SKU: HL.49043945

ISBN 9790220133503. 8.25x12.0x0.3 inches. English.

Sea Songs, commissioned jointly by Ars Nova Copenhagen and Glasgow Concert Halls, is a kind of sequel to Martland's Street Songs (originally written for the Kings Singers and Evelyn Glennie). As with the earlier piece, Martland made use of to the library of the English Folk Song and Dance Society at Cecil Sharp House in north London.I wanted specifically to find texts that were not just the usual nautical heave-ho sort of thing, but instead explored the dangers and hardships still being experienced by sailors as recently as the early 19th century. I was also very happy to see in these texts the sense of camaraderie and mutual support that existed between the sailors. (Steve Martland)Dance to your Daddy sets the scene of a sailor's wife at home, dandling her baby son and singing to him about his daddy away fishing, and about the future. Both the tune and the words come from the Northumberland area around Newcastle. This song is very well known in the UK and gave the title to a famous television series When the boat comes in.Fire Down Below is about the effects of fire - a constant danger on board wooden ships. At the end of this song the words take on an extended meaning: Fire in our hearts for the friends that we love.The Dead Horse is about the initial month of work without pay in which all seamen had to take part. They referred to it as the dead horse - hence the expression to flog a dead horse when something is a waste of time. The seamen resented this unpaid time, and the text expresses their frustrations metaphorically by listing what they would do to the horse! The music's frantic gallop alludes to the horse's desperation.Although The Sea Martyrs presents itself as a ballad, this text has a more literary feel, and unlike the other songs it doesn't include a chorus refrain. It concerns the sailors' lack of pay, the consequences of asking for pay (being hanged!), and the poverty of their families at home. The poem portrays the sailors' deaths as an almost religious sacrifice to help future seamen.At the end of the work, the opening of Dance to your Daddy returns as a kind of descant, sung by an angel calling to the hanged men. Paul Hillier, 2012.

ISBN 9781495064999. UPC: 888680623746. 6.0x9.0x0.314 inches. Chuck Traeger Music Pro Guides.

String musicians, know only this: everything is vibrating. The movement of the spheres? A guru's cryptic musing? Hypersensitivity to plate tectonics? Not quite. This is the briefest possible distillation of Trager's Principle, which states, “When a string instrument is being played, everything is vibrating, from the top of the scroll to the tip of the endpin.” This simple formula, the purest distillation of master luthier Chuck Traeger's lifetime of learning, holds the key to configuring your instrument to your specifications. It also forms the crux of his third and final book: String Instrument Setups: 10 Setups That Will Make Your Instrument Louder, Better, and Easier to Play. At the height of the Big Band era, Traeger, a double bassist, performed alongside a veritable who's who of New York jazz musicians including the likes of Louie Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. In was in this capacity – as Charlie Traeger, one hip cat and a regularly frustrated client of NYC's instrument repair shops –that he began his pursuit of sonic perfection. In 1969, satisfied with his abilities but devoted to constant self-improvement, he opened his first repair shop. Before he knew it, his reputation was preceding him, and he found himself handling the instruments of school band novices and the New York Philharmonic alike. On his seventieth birthday, Traeger retired from musicianship and devoted himself to comprehensively documenting all he had learned about his craft. Two decades later, shortly after he put the finishing touches on String Instrument Setups, Chuck Traeger passed away on November 9, 2016. Scarcely a month had elapsed since the death of his beloved wife, June, to whom he was married for over sixty blissful years. Albeit with a heavy heart, we at Hal Leonard Books are proud to present this remarkable man's parting gift to generations of current and future musicians. String Instrument Setups is the culmination of forty-five years of acoustic research involving Trager's old standby, the double bass, and, in turn, any string instrument with a moveable bridge and a moveable tailpiece, or one that can be made moveable. Armed with this book, we're confident that the average musician can enter almost any string instrument maker or repair shop in the world (the exception being a shop that has already read String Instrument Setups), ask for their best repair or restoration, then make that instrument sound louder, better, and easier to play, every time. This is neither braggadocio nor hyperbole; rather, it's the confidence instilled by one man's extensive research, wholehearted devotion, and firm belief in the sacred bond between instrument and musician. After reading String Instrument Setups, we're sure you'll feel the same.