The Portland Collection Play Along CD

April 3, 2008

We have the new CD set in hand! Betsy Branch, Clyde Curley, and I have recorded a 2-disk compilation of 97 tunes from both volumes of The Portland Collection. We chose some of our favorite tunes, none of them recorded on the other Portland CDs. The tunes span all keys and genres and all levels of difficulty; they are a cross section of the music in the books. Although we recorded most of the tunes in medleys, each tune has a track marker of its own so that it will be easy to find on the recording. Most of the sets contain just one lead instrument and one back up instrument: fiddle and piano, fiddle and guitar, or mandolin and piano. There are also two 4-string banjo and piano sets, one mandolin and guitar track, and one unaccompanied cross-tuned fiddle set. The recording is engineered so that the listener can pan left to hear only the back up,  right hear to only the lead, or center to hear both lead and back up. Tempos are moderate. Our aim was to make each tune as accessible as possible to the ear (and fingers) while retaining the character of the music. We strove to make the recording both a good listening experience and a good learning tool. Each disk begins and ends with the 3 of us playing together at faster speeds and with harmonies and variations to give a feel for how we would play this music at a dance. We hope that you will pick up your instrument and play along with us! This double CD is priced at $25 with $3 for shipping.

April 27, 2006

Fiddler Betsy Branch, Clyde, and I have just started working on a double CD with as many tunes from The Portland Collections 1 and 2 as the two disks can hold. We will aim for a cross-section of the music with particular attention to balancing the levels of difficulty of the tunes so that players of every level will have music they can play along with. There will be only 2 musicians playing on each track—melody and back up. We will engineer the recording so that either the lead or back up can be turned off or down so that musicians can play along with just one of the other. Right now, we are in the process of choosing tunes. If you have any suggestions of tunes you would like to hear on this recording, please send them my way. As of this date, we can still be influenced by popular opinion.

Also, let me know if you would like to be notified when this recording is ready for purchase. If you were on the notification list for the companion CD for Book 2, then I haven’t taken your name off unless you have asked me to. This list will only be used for a one-time announcement of new products and will never be given out to anyone else.  

Volume 2 Companion CDs

November 7, 2005

George Penk, Clyde Curley, and I have just finished recording a companion CD for Book 2. We recorded 36 tunes on 17 different tracks (coincidentally, the exact same number of tunes and tracks as on the companion CD for Book 1.) We included a cross section of the genres of tunes in the book, some played with "artistic license," and some played in a very straightforward style. I will post a track list soon and may be able to get some sound clips up even before the recording is released.

If you would like to receive email notification when the above CD is ready for purchase (hopefully mid-December, 2005), send me a message at songer at portcoll dot com, and I will put you on a notification list. (If you change your email address, remember to let me know, or you won't get the message). Unless I hear otherwise from you, I will also let you know when our next recording project is finished. That one will be a "play-along" CD. Fiddler Betsy Branch, Clyde, and I will begin work on it sometime next spring. I won't use the email list for anything beyond notification of these two projects.

Thank you very much for your interest in our music!

History of the Volume 2 Project

May 16, 2005

Volume 2 is in press right now. It will be finished just before Memorial Day Week End (unless there are any unanticipated printing problems). We will have it for sale at the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle. When I return from Seattle during the first week of June, we will begin to ship. Here is how we will do that: the first round of shipments will go to the composers who have tunes in the book and to people who have helped us with some aspect of the book. Then we will ship to individuals who have pre-ordered. Then, we will ship to distributors who have also pre-ordered. You can pre-order the book at this time although you will probably not have it in hand for another month. You can order either from this website or by sending a check. Note that if you order other Portland music products at the same time, we will hold the entire order until Vol 2 is ready unless you pay for 2 separate shippings. Go to How to Order for this.

I know that many of you are curious about the contents of the book. I will post the list of tune titles soon. There are 322 tunes this time (compared to 318 in Vol 1). Around 140 tunes are recent (compared to around 100 in Vol 1). There seems to be a little more of everything. Many of the tunes are longer (B-1 different from B-2, for instance). The Commentary on the tunes is longer as are the Discography and Bibliography. There are even more alternate tune titles. The format for the tunes is nearly identical to that of Volume 1. Somehow, we managed to get it all into 328 pages--our outside limit. The first book has 312 pages.

This project has lasted more than 3 years. We thought that all the experience producing Volume 1 would speed things up this time around. Not so. This time, we had many more tunes than we could print. We spent months making decisions about which tunes to include. It still took a long, long time to locate composers--even with the help of the Internet--and it took just as long for the composers to get back to us concerning their tunes. It still took more than a year to tend to all the details of notation and commentary. Although we enjoyed all aspects of this project, it also feels really good to be finished with it. Thanks for reading these updates. We hope you like the music in the book as much as we do!

March, 2005

End phase. I've been waiting a long time to write those words, but we're there at last. The notation is completely finished. The Commentary is in final editing stages. We're working on Discography, Bibliography, Tune Lists, etc. The last step will be loading it all into PageMaker and formatting it there.

We are very excited about this book and are eager to get it into your hands. The world is full of beautiful, lively fiddle music, and we feel very fortunate to be part of the dissemination process. We are grateful for all the advance interest, too.

We are aiming for release Memorial Day Week End, just in time for the Folklife Festival in Seattle. If all goes well, we should be able to meet that goal. And, if we don't, we won't miss by much.

The next message here will likely announce that we are finished and the book is on the market.

August, 2004

Clyde and I have both been out of the country for much of the summer, so we have had to let this project languish for a couple of months. But now we're back at it. We are nearing the end of the composer search/permission form phase. The latest tally shows forms returned from 81 copyright holders accounting for 107 tunes. Another 7 composers (11 tunes) have given us the go-ahead and approved the tune settings but haven't gotten all the other details to us yet. There are 14 composers who still need to get a lot of information to us.

Clyde has the first draft of the commentary written, and we are beginning the lengthy editing process on that. As I spend less and less time tracking down composers, I can devote a larger percentage of time to the actual tune notation. After a quick count, it looks like the recent tunes are about 2/3 finished (approved by both composer and music editor). Most of the unfinished tunes belong to the composers who haven't gotten all the information to us yet. A few of the traditional tunes are finished. Those go much faster than the recent tunes because we don't go back and forth with the composer. Again, as the number of composed tunes I am dealing with goes down, the speed of work goes up. So, it will not take nearly as long to finish the traditional tunes as it has to finish the composed tunes.

Once all the tunes are finished to Clyde's and my, the composers', and the music editor's satisfaction, Clyde and I will play through them one more time to make sure they are A-OK. We're not ready for that yet, but hopefully, that phase isn't too far out there.

After such a long time away, it feels very good to be hard at work on this project again. The end is not quite in sight yet, but I can sense that we are getting to the final stretch. That stretch is a long stretch. I'll let you know when we've officially arrived at that point. To all of you reading these reports, thanks for your interest!

February, 2004

Even more progress. Slow but sure. We are working on many aspects of the book at the same time. We have secured written permission to print from around 60 composers accounting for around 80 tunes. Another 15 or so composers have said they'll be getting the forms back to us "soon," accounting for another 25 or so tunes. We haven't received word back from another 15 composers. We are anticipating that most of these folks will give us permission once we get connected up with them. Could be we have sent the info to an incorrect address. There are around 10 composers who we cannot locate. We are reasonably sure that they composed the tune attributed to them, but we can't find any kind of contact information for them or their estates. By the way, almost all of these people are elderly or deceased Irish musicians. If any of you readers have any ideas about how we might find them, or if you could help in the search, please email me. We really would like to talk to as many composers or their relatives as possible, not only to secure permission and work out royalties, but also to get background information on them and their tune. It is one of the most fun and rewarding aspects of compiling the tune books.

Meanwhile, Clyde has been researching and writing like a fiend. He has found far more information than we will be able to print due to space constraints. Many wonderful, knowledgeable people have provided source and background details about the music. In addition, Clyde has been incorporating the stories that composers give us about the tunes they have written. He tells me that he is beginning to finalize some of his notes. We are still waiting to hear from those composers out there who haven't gotten back to us. Once all of that is in, Clyde's notes will go to the text editor.

I divide my time between pestering composers to get them to send their forms back, continuing to search the Web and other places for composers we have yet to find contact info for, and working on the music itself. For all recent tunes, we send our initial version to the composer asking him/her to revise it according the way they would like it printed. In most cases, composers send me back revisions of their tune. I work with them until it looks exactly the way they would like it to (This can sometimes take as many as 5 or 6 viewings per tune--all made much quicker by being able to send the files electronically). Then the tunes go to the music editor who may have further suggestions. If so, it can pull the tune into another back and forth cycle between the composer and me. If I run out of things to do on the recent tunes (not very often), I work on the traditional tunes getting them in good notational shape. Then they go to the music editor. If I have questions, I may send them back to their Portland sources. But in general the trad tunes have many fewer hoops to jump through than the recent tunes.

After all of the music has been approved by composers, editor, and Portland sources in some cases, Clyde and I will play through all of the tunes one more time. After a tune passes that inspection, I will convert it to an EPS file for placement in the book itself. We are still many months out from that point. But getting there. Then, the whole thing has to be loaded into PageMaker. And then, we'll be on the home stretch.

We are going to record a companion cd for Vol 2 at some point--hopefully not long after the book goes to press. We will choose a number of tunes to play through slowly and simply, sticking pretty close to the notation and chords in the book. We are intending this to be a learning cd but hope that it is very listenable as well. Clyde and I will work with Portland fiddler Betsy Branch on this project.

That's it for now. As we get closer to the finish, I'll post these updates more often. To all of you reading these updates, thank you for your interest!

August, 2003

More progress. We have been working on finalizing the list of tunes to be included in Volume 2 for over a year. We thought we had finished with this phase last March. However, as Clyde and I thought about the process, neither of us were satisfied that we had made the best choices. Hard as it was to backtrack, we decided the only way we could have confidence in our selections was to play through all of the tunes together talking about each tune as we went along. So, we had a series of get-togethers to accomplish this task. 450+ tunes. We played them all except for tunes that we both were very familiar with. Since Clyde has moved to Friday Harbor, we had to wait long weeks in between the playings. But last week we finally were satisfied that we had given each of the tunes a fair trial. We have ended up with a list of tunes that both of us are very pleased with.

We did not have to go through this step with Volume 1. We accepted just about every tune submitted to us by the Portland musicians. But this time there were too many tunes. How did we choose? Probably the most important factors were simply how well we like the tune and how well we think it works in a contra dance setting. We also kept in mind the overall balance of the book. And, if a tune was already in print somewhere, that was a strike against our printing it too (even so, as in Volume 1, we have included many tunes printed somewhere else).

At some point down the road, I'll post a list of the included tunes on this Web site, but it would be premature to do it now. We have yet to contact composers for permission (that will likely happen in about a month). We will have trouble locating some of them. One or two of them may deny permission to print. We may find another tune or two that we just have to add in at the last minute. I can tell you that right now, we have 314 tunes on the list. We have identified 118 as recently composed (this number will probably go up as we research origins of the tunes). Once again, there is a cross-section of genres, Irish, Scottish/Cape Breton, Quebecois, General Northern, and Southern. There is more music from Quebec this time around just because more of us here are playing more of it. There is a mix of easy and difficult tunes as in Volume 1.

Now we begin on the next stage, which is contacting composers for permission to print and researching the backgrounds of the tunes. Clyde will begin writing the commentary. If last time is an indication, this phase will take many months. There is a lot of back and forth between the composers and me getting the tunes exactly the way they want them. And we have many trails to follow investigating each of the traditional tunes further so we can understand more about them. (There will be much more information available this time because of the Internet which was just beginning to serve as an information source when we were researching Volume 1.)

Thanks to all of you who are reading these progress reports with an interest in this project. We are excited about it and hope you will like the end result!

November, 2002

It's well past time for an update on the progress of The Portland Collection, Volume 2. Clyde and I officially began the project in January of this year (see below) and have been proceeding at our usual leisurely pace. I have learned a new music notation program (Finale) and created templates which match exactly the templates I used in the first book. We have collected music from all the musicians playing in Portland. To our great surprise, we have more music to choose from this time than we did the first time around. This is unexpected because when we collected the tunes from Portland musicians in 1994, we were covering a time span of more than 15 years of playing for contra dances. At that time, we selected 318 tunes from a pool of about 350 suggested tunes. This time, we are covering a time span of only 8 years (and not even that much for Clyde and me--we continued to add tunes to the first book as late as spring of '97). The pool of music we are selecting from now is around 450 tunes in size. (Again, we are aiming for about 300 tunes in print.) The number of contra dance musicians in Portland has grown, and the bands who made contributions to the first book have all expanded their set lists. In addition, Clyde and I have each been playing with many different groups of musicians from the Northwest and other parts of the country too. Our new musical associations have brought in still different repertoires.

So, we are going through the tunes and ranking each one 1, 2, or 3. The "1's" will be included for sure, the "2's" may be included depending on how many "1's" we have, and the "3's" will not be included. Our criteria are the same as the last time around--we will not print a tune if it can easily be found in print in several places, if we don't think the tune works well for dancing, and, in some cases, if neither of us likes it or thinks it has any redeeming value (if neither of us likes it but many other musicians and dancers do, that can be a redeeming value).

There will likely be more recently composed tunes in Volume 2 than in Volume 1 because people seem to be playing many recent tunes right now. This presents a bit of a dilemma to us--do we include tunes that are very popular today but may not have much staying value over the years, or do we favor the tunes that we think will hold up well over time. And can we really know that anyway? Since the time span covered is shorter this time than the first, it is harder to judge which tunes may not wear so well and be quickly dropped. These topics are matters of endless discussion for us. I would guess that if a tune is immensely popular here (played by many bands), it will be included even if it seems to us that it may get old quickly.

I anticipate contacting composers for permission to print after the first of the year. We are more than half way through the body of tunes we've collected, but we want to be finished with the first go round and have made all selections for inclusion before anyone is contacted.

Date of completion? (This is probably the point of biggest interest to most readers.) It is still too far off to hazard a guess, but we have made good progress.

January, 2002

Volume 2 of The Portland Collection is now underway. Clyde and I are very excited about putting together a second collection of tunes. The focus once again will be contra dance music although we are thinking of expanding into a limited number of couples dance tunes as well. Thanks to all of you who have been asking us for another tune book over the years. The time for moving ahead finally feels right to us.

Right now, we are simply gathering tunes from our own repertoires and those of other Portland dance musicians who are once again enthusiastically supporting our project. There will be no shortage of material--we all have continued to learn lots of tunes since the book was published, and in addition, new dance musicians have moved to town bringing their repertoires with them. Next comes the process of deciding which tunes to include. After that, we will be contacting composers for permission to publish and going over the tunes in great detail. We will make every attempt to insure that the quality of the music and the publication itself is as good as or better than Volume 1.

We have agreed to work on the project without deadlines (the same approach that we had to Volume 1). I am anticipating about 2 years to completion. The first book took 3 years, but, in theory, we know more about what we are doing this time around. Check here for further progress reports.