A summary of this week’s classes at the Scots Music Group and Fun Flute Portobello.
SMG Beginner’s Whistle:
We consolidated The Skye Boat Song and finished learning The Arran Boat Song. We played them as a set and also looked at ways in which we could make our playing more interesting by using taps for ornamentation.
We also played long tones and improvised a piece of music based on the note sequences we had previously covered.
It was agreed that the next tunes we should look at are Campbell’s Farewell to Redcastle and Greenwoodside, two excellent pipe marches that make a nice set for The Gay Gordon’s dance.
A couple of errors were highlighted in the written notation, so I have uploaded corrected ones to the SMG page on The Flow. Tunes and MP3s for the next couple of weeks will go up after the weekend.
Fun Flute Improvers:
We consolidated The Glentown Reel and will be working over the next couple of weeks to put it into a set with The Boyne Hunt, which we started and Rolling in the Ryegrass (also known as The Shannon Breeze), which we will come to later. The Boyne Hunt is originally a Scottish tune, entitled The Perthshire Hunt and composed by Miss Stirling of Ardoch in 1780 for the Perthshire Hunt Ball. More background information can be found at Andrew Kuntz’s excellent Fiddler’s Companion web site.
We also had a look at some different ways of playing The Glentown Reel, played some long tone listening and improvisation exercises and discussed the history of flutes, right at the end.
Resources, as ever, can be found on the Fun Flute page on The Flow. The notation for the tunes is up just now, the MP3s will follow on after the weekend.
Photo of Holy Isle, Isle of Arran by Peter Guthrie, some rights reserved.
Photo, “Still, the River Boyne” by David Joseph Murphy, some rights reserved.