April Tunes - 2024

This month Peter Macfarlane will teach us how to bring a strathspey to life, with the examples of Niel Gow's Miss Stewart of Grandtully and James Scott Skinner's The Iron Man.

The strathspey is quintessentially Scottish. The very name means “valley of the River Spey”, which flows northeast from the Grampian Mountains. It was in this region, maybe in the 17th Century, that a distinctive style of playing reels developed. They were slowed down and played in a jaunty, swung fashion, becoming known as strathspey reels (reels played in the Spey Valley regional style). Over time they have become recognised as a distinct type of tune, rather than a reel variation, and have undergone their own evolution.

Strathspeys are all about the ‘Scotch Snap’ - the Di dum.

Here are 4 patterns - #1 is the most common, #2 the least. common,

The fashion of linking the four notes together in the notation arose from manuscripts (hand written scores).

Modern computer notation programs often have difficulty separating 16th notes - as in pattern #3 - so dotted 1/8th - 1/16th pairs are often notated separately. But you should still think and play in the 4-note phrases.

When playing strathspeys, remember there are 2 dancing steps per bar, thus they take about twice as long to play as a reel. In “The Manual of Scottish Country Dancing” the recommended beats per minute for reels is 112, and for strathspeys is 61.5. So 32 bars of reel takes 34.0 secs while 32 bars of strathspey takes 61.5 secs.