Bourrées slide

These are from Kevin Burke’s “Open House”. Since the track listing is for one tune, I just put them all together. All the transitions I’ve included sound as close to the album as I could manage. Listen here for more help with what they sound like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVGXTgM2jtc

play video

Lovely set of tunes, Bachnut_1006, but I’m afraid your transcription is rather difficult to decipher. All the notes are there but it does not capture the rhythm very effectively. These are triple-time bourrées (bourrées à 3 temps) and should be notated in 3/4 (sometimes 3/8 or 6/4 is used, but those options are not available here) - you would need to choose ‘waltz’ or ‘mazurka’ a the tune type (even though it is neither). Another issue is that what you have notated as crotchet-quaver (1/4 - 1/8) groupings are best regarded as ‘swung’ quavers. It *could* be notated using dotted quaver-semiquaver groupings but I feel that the swing rhythm is a stylistic interpretation on the part of the musicians rather than how the tunes would normally be played, so it is best notated ‘straight’.

As you say, this is a set of tunes rather than a single tune and, as such, it should really be four separate submissions. In fact, at least one of these tunes (no. 2) is already in the database https://thesession.org/tunes/562 .

Hadn’t heard those tunes for over 20 years. Transcription looks good CMO, but in the second part of the third one are the Fs not F-naturals?

CMO,
Of course! Wonderful job looking through the the trees for the forest. I come to public forums for the different perspectives. Thanks for adding your voice!

I get frustrated when I can’t track down individual tunes in a mono-named track listing. I thought pasting them together here might help someone else who also wanted to learn from the album. Your version I’m sure will get them there quicker.

@Stiamh: You’re absolutely right about the F-naturals - my impatience made me miss the obvious. It is now duly corrected (Thank heaven for the ‘Edit’ facilty!)

@Bachnut_1006: Glad to be of help. It can be bewildering trying to make sense of tunes from an unfamiliar genre - more so when they are tunes from one genre interpreted by musicians from another. It is down to Jeremy’s discretion whether this posting is left as is or gets separated into individual tunes.

Keep in mind that on the recording you can change the track listing to be four separate tunes *and* link them to the specific tunes now (thanks to Jeremy)… Best choice probably :D

If separated, the third tune would be in Amin by the looks of it.

@NfldWhistler: Yes, it uses all the notes of the melodic minor scale. But those F#s an d high G-naturals in the A-part scream “Dorian” to me, inspite of the low G#s - so I might be inclined to leave the F# in the key signature for that part of the tune and put the B-part in A minor. It’s a matter of preference, really.

Right! I missed those few F#’s in the A Part.

Thank you so much for posting the video for this. I really like them, especially tune 1.
I can’t help wondering if there is any classical influence to this set. My parents have a few older Handel albums and there are several tracks that are a “bouree” (Sorry, Voice-Over on my iPhone is not great with accents!), and especially considering the fact that the OP of this tune considers themselves a “Bach nut”.

“I get frustrated when I can’t track down individual tunes in a mono-named tune listing.”
I’m the same! You can sometimes try your luck at a Web site that I found recently called discogs.com, which will sometimes have the full tune listing. Not for this one though, sadly.

“I can’t help wondering if there is any classical influence to this set. My parents have a few older Handel albums and there are several tracks that are a ‘bouree’…”

The bourrée (both 3-time and 4-time) is a staple of French traditional dance, especially that of central France, not a borrowing from classical music. It has been, sometimes simultaneously, both a courtly dance and a peasant dance in France, and the tunes for the dance would probably have traversed class boundaries in both directions. The form was taken up by many composers in the Baroque period (including Handel and J. S. Bach) as the basis for listening (i.e. non-dance) music and this is probably how it is best known outside the French traditional dance world.

Dots here for comparison:
http://forlorn.fr/pdf/bourrees_3t_ut.pdf

More bourrées here:
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/France/bourree/
http://www.hurdy-gurdy.org.uk/hurdygurdy%20soc.html

Maybe some of the other tunes are there.