This post’s banner image shows a tune in the third volume of the collection, Caledonian Country Dances, published in London by John Walsh circa 1740. The copy from which it was taken was given to Queen Charlotte of England on her birthday in 1773. In preparation, someone apparently felt it prudent to alter the first letter of the tune’s name (where ſs = ss).
The same tune appears in a Welsh manuscript collection of fiddle tunes from 1752. Its title can be traced back to a compilation of English proverbs from 1678, where it is preceded by, “He that’s afraid of every nettle, must not…”
Several texts have been set to this melody. I learned it as the children’s tune, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, likely not long from when a musical instrument was first placed in my hands (an autoharp, when I was five). Whatever label it bears, comparing successive versions provides useful clues about how the ornamentation of such tunes evolved from the middle of the 18th century. This ones simplicity also makes it a good starting point for testing how traditional Irish ornaments might be played on instruments where there are no established approaches to their use.
The Walsh volume is subtitled:
— being a collection of all the celebrated Scotch country dances now in vogue, with the proper directions to each dance, as they are perform’d at court & publick entertainments, for the harpsichord, violin, hoboy, or German flute.
The cited tune was played for an on-stage dance in a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Covent Garden in London, in 1759. The lead dancer was indisposed at one of the performances and replaced on short notice by Nancy Dawson, another cast member. She won immediate acclaim for that appearance and became the featured artist in a regular entr’acte rendition of what was called Nancy Dawson’s Hornpipe.
A Ballad of Nancy Dawson was soon set to its melody, which is found both with and without lyrics in numerous collections published in Europe and the US. It is commonly simply titled Nancy Dawson and claimed as native to the country of publication (in the US also designating an altogether different tune). It is normally written as a jig, with a 6/8 time signature, explaining why it is rarely titled a hornpipe. The following instance appeared in London some time during the 1760s.
The abbreviation “Sy” at the end of the third system stands for Symphony, indicating that the following passage is played instrumentally. This edition does not include the ascending sequences of three sixteenth notes in the two earlier examples. That figure is a prototypal form of the Irish triplet, examined more broadly in a discussion starting with the following recording of the piece on a fiddle and whistle, ornamented according to the practice of Dawson’s day.
Four beats before the whistle joins in (at the 0:13 mark), the fiddler embellishes a dotted quarter note by dividing it into three parts separated by intervening notes, one above it and one below. Both players then use this ornament repeatedly. It was called a turn in the 18th century and a roll in more recent discourse about Irish traditional music, but there has long been more than just a nominal difference between them.
A version of Nancy Dawson without lyrics is included in a collection of Original Irish Dances…with Basses for the Piano-Forte, from 1795. A comparable setting, but with an ornamented melody, is in the third volume of The Complete Repository of Original Scots Slow Strathspey’s and Dances, published by Neil Gow & Sons in Edinburgh, in 1808. The list of targeted instruments begins with a harp (of a type discussed in an earlier post) or pianoforte, continues with a paired violin and cello, and ends with the ubiquitous etcetera.
The périgourdine was a French country dance played at times together with song. Some of the tunes in the Gow repository are labeled as representing “old” (or “original”) style performance, and others are “modern.” Its most likely compiler and editor was Nathaniel Gow, who had a solid footing both as a traditional Scottish fiddler and a classical violinist.
The turn sign over numerous quarter notes in his transcription of Nancy Dawson indicates the ornament discussed above. It is an inverted form of a sign that first appeared in 1696 but, unlike in other musical contexts, the choice between the two was solely a matter of typographic preference in compilations of Irish and Scottish tunes from the period under consideration. Yet another post discusses the original explanation of how the ornament was executed.
The rhythmic allocation of the elements in this five-note figure more closely resembles the way a present-day traditional Irish fiddler might play a roll than a classical violinist would a turn. In Nancy Dawson, Gow writes the initial eighth note directly in the melody and places the turn sign over the following quarter note. Other tunes in the repository have the turn sign over dotted quarter notes, as well as quarter notes that are not adjacent to an eighth note of the same pitch. His expectation was presumably for all to be played as five-note ornaments.
Gow also placed the sign over both dotted and plain eighth notes. Since it, otherwise marked a four-note form starting on the note above the main one, the choice between the two would have up to the player’s individual preference. When speaking of traditional Irish ornaments, the four-note device is a short roll, and the five-note one is either a long roll or simply a roll.
The incipient Irish triplet mentioned above, developed into multi-note and single-note forms. They are sometimes differentiated with the additional term treble, albeit inconsistently. A common approach to their notation is by writing them as classical triplets. This includes the number 3, signaling the ornament, which writing it (perhaps more accurately) as an eighth note and two sixteenth notes does not.
The small eighth note at the beginning of the second measure in the preceding transcription might seem to be a grace note, but indicates that a note shares the time value of the following one. In this case, both are effectively ordinary eighth notes. In contrast, the small 16th note before a quarter note in the middle of the second staff is a grace note played rapidly before the beat (assuming that the second flag on its stem was not a slip of the pen). It is also referred to as a cut in Irish parlance.
If Nancy Dawson had propagated as a hornpipe, it would have been written in either 4/4 or cut time. The following example shows this in a transcription of the early 19th-century hornpipe, The Rights of Man, as found in Middleton’s Selection of Strathspeys, Reels, &c for the Violin, published in Edinburgh in 1870.
shared under a CC BY 4.0 license
This collection was prepared by the Scottish fiddler and self-taught classical violinist, Peter Milne. He gave it the subtitle, “arranged expressly for that instrument,” and noted:
The following collection of tunes is published with a view to…supply amateurs with a selection of Scotch music differing considerably from any other published; almost entirely easy tunes, and all carefully revised by an able exponent of Scotland’s dance music — in fact, printed exactly as he himself would play them.
Many of Milne’s transcriptions include a fair amount of carefully notated ornamentation (including the turn sign and an innovative marker for triplets) but a larger number are completely unembellished. In any case, it seems likely that he played The Rights of Man with more than the single grace note written in the last measure of the second line. The Irish fiddler, Paddy Cronin, is more lavish in a recording of the tune he made in 1950.
I chose Nancy Dawson as the point of departure for this post because it provides a good basis for discussing how selected ornaments from the repertoire exemplified by Cronin might be played on an autoharp. (The tune’s initial title also seemed appropriate to the endeavor if it should ultimately lead nowhere.) The Rights of Man remains a frequently played hornpipe and is also well suited to illustrating ornamentation.
Earlier posts broach that topic from the perspective of established practice on several instruments. One of those posts brings the hammered dulcimer into consideration, tracing its use for accompanying dance in Ireland back to the 1720s (when Nancy Dawson was born). It is arguably the closest relative to the autoharp ever to have had an accepted place in the traditional Irish line-up, and is a viable role model for approaching ornamentation on the younger instrument. John Rea was one of the hammered dulcimer’s greatest exponents and made the following recording of The Rights of Man in 1977.
Rea uses multi-note triplets throughout, with a single fleeting occurrence of the single-note form. He demonstrates that variant more extensively in a video recording of O’Dwyer’s Hornpipe (that isn’t available for playing directly here). The link goes straight to it but the full video begins with an interview where Rea discusses the relationship between his instrument and the fiddle, in both musical and personal regards.
I’ll get back to Nancy Dawson from a similar viewpoint centered on the autoharp, in a coming post. Tom Schroeder provides a suitable wrap-up for the present outing in one of his tutorial videos for that instrument, where he demonstrates triplets in The Rights of Man.