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  • Maureen
    Posts: 679
    Folks here may remember me mentioning the old Irish hymnal (in Gaelic) Danta De, from 1928. The tunes in it are public domain, mostly chosen from various tune collections, and most either religious or "classical Irish" airs. The words fitted to them are also public domain (with some exceptions), though marrying them together was in many cases something new.

    I just found out by chance in a websearch that the Episcopal 1982 hymnal tune "St Mark's, Berkeley" is taken from Danta De. But apparently the source doesn't say which tune number it is, or the pre-existing name of the tune, or the words of the tune in Danta De, or anything at all helpful! (And isn't it a tad presumptuous to name a pre-existing Irish tune after a church in the US that probably didn't even exist when the tune was first collected?)

    Argh, argh, argh.... I know, the world doesn't exist for my convenience, but would it have killed them to give a little more info?
  • Maureen
    Posts: 679
    Well, I've now looked through every piece of hymn music in Danta De, and I don't see anything that looks like ST MARK'S, BERKELEY. So either the "harmonization" changed the melody pretty darned substantially, or the guy is using a harmony part for a melody. Sigh. My head hurts.

    (The odd thing is that it shouldn't have been hard to find. There aren't a lot of Irish tunes that start by going down, like SMB does; there were only maybe five airs in the whole of Danta De that did. Shrug.)

    OTOH, it's possible that this is sweet, sweet divine retribution on the original editors of Danta De, for their own sins in crediting tunes.

    Listing P.W. Joyce as "P. Seoighe" is a really unnecessary piece of Gaelicization. They also have a terrible way of crediting tunes by the title they like, instead of the title given in the source material... so you can't find the tune without a pretty good knowledge of the vast potential number of variations in nomenclature.

    And I don't just mean crediting "The Star" as "An Reult", or even "An t-Sailchuach" as "An Salcuach".

    I mean crediting "An Cailin Deas Ruadh" as "An Cuilfhionn Ruadh".

    Man, if these people were not all long dead, I'd be sending them some pretty nasty emails right about now.

    P.S. Picture the sick twisted nature of people who provide notes in back, and an index of hymns by first line, but no tune index... arghhhhh.
  • Maureen
    Posts: 679
    Well, I've been writing up an index for Danta De. (Not fun, given the pretty but hard to read Gaelic font. Or the tiny little dots for adding H, which were sometimes remembered and sometimes not. Or the lack of standardization of credits boilerplate.)

    So I got curious to see what tunes were used in the Steven Warner album of instrumentals from the hymnals. (I guess they had trouble reading the dots, also, because they left out pretty much all those H's.)

    Sigh. Well. All nice tunes, as such. But.

    There are a good many tunes in the book which are explicitly religious tunes. But for some reason, the only ones used are "Dan na h-Aoine" (Song of Good Friday), "Sancte Venite", "Ag Chriost an Siol" (which isn't in the hymnal since it was from 1928, and the tune was composed by Sean O Riada in the Fifties), and "Caoineadh na h-Aoine" (Keen of Good Friday).

    The others are all nice tunes, but without hymn words, they're not anything more than nice airs. OTOH, they did resist playing more familiar airs like "King of the Fairies" , which was also in there. :)
  • Maureen
    Posts: 679
    Well, I thought all my problems with "St. Mark's, Berkeley" were solved, when I found a book calling itself a companion to the 1982 Hymnal. Well, they weren't. I learned that this Mealy guy had previously set another hymn to the same tune in another hymnal (a kids' songbook named Sing for Joy, pubbed in 1961), but they still didn't deign to let us know which hymn in Danta De they'd used the tune from, except that it was one of the ones that didn't have a tune name. Wow. That narrows it down. Also, it admits that the tune did have some serious alterations done to it, in order to make the hymn text scan. Sigh.

    However, I did learn that the gentleman felt in his heart that it was totally okay to name it "St. Mark's, Berkeley" instead of "Kerry Folk Tune" (for example); or instead of asking some local Celtic musician what it was named already. (He lived in Berkeley in the 1950's. Not exactly difficult to find a faculty member who was professionally well-versed in folk music and knew the right people to ask.) No, he was certain that it was more important to name it after his own parish.

    I'd say this is why the Irish hate the English, but this guy was an Irish-American; so he has no excuse. (And you can't send the dead any emails of complaint. Sigh.)

    It's just so annoying. I mean, I was going to work through these tunes anyway, but it would have taken all of two or three numbers to let us all know what tune they meant. But they didn't, even though they had plenty of space. Gah! Needlessly annoying.

    I'm starting to become convinced that this tune must have a very embarrassing name, in the actual Irish tradition. However, there are no tunes in Danta De named "Henry VIII Must Die" or "Confusion to English Heretics". So far as I know, anyway.... It's also possible that they finally figured out that the Irish credits were saying that it was a Scottish tune, and were too embarrassed to admit it.
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