One of the great Christmas carols --- perhaps the most beloved of all --- is ‘Silent Night’, which was written by Franz Gruber in 1818 using a guitar when the church organ wasn’t working.
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Timothy's Blog
Timothy's blog on dulcimers, music, nature and life!
NOV
14
[Photo: Virginia Sky, with Ann Robinson and Peter Budnikas.]
Guitarists face the audience, especially when they’re singing. Of course! Well, pianists don’t, because they need for the piano to face the audience, so they face sideways.
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In 1996 I set about recording the classic folk tune ‘Shenandoah’ in a special, new, expressive way with something of a sense of the epic in its flow. So I chose to devise a pattern in which each verse would be in a different key and each new key would be either a major or minor third away from the previous one --- a somewhat startling and unconventional kind of key change!
On top of that, I wanted to jump to each new key immediately at the end of each verse without playing the verse’s last note --- at least till the very end of the whole piece.
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Some Appalachian folk hymns have a powerful, stark, droning nature; perhaps the most well-known and effective of these is ‘Wondrous Love’, and it’s included in many modern hymnals with hollow harmonies reminiscent of the old shape-note books.
How does one arrange for this strong Dorian-mode melody when playing it solo on the hammered dulcimer? I’ve always loved the shifting minor and major chords in some versions of it (see one possible set of modern chording in the lead sheet I’ve included here: Wondrous-Love-in-Edor-F.pdf), and it certainly is compelling when played as a melody only, solo a capella --- but I’ve opted to do only the stark, harmonized sound when I play it solo, and usually I play only one verse, letting the hymn be an introduction to another, contrasting, piece in a medley.
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In 1999 I wrote a personal account about my life with music up to that point and particularly in relation the hammered dulcimer. Perhaps it will be of interest!
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Visually on the hammered dulcimer the "shape" of a three-note chord (a triad) is often a triangle, with the "vertices" the places where the hammers strike.
Around 1990, as a relatively new player, I wanted to practice playing triangles in a repeating right-left-right-left pattern, so one evening I started near the top of the dulcimer and played the E minor chord then moved down to the next position (G major) and continued downward in this way till an even number of measures seemed to call for a change. I inserted a few other figures as part of this for interest (moving up a note for a moment, etc.), but the pattern was basically straightforward as a triangle study.
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