Sheet Music For Accordion Also For Concertinas?

[conce]

Hi,

 

I'm trying to find sheet music or songbooks for English concertina. Is it possible to just buy books for accordion? (It seems there's a lot more for accordion than for concertina..)

 

Thanks,

Mark

[Christian Husmann]

Hello Mark,

 

I have a lot of accordion sheet music at home and find it pretty hard to use it for the EC. If you want tunes or songbooks for just having and idea of the music, ´s alright. But than you could as well seek something for flute/ recorder or any other instrument that plays in the same range of scales available. Accordion music uses often different registrations and if you have a look at the music using melody for the left and righthand side this might be interesting for people that play the Duet.

 

Greetings

Christian

 

Hi,

 

I'm trying to find sheet music or songbooks for English concertina. Is it possible to just buy books for accordion? (It seems there's a lot more for accordion than for concertina..)

 

Thanks,

Mark

[yankeeclipper]

I use sheet music for fiddle, and for fiddle duets with other instruments. It's available everywhere, and same range as my treble EC. Fiddle music offers a tremendous selection from classical to jazz, bluegrass, folk and pop. Recently I've been having a blast doing klezmer duets and trios with oboe, clarinet and keyboard players!

Edited April 20, 2008 by yankeeclipper

[JimLucas]

I'm trying to find sheet music or songbooks for English concertina. Is it possible to just buy books for accordion? (It seems there's a lot more for accordion than for concertina..)

Depends very much on your style of learning, what you expect to learn, and to some extent your competence both on the EC and in understanding music in a broader sense.

 

I would assume that you're looking for arrangements to play, since otherwise any kind of sheet music or song book would be adequate for giving you the melody.

 

If you want to be able to take an arrangement for accordion and just play it on the EC, I think you would mostly be wasting your time. With "advanced" arrangements that include more than one note at a time in the right hand, some of them might work if you play just that right-hand part, but many might not. I think you could do the same -- i.e., play only the right-hand part -- with piano arrangements, and I think a higher percentage would be acceptable, though you would still likely consider many to be "inadequate".

 

If you have a good grounding in chord structures, you might be able to take the right-hand of accordion arrangements and add to them selected notes from the indicated left-hand chords (if the arrangements show actual notes as well as chord symbols, so much the better), keeping in mind that a treble English doesn't have any real bass notes. That also requires that you be comfortable enough with the English to experiment with such things.

 

To take it one level deeper, there are series of accordion instruction books that you might use to teach yourself chordal and harmony structures, using those parts which "fit" the English and modifying or not worrying about the parts that don't. Pietro Valente said that's how he taught himself to play jazz on the English. But that's a lot more work, and a long way from simply having arrangements "for the English" that can be played as written.

[Larry Stout]

Check out the collection of sheet music for EC from the 1880's at

http://www.juliettedaum.com/concertina.html

 

There's also quite a lot in the Butler tutor available at

http://www.concertina.com

 

And on

http://www.rowlhouse.co.uk/concertina/music/

from Danny Chapman

Edited April 20, 2008 by Larry Stout

[Dirge]

It depends what you're after but I think guitar music works on English; it's finding music written out longhand and not just tablature that's the art, but it usually seems to be just a line of treble clef. You could join the ICA and get access to their library of EC arrangements.

 

There's a lot of free music on the internet, which means you can download it and try it out; if it's playable you can print it off and have a proper go. I spend a lot of time happily tracking down music. You have to get past a wall of music shops offering 'free music' first (on no grounds that I've ever found).

 

Mutopia is good classical stuff. http://www.mutopiaproject.org/

 

This is a set of links to accordion music; http://www.accordionlinks.com/publisher.cfm Have a look at some accordion music for yourself.

 

I wasn't very impressed with Musica Viva http://www.musicaviva.com/index.html but you can start with their links page and leapfrog onto other related sites, then to more fruitful ground.

 

Editted to avoid repeating Larry's post.

Edited April 20, 2008 by Dirge

[JimLucas]

It depends what you're after but I think guitar music works on English; it's finding music written out longhand and not just tablature that's the art, but it usually seems to be just a line of treble clef.

Treble clef extended downward with ledger lines.

 

Some guitar pieces/arrangements are within the range of the treble English (though on the guitar they actually sound an octave lower than written), but many (most?) go below the treble's low G. A tenor-treble, on the other hand, will cover the full range of guitar transcriptions, as written. And of course, the fingering on some is easier than on others.

 

Other possibilities, though in my experience not easy to find, are arrangements for mandolin or "classical" 5-string banjo. In normal tuning, the range of those instruments fits within that of the treble English. One advantage of classical (or "classical") arrangements for these stringed instruments is that they are normally written in standard music notation, so there's no need to learn which frets on which strings of the various instruments correspond to which buttons on the concertina... as long as you know which notes correspond to which buttons.

[conce]

Well, thank you all for your numerous suggestions!

It seems I will be looking for (violin?) arrangements that cover the EC range.

 

Mark

[m3838]

If you want to be able to take an arrangement for accordion and just play it on the EC, I think you would mostly be wasting your time. With "advanced" arrangements that include more than one note at a time in the right hand, some of them might work if you play just that right-hand part, but many might not. I think you could do the same -- i.e., play only the right-hand part -- with piano arrangements, and I think a higher percentage would be acceptable, though you would still likely consider many to be "inadequate"

.

I disagree.

Piano music, written for piano, takes advantage of natural decay.

Accordion arrangements are better suited for EC, the good ones. You can easily leave out the left hand and concentrate on the trebble cleff.

But just be aware that accordion arrangements may be written too high for EC, and have larger range. So you have to be creative.

Violin parts, on the other hand, may fit the range of EC, but also are written too high, where concertina doesn't have strengh, and assume the use the unique dynamics of the violine, that concertina is simply incapable of.

Most of "learn to play Piano Accordion", and "Easy-peasy arrangements for Piano Accordion" is pure garbage. Once again, I'd recommend Gary Dahl's books, and just write to him and ask, who of the accordions arrangers is good. You'll get an eager and comprehencive answer.

[jggunn]

I recommend mandolin music because it not only has the same range as the EC but many of the harmonies and double-stops work well.