June’s Tunes

June’s tunes include a march and three jigs - the June Jigs.

The four part march in D major, Fiddlers to the Fore, is another of John Mason’s compositions to join our repertoire. Mason was the founder of The Scottish Fiddle Orchestra (SFO), and was Director of Music and Principal Conductor from the first performance in 1980 right up until his death in 2011. The SFO was all set to celebrate its 40th anniversary as “tradition bearers” for Scottish music by touring the USA and Canada in 2020. The opening concert of the tour at the Portsmouth Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was to be on Tuesday, March 31. Sadly the pandemic put paid to the tour.

You can hear the SFO performing this march here on YouTune Music.

THE JUNE JIGS

To close out the 2022-2023 year I picked a couple of 6/8 ‘two-step’- like jigs by Frank Ferrel, a Down-East Maine composer whose works are popular in Cape Breton and PEI.  Two-steps are typified by having a lot of dotted quarter - quarter+eighth note combinations among the runs of three eighth notes. You can listen to Frank playing these (starting at 1:00 min) on a YouTube music track from his ‘Moxie’ CD.

Spin-N-Glo in G major is named for a neon-colored fishing lure, which the composer thought “spins and glows just like the dancers do.” Ferrell caught his first Steelhead trout fishing in the Pacific northwest with the lure. The jig plays nicely to begin with but has a hook or two to snag the unwary musician!

The next Frank Ferrel jig is in D major, The New Stove . I got the chords from the Roaring Jelly version. The stove  image is from page 133 of his published collection of 315 original compositions. Quite a fancy contraption it looks!

The final tune of the 2022-23 year is a traditional jig from the Borders - My Wife’s a Wanton Wee Thing.  Sanitized by Robert Burns, and titled ‘Winsome Wee Thing’, the key is D Mixolydian. Keep all the C notes natural unless they lead to the tonic D note. Listen to Rod Paterson singing the Burns tune here.