[Harp-L] Spiral (Circular Tuned) Harps and Correction

["eskeene@xxxxxxxx" <eskeene@xxxxxxxx>]

Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:47:13 +0100
From: Eugene Ryan <ryan.eugene@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Harp-L] Spiral (Circular Tuned) Harps
To: harp-l <harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx>
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>>, you get a good Lydian mode (which is actually used quite a bit in
Appalachian fiddle music) and the ability to play some good figures over
the II chord that shows up in so many tunes.

Hey Emily,

Could you give me the names of some of those tunes?  I'd be very interested
in hearing them.

I'm glad this tuning has suited you so well... Richter is great but has
some disadvantages for melody playing.

Thanks,
Eugene I should clarify before I get in any deeper (which perhaps belongs pasted up on my refrigerator).  By using the Lydian mode, I mean that at points during a tune, a player will substitute a raised 4th degree of scale (for example, in the key of G, C# would be used instead of C). However, a given player might switch back and forth in different parts of the tune, and as I understand it, strictly speaking, in a TRUE modal system, you would pick one and stick with it. Then there's the question of pitch. A lot of fiddle music evolved before (or in spite of) the tempered scales that most Western music uses today, and so what a violinist might say is "out of tune" might actually be a fiddler using a different scale system. Western notation doesn't do a very good job of notating "the notes between the notes", and since most fiddlers learned aurally, they probably couldn't tell you they intended to play "a raised 4th degree that was two microtones flat of the even tempered 4th degree, and it makes this portion of the tune sound as though as though it were in the Lydian mode". Here's some examples; Fiddler's  Dream as played by Arthur Smith, Stoney Creek by Sonny Miller (not related to Jesse McReynold's tune of the same name), Paddy in the Turnpike (as well as some of the other tunes)  played by Byron Berline on "Pickin' and Fiddlin'", and the closing notes of Paul Warren's break on Foggy Mountain Breakdown (he threw in the raised 4th in a lot of his breaks). I once heard some expert say that the microtones used in the scales of American fiddle music and many, varied, and subtle. Many think that Appalachian fiddle and banjo music is just transplanted Scots and Irish music, but it has just as much (if not more) African influence (see Fiddle L for endless discussion on that subject). Two old champion fiddlers I used to play with, Joe Pancerzewski and Alvin Sanderson, both originally from the Midwest, both incorporated a raised 4th from time to time (Joe called it "barbed wire"), possibly a holdover from the Hardanger kind of stuff from Scandinavia. Since it's usually just a passing tone, in a fast run it just adds a bit of color instead of sounding wrong, which is nice on a harp because you don't have to choke it flat. All that said, when I'm playing my Zirk in the key that is one tone LOWER (I said higher in my original post) than the named key (for example, on an "A" Zirk, which starts on a draw, you'd play the same hole on the blow-and you'd be in "G", but with the raised 4th, some good scales on the II Chord, and a draw on the 6th degree, which is really nice for those tunes that go to a relative minor. Apologies to any who went mad trying to make sense of this or my previous post.  cheers, emily
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