I think about the intellectual work of the world, and I wonder if it doesn't just distance us from what it means to be alive rather than connects us to it. I feel that trad music has something very special to offer: a demonstration of the viserceral, the physical, the engagement over the intellectual.

I feel a magic infinity in the connection with the body, as if there is as much here to be learnt about what it means to be alive as there is within scholarship. This does not mean I disapprove of study, thorough research and passionate argument, quite the opposite. It's just I feel they cannot capture all of life.

I feel that life itself is not necesarrily that intellectually interesting as a commidity but it is engaged, lived, experienced, connected, magical. It is the unbounded unknown, even if it does not carry satisfaction in the way that the vast glaciers of intellect do. But what is anything if it does not serve to connect to the further reaches of the world? What is beyond us is the only interesting thing.

That doesn't mean that I don't get pissed off that I can't absorb and manage information as well as I want. Oh no. that pisses me off totally.

Keys, operations, intersections, bendy notes in tunes

This is also what I vaguely remember from Ros.

Something about...
Take a scale. do something to it. compare it with your first scale. what's interesting?

Also something like:
Take a 10 note cycle of fifths. take 2 out. Then there's something interesting left over.

Also something observed:
the above somehow relate to where keys are most bendy chromatic runs in baselines under predominantly diatonic or modal music - backing trad.

Most bendy places are:
3rds, 6ths, 7ths, 9ths or 2nds,

e.g. in G:
Bb, B, Eb, E, F, F#, Ab, A

Organised by fifths: A, E, B, F or 9ths/2nds, 6ths, 3rds, 7ths

Steph note: within the four common modes that get used in trad, these are the points in the key that give it it's emotional colour. The notes that do not bend include 1, 4, 5 and create the structure.

** Compare this with where a blues scale gets bent ??

Meta structures

One of my favourite things...
Something Ros said in the car about...

a structure turning up in quantum physics, in linguistics, in music - the organisation of tones within a key, in maths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantale

Other idea to look up - look at Euler's theory relating vertices to sides of a shape.

Hurdy finger patterns

Steph geeks out:

Let's start diatonically.

Easy things:

two notes
2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, (any wider is stretch)

3 notes: any pattern up within a sixth
noteable shapes include
3 note scale
triads (sandwich shapes)
squashed sandwiches (1-2-4, 1-3-4)
inversions
squashed inversions (probably fingered something like little-ring-index or little-middle-index)

4 notes: any pattern within a sixth

Notable exceptions - arpeggios! scales longer than 4 notes

Articulation aids:
ornamentation above
the clack of the keys
allowing the note to drop back to a bass note - think pipes
vibrato (time to change fingers?

Fingering patterns on all keyboard-ish instruments

So fingering patterns - I've just been thinking about this, prompted by the hurdy and by playing the piano in the pub a little more, also the prospect of playing (and ornamenting) piano accordions. I've also realised I probably want to play concertina.

I never really understood piano finger patterns intuitively as a classical pianist, they seemed just arbitrary and far too rule-like. However as with all music as soon as I try to understand something away from score it begins to click into place.

Fingering patterns for each keyboard like instrument are about getting the most efficient and relaxed hand movements and the using the natural flows or stops of the instrument to articulate the music really well.

It took me 3 years to properly grok how to communicate how it worked on harp. Hopefully the next instruments will take less time. I want patterns for piano and hurdy gurdy (and probably concertina). To be fair, I want meta-patterns.

So I'm going to start by looking for:

• naturally fitting patterns under the hands
• shapes in the music I'm playing that I need to acheive time and time again
• solutions to the awkward things

Like all aural traditions the craft, the art is the composition of something complex from relatively few small chunks. If you go in with that expectation then it makes it a lot easier to analyse. Trouble is the frequency of thoe chunks changes for each group of repertoire, like syllables in a language. For the hurdy music I'll pick English tunes and the few French and Breton tunes I know, for piano it's got to be Irish and English, with the added excitement that I'm adapting for different right and left hands.

Fingering patterns part 2

Other fingering treatises:

Couperin: L'Art de toucher le Clavecin (The Art of Touching the Harpsichord) pub. 1716 and revised in 1717
Online at IMSLP

Maria Boxall wrote treatises within the past 40 years, as did Tom Nevell.

There are lots of useful articles at http://www.harpsichord.org.uk/EH/ehm.htm, interesting beyond just fingering.

Robert Kelley also includes a list of clavichord treatises - http://www.robertkelleyphd.com/clavichd.htm#ClavTechnique


There will be still more....

Hurdy-gurdys and renaissance fingering

I've been lent a hurdy-gurdy, this is exciting. It's a noisy instrument of French origin (also called vielle à roue) thought to date from 11th C in western Europe or the Middle East.

I've got a very few days access to get as far into hurdy-ness as I can before I have to hand it back so it's hunting for fingering patterns time.

You can't easily use your thumb in fingering, this means that for more than 4 notes in any direction you have to either do a long finger crossing, jump or slide. This is similar-ish to renaissance keyboard music, for which there are fingering treatises based around 4 fingers and no thumb.

So on a brief first scan I have found...

The work of Girolam Diruta, organist (c. 1554 – after 1610)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Diruta / http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Girolamo_Diruta

Claudio Di Veroli (alive now)
http://finger.braybaroque.ie/

Claudio brought a book out in 2008 called Baroque Keyboard Fingering: A Method. In his online introduction there are a couple of clues - that the four finger method makes for better articulation (certainly of Baroque music), that the left hand and right are not symmetrical.#

A brief search for hurdy gurdy fingering has turned up relatively little, the only guide that I've found thus far is that smaller jumps take less time (shock!) so the aim is to plan your fingering around that.

I'm sure there's got to be more stuff than this is to go on, I just haven't found it.

My own experiments lead me to think that the angle at which you hold your hand to the keyboard changes things, that accidentals make a big difference to how easily you can cross fingers, that I'm not interested if I can't find something fairly elegant, which I can't yet. Grr.