Chiff and Fipple Forums

There's a few tunes in this set -- ignore the video. Anyone know the tunes that are being played?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbl8pX24hls

The first tune is "Good Christian Men Rejoice" (In Dulci Jubilo). I'm not familiar with the next one.

Second is "Saddle the Pony". Then back to the first. No idea what the third one is.

I picked up that exact track about five years ago in a random downloading frenzy on Limewire. I always wondered what the tunes were, the set structure is quite strange. I could never tell (since the repeats were not typical of Irish music) where one tune started and one stopped. Once colomon mentioned Saddle the Pony it clicked in my head though... don't know why I never caught that before.
Anyone know what kind of tune that first one is? The phrasing sounds more like a slide than a jig to me. Am I way off?

straycat82 wrote:Anyone know what kind of tune that first one is? The phrasing sounds more like a slide than a jig to me. Am I way off?

You're way off -- it's a 14th century German hymn tune: http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/g/o/goodcmen.htm

Though it's true that they are treating it more or less like a jig.

I was familiar with the hymn beforehand, I just wasn't sure if they had arranged it to fit Irish music, or if it just naturally suited it. It plays like a jig but didn't really sound like a jig to my ear. I suppose I was just wondering that, if you had to classify it, what type of tune would it be. I'm pretty familiar with the rhythms but I've never known Irish dancing so I don't know about that side of it.

They've dropped the "News, news" bar you sometimes see, so that the tune is in 16 bars rather than 17. And though it's not in the Methodist hymnal, my instinct is that there would normally be a bit of a hold on the second beat of bar 14, which they are completely ignoring.

I'd say the tune could be played as a single jig, but listening to it again they seem to be making it into a bit of a dopey double jig -- listen to how many times they're turning a nice lazy quarternote into two eighths. But then, disclaimer, I'm still trying to sort out all the subtleties of jigs in my head, and my instincts could be badly off here.

It doesn't fit well at all with my limited understanding of how the internal accents of a slide should go.

The third mystery tune is The Hills of Ireland. It appears in Krassen's O'Neill's, and there's a reference to it in the Fiddler's Companion:

http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/HIL_HIU ... OF_IRELAND