Banish Misfortune - A 3-Part Jig in D Mixolydian

I learned how to play Banish Misfortune earlier this year.  I used the term learned lightly because there's always room for improvement in Irish music, and there's always the chance you could forget a tune.  The Mixolydian mode is like a major scale with only one note different: you flatten the 7th note by a half step.  When your tonal center is D, the mixolydian scale is D, E, F#, G, A, B, C and D.  (If it were D-major the C natural would be a C sharp.).

Mixolydian is one of the most common modes played in traditional Irish music.  It will usually start with an A or a D.  I've often seen people look at the key signature of a D-Mixolydian tune and surmise that it's in the key of G.  But you have to look at the notes it starts and ends with or resolves to.

The D-Mixolydian scale still has a major sound because the 3rd note of the scale is F#, like in the D-major scale.  If you play backup, you can give it a more mysterious sound by leaving out the 3rd note of the chord and replacing it with another root or 5th note, or some other note to add color.

Mixolydian is often characterized by a "two chord" or "modal" sound - adjacent chords that you can think of as the home and contrast chords.  Many modal tunes can be played with just these two chords.  In D-mixolydian the home chord is D and the contrast chord is C.  Normally you would almost never play a chord with C as its root as part of a "D-tune", but finding a C chord in a tune in D is a big indicator that it is mixolydian, or at least has some mixolydian qualities (that prominent C-chord in the B-part of Staten Island Hornpipe comes to mind).

Remember that as part of the D-Mixolydian scale you changed the C# note to a C natural, so hence the C chord.  You might also find an A7 (the five) or an Aminor (relative minor to C) in there somewhere. Anyway, all this talk about modes and Mixolydian is probably making you feel sleepy, right?  Well here's a great video of the tune Banish Misfortune played by Ian Walsh.  Listen to it, get the sound in your head, and then find it on your instrument.  You don't need to know anything about theory to do that!

Good luck!

Blackberry Quadrille Transcription

Not too long ago I got a used copy of a book from 1987 called Old-Time Music Makers of New York State, by Simon J. Bronner.  The book examines the fiddling and old-time music of rural upstate New York during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Old-time music is usually associated with the Southern Appalachians, so it's interesting to find a book that addresses its role and meaning to the people of this region, whose fiddlers had just as much of an impact on their communities as their counterparts in Kentucky or Tennessee.

I would like to sit down and read the whole book, but so far I've just been perusing it and looking at the photographs and transcriptions of old fiddle and dance tunes.  It contains many great tunes that were part of the Yorker tradition, including Haste to the Wedding, Money Musk, Durang’s Hornpipe, Rickett’s Hornpipe, Irish Washerwoman, Rakes of Mallow, Miss McCleod’s Reel, Devil’s Dream, Turkey in the Straw, and more.  

I thought I'd share a tune in it called Blackberry Quadrille.  I wasn't familiar with the title and until I looked it up I don't think I had ever heard anyone play it.  Blackberry Quadrille was recorded on July 14, 1941 in New York City by Woodhull's Old Tyme Masters, an old-time square dance band from New York State.   Click here to listen to that recording of Blackberry Quadrille.  Woodhull's also recorded versions of Soldier's Joy, Girl I Left Behind Me and Capt. Jinks during the same recording session that day.  

Below is the book's transcription of Blackberry Quadrille.  As you can see it is in 6/8 time, making it a fun, Northern sounding tune that you could probably toss into a set of jigs or slides at an Irish session without raising too many eyebrows.  It would also make a great contra dance tune, obviously.

Blackberry Quadrille sheet music transcription

I found this YouTube video of Blackberry Quadrille.

According to this video's description, "Quadrilles, or dances in square formation of four couples facing each other, evolved in France and became popular in Britain, Ireland and America in the 19th century. It was first danced publicly in Dublin in 1816. It is possible that quadrilles were brought back to Ireland by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars. The Irish dancing masters increased the speed to that of Irish dances of the time and modified the dance with native Irish dance steps".

I hope you enjoy learning this tune!

Memorizing Tunes

It's easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of tunes there are to learn, especially as a newcomer to this tradition.  Mysterious, never before heard melodies with titles like Snake Hunt, Musical Priest, Folding Down the Sheets and I Buried My Wife and Danced on Her Grave seem to pop up at every session or jam.  Thus far, my approach has been quantity over quality - trying to halfway learn a bunch of tunes without ever really delving into any of them.  Or worse, simply playing along with a tab arrangement over and over again but never actually learning anything.

That's about to change.  I want to focus on just two or three tunes per week and study them phrase by phrase.  I may use tab and notation as a shortcut, but by the end of the week I intend to be off the paper and have the tunes fully ingested, even if this requires rote memorization note by note.

When you cut out all the frills and fluff of someone else’s arrangement of a tune and you are left with the very heart of a tune - its melody.  That is what you need to memorize to truly know a tune and create your own way of playing it.

Memory is flexible.  It allows you to take new techniques and tricks you've learned and apply them to old tunes almost automatically, allowing your interpretations to grow and change.

Each tune can be broken up into musical phrases.  A typical structure is: theme (2 measures), response (two measures), theme again (two measures) and turnaround (two measures).  Learn the first phrase until you feel like you have burned that into your long term memory.  Then learn the second phrase the same way.  Then combine phrases one and two together.  Once phrases 1 and 2 are working smoothly move on to phrase three.  Add phrase four and then play them all together.  Look for phrases that repeat.

Turn hard parts into an exercise and/or figure out a workaround or your own way of playing that section.

After you’ve memorized lots of tunes you'll find it easier pick up new ones since there are only so many forms and every tune is a combination of bits and pieces of other tunes.  This makes it easier to internalize any new tune, since playing a new tune is just a matter of taking stuff you already know and re-assembling it in a new way. Eventually when you hear certain tags, turnarounds or passages you will be able  to associate the pattern of notes from having learned them in earlier phrases.  In this way you begin to learn exponentially.

So, what two tunes to start with this week?  I'll think I'll do Banish Misfortune and Old Mother Flanagan.  Both of them get played locally and would be good ones to know.  Banish Misfortune is a three-part Irish jig in D mixolydian.  There's a pretty fast version of it on YouTube by fiddler Ian Walsh.  I grabbed the audio and slowed it down using the Amazing Slow Downer.  Old Mother Flanagan is usually a three part old-timey tune in the key of A, although the B and C parts are shorter in length than the A part.  One source is the Fuzzy Mountain String Band version.  I have two or three other practice versions as well.  Sometimes the B and C parts of Old Mother Flanagan are combined.