Posted by Jerry on December 10th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Music, Travel
The tour was awesome! I’ll have some more photos up soon – suffice to say the trip was exhausting and exhilarating. Beijing is a vibrant place with many surprises. We played five shows over a week and had a few days at either end to do some sightseeing and shopping.
The weather was cool – similar to Canberra winter temperatures. The language was completely alien to us although by the end we had learnt some useful phrases – like the greeting: Ni Haou, yes, no, and No Way! But there were always enough people around who spoke English for us to be able to get around without problems.
The traffic is truly chaotic! Pedestrian crossings exist only to concentrate the targets, red lights are treated as ‘advisory only’ and they somehow manage to fit six lanes of traffic into four lanes of road! but for all the chaos we were soon crossing roads with care, and trusting to the skills of the taxi drivers. On the taxis – look for ones with low numbers on the side – they have been licensed for longer and are more likely to know their way to your destination.
The shows: The John Bull Pub was fun – I think they expected us to sit quietly in a corner and play wallpaper muzak – instead after about half an hour we looked at each other and said ‘nah – time to show our stuff’ so we launched ourselves at individual tables and played requests and did silly antics – and the crowd loved it – soon we had them singing along and a great night was had by all!
The Bookworm is like a Parisienne salon of thirty years ago – the place is lined with books – it doubles as a lending library for expats – the place serves excellent food and drinks and offers a wonderful respite from shopping at the Yashow market.
The first time we played there it was a jam with some local celtic musicians – including an expert gallic linguist who sang some wonderful songs. We also met the piper who had been flown out from Scotland to participate in the St Andrews Ball – the highlight of our tour. Make sure you get good directions though – I wound up walking around a dilapidated hutong, or dingy residential back alley way for about 30 minutes before I stumbled on the place… scary!
St Andrews Ball at the Great Wall Sheraton – a formal Highland Ball with piper and Full Circle playing scottish music for the dancers – we played until 0530AM – a full 12 hours from sound check to pack-up! Exhausting but fun:-) This is the first year they had brought out a band and I don’t think it will be the last! We were able to tailor the pace and the start-finish of the dances to suit the dancers – something a CD can never provide. We made many friends that night and I hope we get to do it again next year!
Sights included the Great Wall – a truly amazing structure! We also visited the Lama monastery, The Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City (need to spend at least two days there!) and the ancient observatory – one of the overlooked gems of Beijing!
We saw an acrobatic show at the Chowyang Theatre – truly amazing performers
Beijing is certainly a place to visit again before the Olympics!
cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on October 12th, 2004 — Posted in Music
Another fine session last night at the Canberra Irish Club – good music, good songs and of course there’s the Guinness.
A friend of mine managed to track down the words to song I have been trying to find for the past several years – the Bell Ringers Competition – about teams of bell ringers in various parts of Devon in the UK. I heard the song about 20 years ago in Perth western Australia and the tune stuck, along with the chorus – but the words proved elusive the song started off:
In the month of October, neither drunken nor sober
On Broadbury Down I was wending my way
When I heard of some ringing, some dancing and singing
I ought to remember that Jubilee day
CHOR:In Ashwater Town, the bells they did sound
They rang for a belt and a hat laced with gold
But the men of North Looe rang so steady and true
that there never was better in Devon I hold
The tune could almost be sung as a round – anyhow, many thanks to Sandra for tracking this one down when my own net searches had proven fruitless.
Click here to hear the tune
Can’t play .mid files? Here it is in mp3
cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on October 1st, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Music, Recipes
Actually the start of a four day weekend for me wooohooo! Up at the crack of 8.30, leisurely breakfast of cereal and coffee, then a browse through the latest Australian Woodworker magazine – good piece on Egyptian lathes and the questions over evidence they had them, and a good article on Angel Polglaze – a chainsaw sculptor. Also a good readers tip on converting a jig saw to a scroll saw.
While my partner busily packed for the Southern Cross Crazies quilting retreat, I put in a bit of practice on some strathspeys – now have Monymusk down fairly well – though probably still too round and Irish sounding for the discerning Scottish ear.
Second breakfast: Apricot lattice (or Danish as we call them) and coffee
A quick bound out to the shed to cut a length of rod for a quilt, and put a couple of grooves in the ends to stop the hanging string from slipping off, then back for more tunes – damn need more waltzes too…
Lunch – some cheese and honey on crusty bread, and coffee
Then late afternoon expedition to cart stuff to the quilters retreat – held at GreenHills at Birragai on the Cotter Road (a beautiful location, even better on the motorbike). They seemed pretty well set up there for the weekend.
Back home, polished the fiddle (it really needs stripping back and re-varnishing – maybe after the China tour), hammered out some more tunes (repaired my old shoulder rest – now about 28 years old and the rubber feet had perished, so I did a quick repair using old bike inner-tube rubber. It’ll do the trick. I use another one on the hardanger fiddle, but it’s convenient to have one on each fiddle because different tunes sometimes demand different instruments.
Prepared some satay and rice for dinner – I love the Pataks simmer sauces – they make life so easy: just chop up an onion, some capsicum, a potato or two into cubes, add some Chinese stir-fry vegies throw the lot into a pan with the sauce and a half-sauce-jar of water and simmer for about 20 minutes (meanwhile dump a couple of cups of rice, dash of salt and a couple of cups of water into the rice cooker and set and forget). The smoke alarm tells you when it’s ready 😉 …er actually no, you remember to stir the satay occasionally and cook until the spuds are no longer crunchy, and serve when the rice is cooked – easy!
Then off to the bus depot to collect my daughter from her trip to Sydney where she is appearing (briefly) in a movie being filmed there – the “Mary Briant”. Eve was most appreciative of a hot dinner after a week of 4.00AM starts and a long cold and wet ride home on the bus. We shared a cup of tea and a exchanged news – her costumes look fabulous… but what have they done to her hair!! I guess the 1780s were a time for big hair and bustles…
Otherwise just a normal day really
cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on September 29th, 2004 — Posted in Music, Woodwork
I was giving some thought the other day to how best to put together an online course in fiddle playing. But I am easily distracted, and out of idle curiosity started searching for instructions for making a violin – preferably in as few steps as possible and in the simplest manner possible. But this is a violin we are talking about – they aren’t meant to be easy are they? Well, structurally we are just talking about a box with a handle on it… Anyhow, I encountered Derek Roberts’ site devoted to detailed instructions on making a violin in 24 days – or at least 24 episodes. It is beautifully structured and well illustrated. Even if you are not thinking of making a fiddle – the site will give great insight into what goes into making up a violin. He starts with selecting the wood, and goes from there. It has full marks from my point of view – and I’ll be adding a link from my band’s web site. After all, if you are thinking of doing an online course in fiddle playing, you’d better think about getting yourself a fiddle! Highly recommended 🙂
cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on September 24th, 2004 — Posted in Music
Some 3400 year old ancient Ugaritic tablets from what is now Syria revealed a complete song deciphered by Prof Kilmer from University of California. The thing is there were twice as many notes as word syllables, but when the notes were matched to the syllables, they doubled up into logical harmonies, suggesting that this hymn was sung in polyphonic parts. A corollary to this is that the scale was actually a diatonic scale – like our present day ‘major’ scale – one of many modes (like major, minor, myxolidian, dorian etc). However there are many musicologists who think that the diatonic scale was only invented by the ancient Greeks about 2000 years ago.
click on the image to take you to the site – and if you click this image there you will be able to hear a midi file of the ancient song.
Of course, anyone who has heard Fijians or Papua New Guineans singing would recognise immediately that you don’t have to be musically literate to sing complex harmonies. Robert Fink wrote a book in 1970 called “The Origin of Music” in which he articulated the view that there is a natural foundation to the diatonic scale – a view that has actually been around for a while, and is readily discernable to any fretless stringed instrument player. I first heard about it in 1984, while listening to some radio lectures by a musicologist that my recollection suggests was Robert Haas, that the diatonic scale is what happens when you take the main three musical harmonic overtones, build on their overtones and arrange them in linear sequence.
The human ear is quite amazing – and childrens’ ears are able to distinguish most of the overtones without difficulty. It works like this:
If you take a string, say one tuned to the note ‘C’ and play it, you will get not only that note, but a whole series of other notes that make up its harmonics – these are the overtone series. The first of these is derived from the string being halved which yields the octave above the note – so it is another ‘C’. This is the strongest reinforcement of the note, so it is the most readily discernable and gives strength to the note. The next occurs at the one third point, and this generates a note a fifth above the tonic (the note ‘G’) – this is called the ‘dominant’ and it is the first different note to be heard. the next occurs at the one quarter point and yields a note a fourth above the dominant – it is another octave ‘C’ – so it still reinforces the tonic note.
Now it gets interesting… the next overtone is where the string is divided into fifths, yielding a note a third above the tonic – this is called the ‘sub-dominant’ – the note ‘E’, as it is strong but not as strong as the dominant. The next harmonic divides the string into sixths, making a note a third above the E which is another ‘G’ – now we start to see a pattern. By this time the tonic note – ‘C’ has been reinforced three times, while the dominant has been reinforced twice and the sub-dominant once.
The next overtone on our C string is where the string is divided into sevenths, yielding now a ‘B-flat’. As the string is divided into eighths we get another ‘C’ which again reinforces the tonic note.
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But now we notice a wonderful thing. Have you heard children taunting each other? have you heard them chanting ‘Nyah, nah, ni nyah nah…’ Why is this a taunting tune the world over? And why is this remarkable? Look at the harmonic overtones that are not the tonic note, and look at the first three without repetitions – play them if you have an instrument to hand. The notes will be: G down to E, then up to B-flat. Try playing G,E,G,E,G,E,B-flat,G and hear that taunting tune. Think for a moment about the sophistication of children’s ears to pick up the first four harmonics and then recognise that they can represent weakness by singing or chanting the first three overtones that do not reinforce the tonic note!
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Are we amazed yet? there’s more.
Let’s continue the arithmetic progression up the harmonics. The next in the series is where the string is divided into ninths – this gives us a ‘D’ or supertonic as it is one whole tone above the tonic note. Divide the string into tenths and we get an ‘E’ which reinforces the earlier E – with all this reinforcement, that is why a Major chord based on C will be C,E,G – as these most strongly reinforce the note – any other combination will sound weaker, because there will be interference as weaker harmonics are being emphasised – hence a minor chord sounds weaker or even a little sad, as against the strong happy sound of a major chord.
back to our progression – the next overtone divides the string into elevenths giving us an F-sharp. Finally, with the twelfth harmonic, we get another ‘G’. We have seen that some notes keep getting reinforced, and others don’t.
Fink points out that the most audible overtones have some simple ratios – 2:1 for the octave, 2:3 for the fifth (or dominant), and the fourth note of the scale (whose first different overtone is the octave) with a ratio of 3:4. If we draw out the first three different overtones of these three notes and lay them out in sequence, we get: voila! a major scale.
He goes on to explain how some of the other types of scale came into existence, but for me the interesting thing is that the scale is based on the sheer physics of sound – and that our ears are perceptive enough to pick out natural harmonies.
Cheers
Jerry
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