September Tunes
Welcome back! I hope the summer has been a good one for you, and that you have taken care of your instruments - now it is time to get back to having fun with Scottish music!
Several tunes discussed below are already in our repertoire. To see pdf copies of the music, click on the link with the SRS number. You can hear mp3’s of the tunes by clicking on the title.
The first tune this month came to me from Jannine Randall, a fine Cape Breton pianist living in the Boston area, who taught Goose Cove, at the Boston Harbor Scottish Fiddle School. A catchy Brenda Stubbert march in D major, it is paired with a couple of Brenda’s D major reels in one of the new concert sets. One of those reels, Rannie MacLellan, is already in our repertoire (SRS 23.18); and the other, Jimmy and Marcella Slade, is our second September tune.
The other September tunes are all from Katie Hawn’s scholarship report. She received support to attend the Ashokan Scottish String Fling with Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas in May 2023.
Two of the tunes in the handout Katie provided are already in our repertoire: Knockdhu Reel (SRS 25.13) and Captain Campbell of Lochnell (SRS 15.11).
The slow air/song Soraidh Leis an Ait’ (Farewell to Skye) is presented in G by Alasdair Fraser, but is frequently heard in A, so I also give a setting in that key.
North of the Grampians is a quite well known strathspey in C major, composed by Captain Simon Fraser. As is often the case in Scottish tunes, Fraser leaves the melody unresolved at the end, with a subdominant F. I used the setting in the Athole Collection here.
The last tune this month is a Gordon Duncan pipe reel in Amix and Bm Zito (aka Zeeto) the Bubbleman. The story goes that Gordon and his band arrived at a festival somewhere in Connecticut to find themselves (as in the 1984 Rob Reiner movie “This is Spinal Tap”) billed below, not a puppet show, but beneath “Zito the Bubbleman”. Gordon was very taken with the idea of blowing bubbles for a living, took in the guy’s show and composed this wonderful pipe tune. [I am not going anywhere near why pipers call reels hornpipes]
And finally for your viewing/listening pleasure, you can watch the entire Alasdair Fraser / Ashokan String Fling concert performance on YouTube by clicking here. You can find Farewell to Skye about 1:30:30, Knockdhu at 1:33:33 , North of the Grampians at 1:37:30, Captain Campbell at 1:39:08, and Zito at 1:41:30
