I've been playing around for the past couple of days with Rob MacKillop's ebook "Twenty-Five 17th Century Scottish Tunes Arranged For Mandolin" (which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available from his web site anymore). That book has a number of arrangements of pieces from the Skene Manuscript, and that got me looking around for a decent source for the original pieces.
What I quickly found was a site I'd not seen before, but which has a fabulous amount of source material: www.scotmus.com
That site has many more tunes from the Skene Manuscript than either Rob's ebook or the renaissance music editions by Allen Alexander, and they are in the original keys and with double stops (but in standard notation, not in the original lute tablature). It also has a surprisingly musical MIDI player for all the tunes, so it's easier to browse through and pick the ones worth learning.
The site description of the Skene pieces is:
"The Skene MS (c.1620) is one of the most important early collections of Scottish music. A personal music-book in tablature for the mandour or mandore (a small type of Renaissance lute), it contains some 114 tunes, including the earliest recorded versions of several Scottish popular classics. This ScotMus.com album reproduces the first print edition of 85 of the manuscript's tunes, transcribed into modern staff notation by George Farquhar Graham for William Dauney's antiquarian study, The Ancient Melodies of Scotland (1838). Their edition rapidly became the definitive source of "ancient melodies" for several generations of editors and arrangers."
So, I've picked and recorded three pieces that I hadn't seen before (they're not in Rob's or Allen's books). All are in the original key. Many of the original double stops are easy on the mandolin (the mandore was tuned in alternate strings of g and d, and the original tablature made extensive use of open bass strings), some had to be transposed up an octave to be playable with a plectrum, and a few would be too awkward (for me anyway) to finger and so I've left them out.
1. Ostend
2. Sir John Hopes Currant
3. Chrichton's Gud Night
It also struck me that the description of the mandore (on Wikipedia anyway) is a mandolin-sized lute with between four and six single gut strings, a flat soundboard and tuned in fifths and fourths. Well, I have such an instrument: my ukulele (retuned to mandolin tuning, GDAE). Ignoring the fact that the mandore was fingerpicked, and that it combined fourths and fifths, I thought that I'll probably be closer to the original tone with the uke, so I've recorded "Chrichton's Gud Night" again:
These are only the tunes that I picked straight off Scotmus.com. I've also recorded four Skene tunes that I learned from Rob's book (who generally transposed them down from the original keys, by between a fourth and an octave):
She Mowpitt Comming Owr The Lie
Lady Cassilles Lilt
The Lass O Glasgowe
Shoe Looks As Shoe Wold Lett Me
Martin
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