“Anecdotes…make this a living document and invite the reader into the world of the dance musician in a unique way.”

-Kevin Carr, Fiddler Magazine, Winter 2015/16

About the Portland Collection, Volume 3

The Portland Collection, Volume 3 is a continuation of the music in the first two Portland Collections, and its format is identical to those of the earlier books. Volume 3 contains 314 jigs and reels from the Portland, Oregon contra dance repertoire–all music that arrived in Portland since the tunes were collected for the second book. Again, Irish, Scottish, Québécois, Appalachian, and New England genres are represented. The tunes are both traditional and recently composed, from local treasures to national contra dance standards. There is an extensive commentary on every tune including stories about the tunes from their composers. There are chord suggestions, a discography, a bibliography, and more. The tunes and their histories were collected from many local contra dance musicians who generously gave of their time and talent to help us expand on the music in Volumes 1 and 2.

Several Volume 3 reels have alternative versions that we have posted here. These are Hull’s Reel, Jack Daniel’s Reel, Obama’s March, Ol’ Bob, Red Prairie Dawn, Seanamhac Tube Station, and Troll Soup.

February 16, 2015:

At last! After more than 3 years of work on the project, we are only a few weeks away from going to press with The Portland Collection, Volume 3. We are hoping for an April, 2015 release date. Watch this space for a list of the 300+ tune tiles in Portland 3. There are no repeats from the two earlier books, but the format and features will be just the same.

Here’s Portland Collection 3 as it exists today. Up top on the left is a pile of some of the tunes we are not going to include although they were good contenders (so that’s technically not part of PC3). Top right is the stack of composer permission/royalty forms. The 4 binders on the left of the bottom shelf are the tunes (see next photo to explain why so much paper). Then a little mock-up notebook for layout, which is next to a binder of all the tunes in their final format. Finally, on the right of this shelf is a binder with Clyde’s commentary. The photo omits 2 huge binders of preliminary tunes.

People ask: What is taking you and Clyde so long to produce this book? Here’s a partial response: one tune–The Longford Collector–in all of its iterations, each one with some kind of change until we got it the way we wanted it. The arrows to a B means it was headed for editor Betsy Branch. This one was tough because there seemed no great chord choices, so back and forth between Betsy, Clyde, and me it went until we got something we could live with. We started work on this tune in June 2014 (dates on upper right corner) and finished in January 2015. And this tune does not have the additional step of composer back-and-forth to add into the mix.

Here’s what I’m working on right now–the layout. This shows me how all the tunes fit together–how many pages the music will take up. Boys of Antrim on the right uses a whole page, which will leave a blank half page under Boyne Water. So we will put a quote under Boyne Water. Usually by this point, we would be publishing a list of titles in the book, but the fact is, we don’t know for sure yet. We know that we will be over our 328 page limit (that’s all our chosen binding size can hold). Once I have loaded Clyde’s commentary into InDesign (any day now–he’s making final adjustments), we’ll know how much over we are, which will then tell us how many words and how much music we will need to remove. We hope not very much, and no tunes under copyright will be taken out. As soon as we have made those decisions, I’ll publish a list of titles.