Cimorene

I mentioned the jigs, reels, and country dances in a previous post. This is an engaging little melody (that fits on only two lines of the book!) and the title stuck in my head because lol bonny prince Charlie and also because of the "Wha'll", so I looked it up today and learned:

• It's also (originally? more commonly?) known as "The News from Moidart"



• The tune is an Irish jig called "Tidy Woman", so in the absence of the lyrics, which my songbook did not provide, there's no particular reason to say it even was about Charlie except I presume it was better known in its Jacobite form in 1950s NYC



• The lyrics were written by a Scottish baroness named Caroline Nairn and it was popular from the late 18th century and remained so into the 20th



• The lyrics are in Scots, nobody has seen the need to translate them into regular English in a prominent search result, and the online Scots to English translators don't work. Google translate does not acknowledge Scots, only Scots Gaelic, which this isn't.

The latest addition to my collection of music is a book of Jewish folk music my parents mailed me only a year or so ago. I'd never seen it before, but it, like the others, belonged to my grandmother; it dates from the 1960s and is actually older than several of her other books. Almost all the tunes in the book are in minor keys, so although many of the melodies are extremely simple, usual for folk music, it suits my taste much better than the average book of songs.

My preference for minor over major keys goes back as far as I can remember and is so viscerally strong that I not infrequently can't listen to more than twenty seconds or so of a slow ballad in a major key before being overcome with disgust. I tend to express this as hating ballads or hating slow songs, but actually I like slow ballads in minor keys.

There is obviously a cultural tradition behind the dominance of minor music in jewish folksong, or rather several cultural traditions behind it, since the sources of the melodies in the book come from historic jewish communities from both eastern Europe and Africa (and one can hardly call the Polish, Ukrainian, and Romanian communities one culture because they were all in Europe). The emotional color of different modes of music has been written extensively about, I know, while I've encountered just a little of that theory. If the minor modes are expressive of mourning, suffering, and oppression, then certainly the times and places that produced this jewish music more than support that, as does a great deal of jewish history; but there's a vast amount of music in the book that's happy, cheerful, or upbeat in minor keys as well, going by the notation and translations of the lyrics. Perhaps the influence of what I keep seeing described as "eastern music" is a better explanation for the pattern.

They're not very challenging to play for the most part, so they aren't the most useful practice material; when people perform simple folk melodies they are meant to embellish them themselves, often through successive repeats, and obviously how one does that is an art that can be studied, but it isn't a skill I have yet. Consequently, another book that belonged to my grandmother, called The Robbins Collection of 200 Jigs, Reels, and Country Dances, is much more useful to practice. The plurality of it is Celtic music, about 60-70% of that Irish, and this familiar style is, even in the simple versions of the melodies, more challenging; although after a couple of weeks I'm now seriously impatient to get an Irish tin whistle, because the sound of a soprano recorder playing a tin whistle's part is maddeningly close-but-not-quite-right. (Apparently they're pretty cheap and knowing how to play the recorder should make them easy enough to play, although they lack a thumb hole.)

My paternal grandmother was a lifelong folk music enthusiast who played the recorder in a medieval music ensemble; she died when I was 8. I myself played the oboe from age 12-17 — I loved the oboe, but when the repair shop couldn't fix it (the wood cracked), I chose to stop because I had so little time then, and it would have cost my parents thousands they didn't have to replace it. When I was 13 or 14 my aunt had given me, the music hobbyist in the family, my grandmother's recorders and music collection; I experimented with the recorders and recorder music quite a bit for fun, and after the demise of my oboe, I continued to play it occasionally, but unlike with the oboe, I didn't have any classes or ensembles to practice or perform with. It's probably been 15 years since I played one now, if you don't count the last week.

But! I've been meaning to get back into it for a long time, and last week I finally found the instruments and the music among our packed boxes of stuff and gave it a try! I've practiced a few times, and it's going well. My fingers want to do oboe and not recorder things, but the secondary programming is coming back. (My cheek muscles and core muscles that are responsible for the wind bit of woodwinds will need to build stamina back up, but that's expected.) I also watched some YouTube videos by Sarah Jeffery/ Team Recorder... and learned things!

• I didn't know that German fingerings are for different holes on the instrument, even though there's a plastic German soprano in the recorder case. I learned the horrible truth and experimented with my grandmother's German soprano and am now extremely anti-German-fingerings. I was at a Finnish music store online the other day and it called the German fingering instrument "especially good for schools" and I scoffed out loud and scared the cat.



• I didn't know that I like the alto sound better! Grandma had a plastic Yamaha alto but I always used the one wooden instrument because, duh, it's wood, so I didn't really know that I like the alto's pitch better! (I don't dislike the soprano - it's fun to be able to play those high parts above the reach of the oboe with such ease - and I do enjoy being piercing - but the alto tone is lovely.) Also because soprano recorders, like the oboe and piano and flute, are in C, and I didn't want to mess with an instrument in another key because I hate transposition and - thanks to never needing to no doubt - have never been able to do it in my head or as I play. BAD NEWS: if I want a wooden alto that's gonna cost like, two hundred bucks (ish).



• I didn't know that I like the tenor pitch even better than that! From the videos and the fact that it's also in C I'm super drawn to the tenor, but even a plastic tenor costs around a hundred euros; the wooden ones are quite a bit more. I'll leave this wistful thought in the distance. Perhaps if I eventually find some local recorder-related activity I'll have an opportunity to try out someone else's tenor and see what it's like.



• I didn't know how nice the recorder I was playing on was! It's a Küng (Swiss), one of the leading manufacturers mentioned by Sarah Jeffery, and it's apparently made of plum, which is also very nice (although I also know now, after her videos, that I prefer the sound of maple, which is softer and cheaper... but my favorite sound is palisander, or rosewood... which is even more expensive). Made in 1966, which doesn't matter so much other than that it's not identical to their modern models, but apparently anything comparable would cost from 200-400€ now.



• I didn't know the wooden recorder should have been 'played in' gradually after being packed up unused for a long time: 5 min a day for a week, then 10 min a day, etc, for example. I suppose I'm lucky that it's been played only intermittently over time and probably hasn't been hurt therefore? But I'll follow these recommendations now. Better late than never? Aaaand I didn't know it should be oiled! I have to get some linseed oil and oil it since it likely hasn't been oiled since my grandmother died in 1991.



• I didn't know that the recorders I've seen have all been baroque and that there are renaissance recorders, built based on earlier models, and they are completely different (wider bore), and I prefer the renaissance ones... which are rarer and more expensive. There's a plastic renaissance soprano by Mollenhauer called Adri's Dream which costs 34€, but any other pitch has to be in wood.



• I didn't know that recorders come smaller than the soprano! I'm about 99% decided now to buy a sopranino to play with after a few more months' practice. They're only about 20€ in plastic, and the pitch is more piccolo-like. (They're also in F, but this is just for fooling around.) Here's a bass, tenor, alto, soprano, and sopranino, with a ruler for scale:
  
  Original uploader Saskii at English Wikipedia. Originally from en.wikipedia; description page here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2479652
  There's another that's even tinier than the sopranino, called a garklein, so small that the finger holes have to be staggered sideways to fit:
  
  Küng 'Studio'-line garklein

So you can see from all this infodump that I'm feeling pretty good about the recorder, at least. You have to have something to feel good about! But possibly the most entertaining part of all this this week has been my

Audience Reception

1. Day 1:
A. Snookums startles awake on the sofa, leaves his sunbeam and slinks out of the room nervously
B. The BB sticks it out a bit longer, gives me an annoyed look, leaves the room
C. Both cats intermittently come back to look at me making sounds and then wander away again, milling around uncertainly
D. Somewhere between B&C Rowan, who is the more highly-strung of the buns and also the one who has thumped at me for laughing too loud at bedtime, starts thumping. At first he just thumps intermittently but by the end of the session he was thumping every 20 seconds or so.

2. Day 2:
A. Both cats are in the kitchen, giving me occasional dirty looks, so I leave
B. Rowan doesn't mind when I play in the livingroom this time but Snookums comes and grumbles at me a bit before leaving
C. The practice session ends because the BB wants to sit on my lap. She lets me know by saying "Meh" in a requesting manner and then climbing up my back.

3. Day 3:
A. Snookums leaves the kitchen. The BB stays but after ten minutes or so she hops gracefully down from her sunbeam perch, walks up to my right foot, makes eye contact and says "MRRR!!! MÄÄÄÄ!" I have to take a break to laugh and also pet her, but then I put her back in the sunbeam and move to the livingroom.
B. The bunnies give no sign of being bothered, but Snookums wanders in and makes comments from time to time.