Corsican Waltz

[Jim Troy]

anyone , anybody , anywhere , got the dots for the Corsican Waltz ?
i'm not going to wreck my head trying to figure out what the flute is , for instance is it Eb , or F or just the good old D , that Desi uses to play it .

years ago , i tried to play " Iles de la Madeliene" on the fiddle , in weird and wonderful keys , never fell out of love with the tune though , only to realise two months ago , that the Maguires had tuned their fiddles to Eb for that recording .
had a senior moment then , with a youthful desire to dropkick the fiddle , but my aged limbs failed, miserably , to respond.

so now , i am here , with my cap in hand , looking for your help .
and i'll wish you a Happy Ever After , a Happy Crimbo and i'll do a novena for your embouchure if you come up with this Christmas wish .
thanks , jimais

[maracirac]

hi! one of the flute forum member transcribed this waltz and he was so kind to sent me via e mail his transcription.be patient , and i will find his transcription and send it to you via e mail.
marin

[kenny]

I'm 99% sure "jemtheflute" has it transcribed. He played it at Hammy's flute meeting earlier this year. If you send him a "pm" via the memberlist, I'm sure he'd help. It's maybe Jem who Marin's referring to.

[Jim Troy]

thanks for that Marin , looking forward to receiving that .

as a matter of interest ,on that recording , which flute did Desi do , it wasn't the D though ?

[chas]

years ago , i tried to play " Iles de la Madeliene" on the fiddle , in weird and wonderful keys , never fell out of love with the tune though , only to realise two months ago , that the Maguires had tuned their fiddles to Eb for that recording .

Chris Norman does a wonderful version of that on a low A flute. That was my primary motivation to enter the world of low flutes.

[maracirac]

It's maybe Jem who Marin's referring to
yes, kenny you are right, he was kind to sent to me his transcription.
marin

[jemtheflute]

Thread Resuscitation Alert!

There is some new discussion of this on Facebook and it has (inevitably - I hear the groans!) impelled me to a rendition.....
Corsican Waltz vid clip on YT
Corsican Waltz vid clip on FB

[hans]

Thank you for the youtube clip, Jem! Nice! Please send me the abc!

The FB links just go to a login page. I suppose I would need to join the club to get any further. Have discussions now moved from forums to FB, are we non-FB users doomed? How much time do folks spend in that world, and not here?

[jemtheflute]

Hans, I've never ABCed it - only have staff notation and it's a bit long-winded to bother to ABC. The FB postings of the dots and the video should be visible to all comers, but if you still can't access it let me have your e-address and I'll zap it over when I get at the 'puter later.
There's lots of good stuff on FB - you can block most of the crud and use it how you wish, like most of the Net.

[Denny]

we're all doomed.....joining Facebook will not save ya!

after you've figured out how to change your settings it isn't so bad.....

it's great for superficial contact & depthless chatter


I should like it more
oh, not a lot of time, it's just an open tab that I flip through when I'm bored.

The FB postings of the dots and the video should be visible to all comers

ah, only if you are logged on to Facebook

[Steve Bliven]

The FB postings of the dots and the video should be visible to all comers

ah, only if you are logged on to Facebook

(Mostly to get my post count higher...)

For whatever reason, it's available to me and I'm too much of a Luddite to join or log on to or whatever you do with Facebook.

Best wishes.

Steve

[Denny]

Steve you might want to go back to JEM's FB link and try again.

If you don't get a You must be logged in to see screen click on Account in the upper right corner and see who you're logged in as.

I'd logged the wife out but I hadn't gotten to logging in yet. I just tried it logged in, logged out and tried it again. I have to be logged in.

[Steve Bliven]

Getting way off topic here, but the Logged-in-as name is not familiar to me. Must be someone else in the family working under a pseudonym. Interesting topic for dinnertime....

Best wishes.

Steve

[Denny]

yes, dinner....better'n clickin' the Home button and tryin' ta guess

[jemtheflute]

OK, OK, OK! I get the non-FB message! Hans, I've sent it to you to your e-address on your website, but just in case anyone else is an FB refusenik:



"Corsican Waltz"
Composer hitherto unidentified, possibly one Antoine Bonelli from Corsica, but I previously thought it likely to be C20th Breton/French – see below. (I didn't believe this was necessarily a trad or even modern-in-the-tradition tune from Corsica; but it seems it might well be!)
Here is a scan of my transcription of Corsican Waltz, approximately as played by Desi Wilkinson on Cran's The Crooked Stair album. I admit there were one or two spots where (without benefit of slow-down playback) I could not discern precisely what Desi plays, so I have made the best sense of it I can to produce what I find to be a satisfactory playing version. I make no claims beyond that! So far as I know Desi played it on a normal 8-key simple system wooden Concert Flute in D (not on one in a different pitch to evade use of keys/"simplify" it) and that is how I play it myself. I've been hacking away at it for over a decade, mind. (Hence the handwritten notation - pre ABC days! - nowadays I'd ABC it and generate the dots that way....)

Of co(u)rse (sorry!!!), this is NOT an Irish tune, and personally I probably play it in a slightly more classical style than Desi does, with bits of double-tonguing etc. I have not marked phrasing or (much) articulation on my transcription, but it certainly should not be read in classical fashion as virtually all detached. I play it at around 66-68 bpm for a dotted minim 1 beat per bar; that equates to a crotchet (3 beats per bar) rate of c 200-204 bpm. I haven’t tried to measure what speed Desi Wilkinson played it at but subjectively I think I'm in the same ball-park.

Desi's recording of the same piece from his The Three Piece Flute album is available from iTunes. It is a different recording from the Cran album one - with an accordionist accompanying - not as nice as the cello etc. on The Crooked Stair rendition and I fancy a trifle slower, though still brisk enough - but some details of how he plays it are a bit clearer (at 1st listening) - not very much amiss with my transcription, though some minor details as I suspected - not worth fussing over - pretty much within legitimate variation of a trad melody.
The Crooked Stair was reissued on CD by Claddagh and appears to be available at the time of writing, but only as a CD, not as a download. http://claddaghrecords.com/WWW/catalog/ ... s_id=1961.

Listen to Desi, if you can, then interpret for yourselves. Desi didn't know the composer's name - he learnt it in Brittany from Gilles le Bigot, according to the album notes. Jean-Michel Veillon does know the name, and told me about the source/?composer? during The Flute Meeting in 2006, and subsequently wrote me as follows:

“The man who passed the Corsican Waltz to Desi Wilkinson - as far as I remember - is called Philippe Colleu. He was a Breton banjo-mandolin player, living in Eastern Brittany (not far from St Brieuc) until he finally moved to Bulgaria and became a dance teacher (Bulgarian dances). In the mid 80's he became a member of the "Breton-Irish Band", a band I had actually created with Gilles Le Bigot, Paddy O'Neill and Martin Nolan a few years before. This is when he passed that tune to Desi. But to be sure, I've also sent a message to Gilles le Bigot, who will probably remember more about that tune.”

I never actually received any more info…….. But, I have now discovered some further information on the Internet…….

As is the way with living tradition aural transmission, that seems not to be the whole story! I have now discovered that this is a version of La Valse Ajaccienne, attributed universally on the Net to Corsican guitarist Antoine Bonelli, though whether he truly composed it or whether his is simply an influential guitar arrangement of a traditional Corsican tune I have not as yet been able to determine. Certainly Bonelli's setting as represented on clips from his album Au Son des Guitares (http://www.musicme.com/Antoine-Bonelli) and in other folk’s renditions on YT is somewhat different from the one that reached Desi/me. However, a more closely recognisable one is on YT here - worth a view! (These guys call it Valse Corse and attribute it, or presumably at least the arrangement they play, to a René Valecalle!)

You can play the tune as many times round as you like, as long as you progress to the coda from the segno when you want to end. It's a darn good work-out for fingers/keys, tone across a wide tessitura (by ITM and other trad standards) and tongue and breath control.

A note to any mainstream Classical players hitting on this - re: repeats. As in Baroque music and generally in notation of traditional dance music, all repeats should always be observed and played as marked - none of that modern classical vice of ignoring dotted double bars, please!

Any problems, please feel free to ask. Any feedback or further information welcome. Enjoy!

(P.S. as I haven't been able to identify the source/composer with any certainty, I have no idea if there are any copyright issues here - if anyone knows of any, please let me know.....)

AND, inevitably..... I've done and posted a video clip of it: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=419828234270 / http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cmy0XhvCTE. I have only played it once through plus the ending here. Desi Wilkinson plays it twice through plus the ending on both of his recordings, and that's how I usually play it myself, but I didn't risk it trying to video myself! I do know it by heart but had the dots up on the stand as a crutch......... I'm all too aware my playing is by no means faultless!

Edited 30:7:10 to update info on source/origin and add some new links.