The first of my two new flutes has arrived from Carbony Celtic Winds! This is the bigger one in D, since they aren’t going to send me the fife in D until next month. But that’s TOTALLY okay, since this one will be fun to play with until then.
The new flute is just about 23 inches in length, about 58.4 centimeters–just a scooch longer than Norouet, my wooden flute in D. I can’t weigh them both but unsurprisingly, the carbon fiber one feels slightly lighter than Norouet does. Norouet has a slightly wider inner diameter, at just over half an inch; new!flute is just about half an inch.
However, and this is a big however–the spacing on the holes, at least for my left hand, is a bit wider than I’m used to. Not out of the question, but it’s a bit of a stretch; I’m going to play around with it for a few more days and see whether I can comfortably play this instrument. But there are concerns here, I think. I’m okay on this instrument if I try to play something slow, like, say, “La Fée des Dents”. But if I go to something fast, like “Manteau d’hiver”, I start missing holes because I have to stretch to hit them and my hand may not be able to do that for long. This will require some experimentation.
The nice gentleman at Carbony who acknowledged my order in email says that they have another model in D with holes slightly closer together, but which sacrifices a bit of power. So worst case scenario is, I send this one back and he sends me the replacement when he sends me up the fife.
Check out the hole spacing in this comparison pic. This is the new carbon fiber next to Norouet.
This is, I suppose, the risk I take when ordering instruments online–I couldn’t have handled this particular flute beforehand, so I had no way of knowing until it got here if I was going to be able to play it. But hopefully this will be a solvable problem. I’ve sent the above pic to the guy at Carbony and asked him to tell me what the hole spacing is like on the other D model they have. It’d be a shame to lose power but that’s an acceptable tradeoff if it means I don’t risk my hand cramping up when I’m trying to play.
(The tone’s REAL nice on this one, though. Somebody with bigger hands than me could probably rock the hell out of this flute! And even given the uncomfortable hand stretch for me, I can get a cleaner and crisper tone out of it than I can out of Norouet.)
Album review: Autio Huvila, by Kardemimmit
Let me tell you about Kardemimmit, Internets!
Kardemimmit are a group of women from Finland who do folk music featuring the kantele, which is apparently Finland’s national instrument. I first heard of them via De Temps Antan, since Éric Beaudry of that band was posting on Facebook about having had the opportunity to learn about this group while De Temps Antan was recently on tour in the States. Then they shot straight onto my listening queue thanks to a kind person giving me their album Autio Huvila as a gift!
So I promptly did the appropriate thing and listened to that album ASAP (well, after thanking that kind person in email, because awwwwww :~) ). Because pro tip: giving me surprise music that features unusual instruments is an excellent way to get my musical attention. I looked up the band, went “ooh” at the instruments in their splash page pic, and then looked up the kantele at the Wikipedia link above. From that, I learned from that that it’s an instrument of the dulcimer family, and from Kardemimmit’s site, I learned that they play it in 15- and 38-stringed versions.
Then I listened to the album itself.
Now, I don’t speak a lick of Finnish, though I’ve gotten pretty good at coaxing halfway coherent meaning out of Google Translate (coupled with judicious actual Googling) if I’m trying to figure out bits of a language I don’t know. But since the band has no lyrics posted on their site, not even in Finnish, I have no earthly idea what any of these songs are about. These girls could be singing the names of all the streets in Helsinki, in alphabetical order, for all I know. But I did note with interest that iTunes tags several of the tracks on this album as “Explicit”, which made me make the O RLY? face. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from Quebec trad, it’s that the most innocuous-sounding song can have very bawdy lyrics. (Le Vent du Nord’s “Les métiers”, I’m looking at you. ;) )
Just by sound and style alone, though, this isn’t stuff you’d think would earn that particular rating. The women of the group all have lovely voices, and between their harmony and the chiming of the kantele they play (note: kantele is both a singular and plural noun), the album’s all very bell-like and beautiful. There’s energy, make no mistake. Right out of the gate, listening to the lively first track, I decided this was very compatible with my rampageous affection for Quebec and Celtic trad. I was particularly amused to hear the singers break into something that sounded a lot like a turlutte, even–though I suppose they call it something else in Finnish! And I kept finding myself totally wanting to give them a podorythmie rhythm track, or maybe a bodhran.
I’m not a hundred percent convinced the album’s instrumentation is all kantele–I could have sworn I heard a bass or extra percussion in there every so often, but if there were any other instruments at all, they were scarce. Mostly, this album’s all about the women’s voices, and about the kantele they play. And I found it highly enjoyable. I’ll be exploring the rest of their work.
Kardemimmit live over at kardemimmit.fi, and you can find them on Facebook as well! If you like Finnish folk music and/or the kantele, or even just think you might, go give ’em a listen.
My next Quebec tunes challenge
I have identified the next Quebec tunes set I wish to learn: the recording “Gigue à trois”, which appears on the Le Vent du Nord album Les amants du Saint-Laurent!
The first tune in this set is locatable in sheet music form right over here. However, checking it out, I note a problem in that very last measure: i.e., it’s going down to low B and G, and those are notes below the bottom end of my range on ANY of my flutes, really. My silver goes down to middle C. My piccolo goes down to D just above middle C.
(And I can’t really play the piece on any of my keyless flutes either–the first tune I linked to is in G, but the other two are in F and A minor, and you know what I’m not doing on a D or A flute? Playing stuff in F and A minor. I DO still suck at half-holing!)
So in order to play that tune I’m going to have to do one of two things: either a) I will need to kick the whole thing up an octave, or b) doink around with that measure and play notes instead that’ll work okay as chords with that B and G. Option B is more likely, and this is why!
The latter two tunes of that set, according to my initial explorations (aided by an Extremely Awesome Person Who Shall Remain Nameless, but Merci Beaucoup, Awesome Person!), have a part that goes up to the C that’s two octaves over middle C.
And that is a problem. Because if I try to kick the piece up an octave, that means I’d need to play the C that’s THREE octaves over middle C, and that is not happening on my piccolo. It’s barely going to happen on my flute. Hell, I don’t even remember successfully hitting that note on my piccolo in school, although I got up there a few times on the flute.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about re: middle C and octaves and such–an octave is scale in music, basically. Think of the “Do, a deer, a female deer” song in The Sound of Music. Go all the way through do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, and that’s an octave.
Middle C is the C that’s right smack in the middle of a piano. It’s kind of the landmark note around which most standard musical notation is centered. Wikipedia has a good description of it over here, including some midi files of what various octaves of C sound like.
If you look at their “Designation by octave” chart, middle C is C4. That’s the low C I can hit on my flute. The lowest C I can hit on my piccolo, on the other hand, is C5. I can do C6 easily enough too. C7 is the problem.
And here’s the really fun part. A piccolo is pitched an octave above a flute–meaning that if I use the same fingering to produce a note on both my instruments, the flute will have the low “do” note, and the piccolo will have the high one. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, piccolo music is actually written an octave down, on purpose. So a piccolo C5 looks like a flute C5, when written out in music. But the piccolo C5 is going to SOUND like a C6.
Which means that that C7 I’m trying to hit on my piccolo is actually a C8. I get woozy just THINKING about trying to hit that note. ;D
(The reason piccolo music is written an octave down on purpose is because if you’re writing notes that go too high to fit on the staff, you have to use extra lines called ledger lines to notate them. And there are only so many ledger lines you can comfortably use in a given piece of sheet music before you pretty much have to ctrl-alt-fuckit, write everything an octave down, and mark it 8va, which translates to ‘kick this up an octave because SERIOUSLY, I’m not sticking 15 extra lines over the staff, are you NUTS?’)
In any event, this is going to be quite, quite fun and I look forward to playing with this piece more. BUT FIRST, I gotta finish pulling Vengeance of the Hunter out of my head, and then work on Bone Walker soundtrack stuff! More bulletins as events warrant!
A little STOMPY for your Friday!
When I commit acts of musical fandom, I learn tunes (and have a tendency to pester fiddle and flute players).
When Dara commits acts of musical fandom, major cities are leveled and the Cascadia Mecha Militia is deployed! Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, I give you my belovedest supervillain’s latest composition: Kaiju Meat, her ode to all things Pacific Rim, written for this weekend’s Jaegercon on Tumblr!
Go! Clickie! It’s a free download! THE CASCADIA MECHA MILITIA NEEDS YOU!
Quebec tunes sheet music
I had a couple different people hitting my site today looking for sheet music to La Bottine Souriante tunes–specifically, “Hommage à Philippe Brunea” and “Valse d’hiver”.
Since I am not actually a sheet music site, I direct interested parties to these links:
- Montreal Session Tunebook: Tunes from Quebec (which has both of the tunes in question)
- IdentiAirs Quebecois (which also has both of the tunes in question)
Failing either of those, TheSession.org may be able to help you. I’ve periodically found Quebec tunes there, though I use it as a tertiary resource.
You may or may not be able to find tunes composed by specific Quebec artists. I’ve found things composed by André Brunet (who in fact has a few of his tunes available in PDF form here, along with tunes by a couple of other people), and a couple of things composed by Olivier Demers (“Gigue à trois”, which is on the Montreal session tunebook site) and the guys in Genticorum (again on the Montreal site, but a couple on TheSession.org as well–notably for them I’ve found “Violon guérisseur” and “Valse de poeles”, the first on the Montreal session site and the second on TheSession.org).
I will also note that the lovely people at the core of the session I go to, La Famille Leger, have a collection of accordion-friendly tunes right over here. I note also that I am NOT an accordion player, but as I am a flautist, stuff that’s easily playable in D is very friendly to my flutes.
Happy tunes hunting, my fellow instrumentalists!
Death by harmony, exactly how I wanna go
Those of you who’ve read my writeup of the amazing time Dara and I had seeing Le Vent du Nord in Victoria this past April may have noticed how one of my very favorite parts of the entire show was when les gars started belting out “Le Retour du Fils Soldat”. Four-part harmony, right in front of me and Dara, YUM.
I’d said at the time that you should all find this song ASAP, though I couldn’t find a video of it on YouTube. A kind soul has now CORRECTED this little problem, and my friend and fellow devoted Le Vent fan Susan pointed me at this delightful thing.
BEHOLD! “Le Retour du Fils Soldat”, now joining “General Taylor” and “River Driver” on the list of Songs That Have Killed Me Ded of Harmony:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tCg8_ePpbU?hl=en_US&version=3&w=560&h=315]
Quelle belle surprise!
(Apologies in advance to people reading the LJ/DW mirror of this post–Bandcamp embeds don’t work on those sites, so I’m directing traffic for it over to my main site. Click over to the original angelahighland.com post to see the embeds rendering properly.)
Well now, this was a lovely surprise!
Being a fan of Genticorum, and in particular of the work of Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand (and his duo work with his wife Mélisande as well), led me over to finding out about La Prûche Libre, a label for Quebec trad. I saw them posting about a new album via their Facebook page last night–and if I read the post correctly it was in connection with Memoire et Racines this weekend. Which got my interest up, so I clicked over to their Bandcamp page to check it out.
This was the first album of theirs that I looked at!
Résistance by Barbo
And while I was at it I checked it out this one as well–because the cover art attracted me. The singer totally made me think “HEY, she’s a brunette Shenner!” Those of you who know me from my Star Wars MUSH days may remember that my character Shenner was in fact a redheaded version of Karen Allen in the Star Wars MUSH movie in my brain, so this is really a roundabout way of the singer reminding me of Karen Allen. Regardless, it caught my eye! So then I actually played some of the tracks, and decided yes, her voice is lovely, so I wanted the music too.
D'est en ouest (Mélanie Boucher) by La prûche libre
Last but not least I had to grab this one by a quartet called La Cantinière. It’s not even out yet but I’m making a point of pre-ordering it, since it’s involving three of the gentlemen previously involved with La Volée d’Castors–who y’all may recall are one of the major Quebec bands I’ve been adoring for a while now. Those guys are in fact the second ones after La Bottine Souriante who got my attention, since they were the ones who, way back in the day, got mentioned on the OKP on one of the recurring “If you like Great Big Sea, you’ll also like…” threads.
Now, though, I just got email from somebody on the La Prûche Libre staff! He wrote to thank me for the support of their music and to offer me download codes for a couple more of their albums, which I gratefully accepted!
The first of the two albums he offered me is this one. As a long-time fan of La Bottine Souriante I absolutely know the name Yves Lambert. That legendary performer is in fact one of my strongest memories of seeing La Bottine back in 2000, because it was his voice I remember sounding rich and round and full. He’s happily still doing music even though he’s not involved with La Bottine anymore, and so I’d already decided to investigate his more recent endeavors. I didn’t, however, have this album yet!
Trio (Yves Lambert, Olivier Rondeau, Tommy Gauthier by La prûche libre
And the second album is this one. As I hope I explained to the nice gentleman from La Prûche Libre, I wasn’t familiar with M. Lepage. The email I got says he unfortunately passed away last year, but I’ll be happy for the opportunity to learn a bit more about some of the longstanding performers of the genre and to see what they’ve contributed to this music I’ve come to love.
Le temps (Lawrence Lepage) by La prûche libre
So yeah. Mes petites pouvoirs d’écriture en français, activez! Here’s hoping I replied to the nice man from La Prûche Libre coherently! And here’s to what promises to be a lovely expansion of my Quebec trad collection!
I am a folk music resource!
Well, for a small number of bands, anyway! Because apparently this is the week for people to hit my site trying to find out about the instruments played by my favorite groups.
Yesterday somebody came by with the search term ‘what mouth instruments do le vent du nord play?’ Answer: just one! Réjean Brunet plays the mouth harp. You can hear it all over a lot of their songs and you can see it in various live videos. Like this one! The mouth harp shows up in the second song in this vid, “Au bord de la fontaine”, which kicks in around the 6:57 mark. Though I heartily endorse watching the first song, “Lanlaire”, too!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YwzFzrqnQY?version=3&hl=en_US&w=560&h=315]
And today’s search term is ‘what flutes do great big sea use’. Answer: none! Séan McCann and Bob Hallett play whistles–Séan plays a small tin whistle but only on “Run Run Away”, and Bob breaks out the big low whistle for things like “Boston and St. John’s”. Behold the whistle in action!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW_pYiLofvY?hl=en_US&version=3&w=560&h=315]
To those of you who came by looking, in case you see this post, I hope this is helpful!
I've been awfully srs bznz around here lately so have some De Temps Antan
I just need to make it through the Monster Release my team is doing overnight between Monday and Tuesday–and then on Friday I’ll be heading up to Canada to see these guys being awesome!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjEwIut64lc?hl=en_US&version=3&w=560&h=315]
Because bouzouki slides! And fiddling! And podorythmie in stereo! And harmonica and accordion and mouth harp and goddamn, the voice on Pierre-Luc Dupuis. <3
And I’m tellin’ ya, people, the Monster Release is kicking my ass (lots of overtime put in this past week), so believe me when I say I will be very, very much looking forward to a long weekend of Quebecois trad goodness! Stand by for a full report on same when Dara and I get to Harrison Hot Springs. Complete with Jean-Claude Mamut, the Genderqueer Mammoth!
Some tunes practice tonight
Rossignolet is rapidly becoming my practice flute of choice–at least, as long as I’m not trying to play along with any recording that isn’t actually in A. If I pretend I’m playing a D flute and ignore how I’m actually a fourth up, this flute’s responsiveness is wonderful for just trying to get fingering patterns down into my muscle memory.
Plus, I just love the way Rossignolet sounds. I posted these to Facebook but for giggles and grins and posterity, here are sound samples of me playing Swallowtail Jig on my three primary flutes of the moment, including the new one!
Anna Plays Swallowtail Jig on New Flute (Rossignolet in A)
Anna Plays Swallowtail Jig on Norouet (Big Flute in D)
Anna Plays Swallowtail Jig on Shine (Piccolo in D)
Tonight, I went through all seven of the Quebec tunes I know so far and then through most of the non-Quebec ones, including Swallowtail. I didn’t hit Si Bheag Si Mhor or Da Slockit Light, but only because my embouchure started getting a bit wibbly and I wanted to work on Pigeon on the Gate, which I need for the Bone Walker soundtrack.
Fun observation of the evening #1: on Rossignolet, trying the embouchure exercise described in Grey Larsen’s Irish Flute and Whistle book, I was able to get three octaves of A as well as the intermediate E between the second and third A’s. That’s hard, people. And leaves me a bit swimmy-headed in a way I rather clearly remember from when I was first learning how to play piccolo!
Fun observation of the evening #2: TunePal can play tunes for you if you bring up the sheet music for one in it. You tap the play button and it’ll start playing through the tune on the screen in MIDI piano, and you can adjust the tempo too. So I fired up Pigeon on the Gate and went through it slowly several times, trying to follow the sheet music. Then I did it a few times more with my eyes closed, to see if I had it in muscle memory yet and if I could play along by ear. Then, I shut up TunePal entirely and tried to play it through slowly by myself.
This actually appeared to work. I cannot play this tune at speed yet but it may actually be getting into my fingers. Even though it’ll take me a bit to polish it up, just because those jumps in the first couple of measures from B down to E then up to D and down to E again are a bit of a bitch on the flute.