Hey, Look! Nathaniel Gow's Dance Band

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Nathaniel Gow's Dance Band

by

Concerto Caledonia

Fiddle Music from 

 Scottish Printed Sources 1761-1823

 

Hey, look! We have a new CD - the latest Concerto Caledonia release, produced as an outcome from the recent AHRC-funded Bass Culture project - or, to use its offficial name, Historic Music of Scotland.  We've added it to stock immediately, needless to say!

Lots of Lovely Fiddle Music - Historical Music of Scotland (hms.scot)

hms.scot

The new Historical Music of Scotland website is live - click here.  There are 22 fully digitized historic fiddle tune books, and full details of another 200, including where to find them, who their compilers were, and what kind of collections they published.  So if you're looking for old fiddle tunes and plenty of insight into how they were harmonized for the cellist, this is the place to go.

There's an article about the website (and the research project that led to it) in the February copy of Box and Fiddle magazine.

We kept a blog before the website went live. It's here at Bass Culture in Scottish Musical Traditions and shows you some of the things we were looking out for.

 You can now buy i-Tunes recordings from the Concerto Caledonia website, with CDs due to be released very soon.

The website will be launched with a concert in London - it's in Café Oto in Dalston on the 11th of February.

Commonwealth Games - Musicians Everywhere, and here's a Tune for them!

With so much happening in Glasgow at the moment, there are musicians everywhere - Merchant City, Glasgow Green ...

Here's a highly appropriate fiddle tune from John Riddell's A Collection of Scots Reels, Minuets etc: 'The Bonny Green of Glasgow'.

The Bonny Green of Glasgow

It's one of the tunes Karen's looking at in the AHRC-funded Bass Culture project.  Riddell's bass-lines were basic (excuse the pun) to say the least! But effective all the same, we think.

Here's the next tune in the book: 'Miss Lillie Ritchie's Reel'.

Miss Lillie Ritchie's Reel

See what we mean?!  The collection is one of a number of late 18th and early 19th century fiddle tune books being digitised for the project.  You can read more about this research on the project blog:- http://bassculture.info/.

Is Fiddle Music Traditional? Views from Above and Below ...

• How 'traditional' is fiddle music really?
• What does the word 'fiddle' mean to you?

Two blogs recently addressed this question:- the Bass Culture blog associated with David McGuinness and the University of Glasgow AHRC-funded research into fiddle music accompaniments; and Ronnie Gibson's Scottish Fiddle Music blog from the University of Aberdeen, where he's a doctoral student.

If you study or work with traditional music, you may find both blogs of some interest.

Bass Culture in Scottish Musical Traditions

The Bass Culture team is researching bass-lines and accompaniments in historic Scottish fiddle collections, not to mention bagpipe music.  One of our outputs is a blog, so we can keep people posted about our progress.

Take a look at the Bass Culture blog here.

Bass Culture in Scottish Musical Traditions

We have a blog for our AHRC-funded research project!

http://bassculture.info/

 

 

 

Research into Scottish fiddle-tune accompaniments

© Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.

This seems an appropriate image to illustrate the Bass Culture research project I'm assisting with.  (It is part of a bigger picture by David Allan, called A Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl.)

 What I and my colleagues at the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge are seeking to establish, is what the cellist was playing, what patterns we can identify, and how it changed during the 18th-early 19th centuries.  Here's our brand-new blog, including a fab picture of the research team.

And here's another nice one called The Penny Wedding, by Sir David Wilkie.  His preliminary sketch shows the musicians more clearly.

http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/artists_l-z/wilkie/Wilkie_ThePennyWedding.jpg