I was listening to Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas’ Stirling Castle set which contains Jenny Dang the Weaver, one of the coolest reels ever. So I arranged a version for myself and thought about posting that as the tune of the month, but it is already a fairly common tune. But in studying all the old settings available at Ceol Sean you run across a bunch of other cool tunes on the same page! One really cool tune was the Marquis of Tullibardine’s Reel. While David Glen’s version of Jenny Dang the Weaver is rather lacking, his is the best arrangement of Marquis; except that the ending shared by all versions is super lame. Such a great tune debased by its ending. So, I rewrote the ending! Perhaps you can come up with something better than I did?
March 2018 Tune of the Month: Fraher’s Jig
I forgot to publish a tune of the month at the beginning of March! That, combined with a request for sheet music and today being St. Patrick’s day, brings you a jig I associate with the Irish music tradition: Fraher’s Jig. What you’ll find below is a myriad of arrangements that I’ve collected or written myself.
The Tune of the Month series quickly stopped being a vehicle to promote competition tunes not long after it was started. What it turned into was, “Hey, look at this cool new session/kitchen piping tune I found!” So, while Fraher’s Jig isn’t new to me, it does give me the opportunity to point out the need for variability in our arrangements. Non-piping audiences need us to play through tunes as least twice/thrice! They need to be given the opportunity to get into the groove so as to understand the tune. It is then imperative for us to explore all the possible ways to play a tune and still be playing the same tune! It’s akin to composing a new tune, except that the theme is already set, we just need to find all the variations. What variations can you find in the music you already play?
Fraher’s Jig < PDF sheet music (you’ll see some harmony at the end that corresponds with some mucking about I did in Apple’s Garageband a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.)
Fraher’s Jig < Garageband
Audio that more closely resembles the variations (I start playing some reels afterwards):