Jump to content

The Bob Kail Book And The Paul De Ville Book


Recommended Posts

I have several books on concertina here (and have been thinking of writing my own reviews). Two of them are The Concertina and How to Play It by Paule de Ville (1905) and the BEST CONCERTINA method--yet! by Bob Kail (1975).

 

Some of the pages bear quite a striking resemplance. The Concertina diagrams are identical. The excercises in the Bob Kail book are the same as those in the Paul de Ville book, only with the left-hand and the two handed ones removed. The fonts/type faces look the same.

 

Much of the tunes in the Bob Kail book look as if they were scanned directly form the pages of the Paul de Ville book, then printed in a different order. The Bob Kail book (on page 28) even has the same strange version of Yankee Doodle that appears in the Paul de Ville book (page 23). In this version, the B's are flat in measures 9 and 13, and natural in measures 2, 4, 6,7,10,14 & 15. This makes it impossible to play on a 20-button G/C Anglo (which is what both books are focused on) and when you play this version on a piano (or any other chromatic instrument) it just sounds wrong.

 

I suppose Bob Kail and his publisher can get away with this because the 1905 copyright of the Paul de Ville book may have expired by 1975, but I'm no lawyer so I would not know.

 

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

To show what I mean, I can scan in images of the pages with my scanner, and attach the images to a message, but I am not sure it is legal to do so without permission from the authors or publishers.

 

- Alex C. Jones

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alex,

 

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

Yes. Randy Merris, one of our resident scholars, did a comprehensive study that is posted right here on Concertina.net....Now where is it? Ah, Here we are:

 

Review of DeVille by Merris

 

Read the whole story there. No need to duplicate Randy's work, I would say. Turns out DeVille cribbed a lot of stuff from even earlier books. Personally I recommend more modern books for students of anglo, depending on what style(s) they want to play.

 

There is also a review of DeVille by David Wallace that _is_ linked from the home page and the Learning page.

 

I was about to repeat my old sermon about look around, there is lots of stuff here that you may not have seen yet. But I had to use my status as Admin to log directly on to the Server and find this article. It was never linked from the home page or the Learning page that I can see, though I haven't looked everywhere yet. After its announcement fell off the News on the Home page 18 months ago, I guess no one knew it was there. Apologies Randy! Fortunately, Paul insists that pages by guests have names that start with their initials (rm in this case) so I knew where to look. I guess Paul and I need to check for other missing articles and revise all the links (after all, we need something to do...).

 

Ken :blink:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

After its announcement fell off the News on the Home page 18 months ago, I guess no one knew it was there.

There's another full version of Randy Merris's examination of Anglo tutors, at

 

Back to the Future: De Ville’s The Concertina and How to Play It and Other Tutors

 

which was posted precisely to solve the curious problem of the disappearing article.

 

Bob

Link to comment
Share on other sites

THanks Ken, and Randy.

 

Yeah, the only mention of either of these books I ever found on this site is the review of the de VIlle book by David Wallace The Concertina And How To Play It

 

With so much knowledge on this site, I figured that at sometime during the life of this site, someone would have posted something about it. The Randall C. Merris article presents the whole situation very well, even with a page showing which pages of one book correspond with those of the other and more details. It's a shame that the article has been hidden for over a year. Put a link on the Learning page AND the Home page.

 

- Alex C. Jones

 

Hmmm, maybe there is some kind of search someone can run, of all of the links, and then of all of the URLs to the articles, then a comparison of the 2 lists to see what is not mentioned.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's a shame that the article has been hidden for over a year. Put a link on the Learning page AND the Home page.

 

posted precisely to solve the curious problem of the disappearing article.

 

I will certainly fix a link from Learning page...As soon as I can, though using my phone line for my hunt for a job comes first right now. I will look at the Home page, though we can't fit every single link on there. I will start checking the Server for other orphans. And folks, again, if you know something has vanished, don't suffer silently but let us know (gently, if you can). We'll fix it as we can (remember, we are a volunteer operation -- if there was a face icon with a vise squeezing it I would put it here! Instead I'll use this one. :rolleyes: )

 

Ken

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I will certainly fix a link from Learning page...

Ken-

 

While we're fixing links, how about one in the header of the concertina.net home page that links to these forums? The Forum link in the header still links to the old one (which would be hard to access if the link were simply changed).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...