La Ciapa Rusa (mazurka) on The Session

Twenty-five comments

Notes

Mazuka? I have no idea but this seemed the most appropriate - forcing these categories niggles me as not everything falls into these..ah well.

The tune is either French or Italian in origin. I picked it up from flute player Rebecca Ritchie-Timms who I understand picked this up from a French session we have in Oxford.

I often follow this with The Plane Tree also in Em as a Jig, although I know other players who play the Plane Tree after this tune with a different swung rhythm.

Mr. Pearce,

The reason this tune doesn’t fit nicely into one of the site’s tune categories is because this site was designed for Irish tunes.

Steve

Is that a rebuke? Or is formality normal? ;)

Perhaps it should be called theirishsession.org then…the fact that a huge number of tunes here are english scottish etc suggested to me (along with the name) that different origin tunes are OK - in fact Bear Dance is from Belgium. From perusing the site it seems to me its morphed to something that reflects its URL. Tunes = Tunes played at Sessions. 🙂

I wonder how you categorise ‘Fir Bolg’ by Kila. Thats ww.kila.ie. 🙂 Irish band. Irish title. Turkish style music and scales on this particular tune…I assume that as its composed by an Irishman and played by an irish band with irish members from ireland that that makes it Irish. Damned if I could place any of the ‘mandatory’ R: tags on it though… ;)
Mind you I have commented elsewhere that as kila are contemporary trad/trad fusion that the session/trad/folk police will hate them anyway!

My local ‘Irish’ session at an ‘irish’ pub in england covers a lot of irish tunes - but the session is contemporary so tunes like this a played often.

You see thats the great thing about sessions…they morph and take influences from everywhere 🙂 - unless of course you are part of the tradition police…

The issue is that you are *forced* to select a rhythm. Normally with such ABCs I simply leave out the R: tag.

Anyway Ive changed it to a waltz as it probably fits better in that category.

For me music at session is a wide and diverse thing. These days its hard to pin down what you call irish or english - peeps like Uiscedwr, Kila, Afro Celts and Michael McGoldrick are blurring the lines significantly, and over here in the UK the who trad fusion thing is the big thing - celtic tunes now have a new leash of life. I think its a beautiful thing 🙂

It’s not a rebuke. You and your friends can play the music you want to play. However, you seemed rather surprised—and perhaps even a little upset—that your tune didn’t fit neatly into one of the categories on this website. As Jeremy explains on the home page, he designed this website for traditional Irish music.

Of course, sessions should be open to foreign influences, but those foreign influences have to be assimilated in some sort of "organic" fashion, usually over a period of time. English and Scottish tunes have been assimilated in this way because they already bear significant genetic similarities to Irish music. The problem with contemporary "trad fusion," in my opinion, is that the musicians involved usually just stick two completely different types of music, producing not an organic type of folk music, but a freak genetic mutation, which, thought intriguing at first, ultimately will not survive.

If you want an illustration of my point, just look at a band like Planxty. Their accompaniment of traditional songs was quite novel at the time, but it was successful and widely followed because they borrowed their approach from English and American musicians who accompanied ballads very similar to Irish ballads. That kind of song accompaniment is now traditional. It has even carried over, with some necessary modification, to the accompaniment of reels, jigs, and more established dance tunes. However, the eastern European tunes they played have not become traditional even now, I would argue. It is acceptable to play them at most Irish sessions, but these kinds of tunes have clearly not entered into the Irish tradition. Are there any Irish dancers who can dance a horo? But, they can dance a polka or a mazurka.

"Are there any Irish dancers who can dance a horo?" ~ Yes!

~ & folks from the Balkans who can dance Irish… 😎

“Ciapa Rusa” ~ another take on this

X: 2
T: Ciapa Rusa
M: 3/4
L: 1/8
R: waltz
K: Emin
|: D2 |\
EF GA Bc | B4 eB | cB AB ce | B4 cB |
A2 FG AB | G2 EF GE |[1 F2 B2 ^A2 | B4 :|[2 F/G/F ^DE FG | E4 ||
|: cd |\
BG EB GE | BG EB GE | cG Ec GE | cE Gc BA |
BE GB AG | BE GB AG |[1 F2 B2 ^A2 | B4 :|[2 F/G/F ^DE FG | E4 |]

A northern Italy mazurka.
http://freedownloads.last.fm/download/92287279/Mazurka.mp3
Gian-Marco, please comment

Yes! Did you write GM? I’ll drop him a line too… 😉

R: mazurka \ O: Italy

Are you out to make work for me swiss? Now I’ll have to do another transcription of this. GM may disapprove, but I also like this played swung, i.e. ~ E>F G>A B>c | ~ 😎

I love Northern Italy, and its wines… Oh to be there in the mountains…

I have to say that in the area where the wine is great there are hills, not mountains…

LOL. Cheers for the comments - Italian Mazurka 🙂 Ive changed the details.

I did do some research before posting this tune and from the name I knew it was italian in name but had no idea of the real origin. The only thing I found searching the net was a band called ‘Ciapa Rusa’….perhaps a nod to this tune?

I see the ABC has been edited. A musically the B part is now missing the vital time sig changes. Guess the site doesnt like Key and Meter changes mid-tune.

The important thing is to note the B part barring - this is technically not correct but does give the right impression as the B part is played as 6/8 (i.e. in 2) apart from the last 2 bars.

You *can*, actually, change the time and key of tune abc’s in midstream - Steve Mansfield’s or other abc internet tutors will show how. I fairly recently entered a Scandinavian tune called Tuolpagorni which demanded time-signature changes, and got it right (great tune, btw!) - if you look it up, my abc’s should help you see how it’s done. (No key changes in this one, though.)

Half the fun of trying to enter exotica is the creative manipulation of the site’s existing music formats to that end. If you *really* want to enter a tune in a Middle Eastern scale with a time signature in prime numbers and based on C#, you can find a way to enter it if you think about it hard enough…

….and square some venerable relic of an Irish 70s supergroup to affirm that it was in fact played at a couple of lock-ins back then, but that the public were not yet thought to be ready for it.

Thanks for posting this. It’s a beautiful tune 🙂

Don’t go telling the Italians that swisspiper. I wouldn’t have risked it. If they want to call the mountains, so be it… Like the lovely nebbiola grape, one of my favourite wine grapes, they don’t describe the cool mists as wafting up hills… 😉

Barry, 3/4 it is, even when it can sound as if it slips into 6/8… This melody, as I’ve known it, is 3/4 throughout, though a musician can choose to emphasize the second few bars, for variation or interest, as if they were 6/8. In the dance, and since this is dance music, it is 3/4, not 6/8…

I love this tune…..especially the b part!

Barry,

I’m not surprised you met with resistance putting this on The Session! People are particular about things not being Irish, which is fair, as it’s an Irish site.

As Becca and I heard it at the festival in Suffolk, and how we play it in the Half Moon, I had it down as 3/4 throughout with beamed groups of 1 crotchet throughout.

Here’s how I’d written it (sans ornamentation)

http://livetunebook.qualmograph.org.uk/tune/00001565

Nicholas - "You *can*, actually, change the time and key of tune abc’s in midstream"

Yeah thats what I did - it was edited by the sitemaster I guess. I’ll post the 6/8 B part version later.

I actually transcribe in Lilypond - namely because I can embed it in OpenOffice documents and more importantly it is designed to produce the very best quality of engraving. I produce the ABCs usually retyping using my document as a source. Lilypond will produce MIDI so I can play the tune from lilypond created MIDs or use the ABC. Although I can find abc2ly I really need an ly2abc program - and I just cant be bothered to write it myself (ho hum…life of s/w eng eh?).
—-
ceolachan - um No. Music written in 3/4 can never sound in 6/8. That/’s fundamental to the concept of time signatures…unless of course you consider the complete suppression of accents to be reasonable. In which case you can write anything in anything….but there is a massive difference between 6/8 and 3/4 when the tempo of a quaver is maintained. Its a totally different feel and sound.

It may be a dance - but it ceases to be a dance without dances - then its just a tune - and morphing of tunes and playing about with tunes is (for me) where the excitement at session occurs - I didn’t realise when I posted this that it was played as a straight 3/4 throughout - I’ve discovered the ‘truth’ behind this now - mainly because of the act of posting it - and that’s been great fun in itself - and I’m pleased I posted the ‘wrong’ version else I may never have discovered all this about the tune.

—-
Hi Joe! Great fun talking about this at the session - and a great example of the 3/4 playing style which as I said I hadn’t heard before because although Becca gave me the dots (in 3/4)…I used the dots to get the basic playing in place - but when I got to session with it it was played (as I can now identify by at least 1 if not 2 peeps) with the 6/8 timing.

What I love about all this is that the tune works as a tune in straight 3/4 or if you do use the 6/8 alternate B part you can go from the 3/4 into a jig quite readily….which I think gives a greater contrast and interest in the tune set. 🙂

and most importantly…isn’t this web-site cool in the fact that these discussions have occurred surrounding the tune - phenomenal.

Corrected ABCs

Here are the two ABCs.

1 - Straight 3/4 with correct beaming 🙂
2 - Alternate 6/8+2 bars in 3/4 B part.

X:1
T:La Ciapa Rusa
L:1/8
K:Em
M:3/4
|:EF GA Bc | B4 B2 | cB AB ce | B4 B2 | AG FG AB |
GF EF GE |[1 F2 A2 G2 | F4. |2 F2 G2 F2 | E4 G A ||
|: BG EB GE | BG EB GE | cG Ec GE | cG Ec GE |
BA GB AG | BA GB AG |[1 F2 A2 G2 | F4 G A |2 F2 G2 F2 | E6 ||

X:2
T:La Ciapa Rusa
L:1/8
K:Em
M:3/4
|:EF GA Bc | B4 B2 | cB AB ce | B4 B2 | AG FG AB |
GF EF GE |[1 F2 A2 G2 | F4. |2 F2 G2 F2 | E4 G A ||
M:6/8
|: BGE BGE | BGE BGE | cGE cGE | cGE cGE |
BAG BAG | BAG BAG\
|[1\
M:3/4
F2 A2 G2 | F4 G A\
|[2\
M:3/4
F2 G2 F2 | E6 ||

Ive also corrected the very last bar - originally it was marked as E4. oops - a hangover from my lilypond-ABC conversion…it should have read E6 which the above new ABCs do.

Thanks to absolutely everyone for the comments - very interesting and informative!

thanks for posting this—i’d heard it at the Half Moon, and never got around to finding out what it’s called 😉

The correct name is…

La Ciapa Rusa mazurka

Four settings