The Midway Plaisance

14 April 202616 April 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

This post bridges the favorite topics here of Irish traditional music (ITM) and the autoharp. Two links will be considered, both geographical, but of vastly different extents. The more compact of the two spans a part of South Chicago and is mapped in the banner image. It was regularly traversed by Francis O’Neill, whose seminal collections of Irish dance tunes are well known in ITM circles.

His work is perhaps less immediately familiar to autoharp folks but any who play such music are likely to have material from O’Neill’s The Dance Music of Ireland, published in 1907, somewhere in their repertoires. There is no basis for suggesting that he had a reciprocal interest in the autoharp. However, he was involved with the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 and would all but certainly have noted the display of autoharps there (detailed in an earlier post).

The present text is not intended to inflate the significance of that encounter. From the autoharp perspective, the aim is to whet further interest in O’Neill’s work. Where his monumental role is already recognized, a bit of biographical and contextual detail is added to its discussion.

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Musical Instruments

Figuring out accompaniment

16 January 202421 July 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The renowned Scottish fiddler Niel Gow (1727–1807) appears in several portraits. One painted by his compatriot David Allan (1744–1796) shows him next to his brother Donald, playing a cello.

The date of this portrait is uncertain but Allan embedded it in, or extracted it from, another painting titled Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl, dated 1780. Gow was the fiddler at Blair Castle and the Duke of Atholl was his patron, making this a plausible depiction in both social and musical regards. (There is also a piper on a refreshment break behind the Gows.)

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Musical Instruments

Turns and rolls — Part 2

7 November 202320 July 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The first part of this series presented a few 17th-century instruction books for the flageolet and recorder. It illustrated continuity in ornamentation practice as the first of them ceded its position in urban amateur music making to the second. The present post moves that discussion into the 18th century and brings reed instruments into it. An instruction book for the Baroque oboe — “hautboy” — comparable to those for the flageolet and recorder was published in London in 1695, titled The Sprightly Companion.

The tunes can be played comfortably on all the explicitly named instruments. (Unqualified reference to a “flute” at that date meant a Baroque recorder; in this case one in C.) Ornamentation is clarified with tablature as in the books examined last time. The Ɔ sign that indicates both a “beat” and a “shake” in them, is used in this one exclusively for a shake executed downward from the note to which it is applied. Here is the first line of the explanatory table with a concluding remark in this post’s banner image.

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Musical Instruments

Fifes and pastoral pipes in 1862

31 January 202319 November 2025 Cary KarpLeave a comment

An earlier post examined evidence of the fife and flageolet interchangeably occupying the same niche in the accompaniment of dance in late-16th-century France. The fife was otherwise more clearly associated with military music, leading to a question about whether it had a more prominent role in civilian contexts than is generally recognized. Evidence of that being the case toward the end of the 18th century is provided by published compilations of Irish and Scottish dance tunes that explicitly list the fife as one of the instruments to which they are suited.

An etching from the mid-19th century presented below illustrates it in a manner that bolsters the notion of the fife having filled the musical role now commonly played by the tin whistle. (The flute is named as a separate instrument in the referenced compilations.)

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Musical Instruments

Fifes and flageolets

24 May 20227 August 2025 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The preceding post discusses a tune found in the third volume of “Aird’s Selection of Scotch, English, Irish, and foreign airs; Adapted for the Fife, Violin, or German Flute.” This is a six-volume series produced during the final two decades of the 18th century. The title page of the first volume illustrates a fife in a military context and the following volumes are dedicated to the British and Irish armed forces.

The collection does not include a noteworthy amount of military music and there is no obvious musical intention behind the dedication. This raises a question about whether the fife was highlighted at the start of the list of instruments simply as part of the homage, or if it had a more prominent role in civilian contexts than is generally recognized. A hand drawing on the back of the illustrated page sheds light on this and will be examined more closely below.

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