Fiddle Studio: Starting Fiddle Studio (Flowers of Edinburgh)

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Welcome to the fiddle studio podcast, featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddle. I'm Megan Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of The Flowers of Edinburgh from a session at the Bru House in Dublin.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about my website, Fiddle Studio and how that got started. I've had the Fiddle Studio website since about 2009. I went back to see when the date of the first post was. I was teaching fiddle before that, my first job out of college was as a violin and fiddle teacher at the Kanack School in Rochester, New York.

Teaching at the Kanack School was fun because the kids were already learning by ear and playing music by ear, this was a Suzuki school. They were also learning to improvise, because Alice Kanack the founder of the school has a wonderful method for teaching children a creative approach to improvising.

So I went in there and started teaching fiddle tunes to these kids. And they just picked it up really quickly. And for years, when I wanted to send somebody home with a reference to practice at home, I had a binder full of photocopies of fiddle tunes, except that they weren't always the exact version that I played. So I'd be crossing notes out or writing in different numbers above. I had the tape recorder, stick a tape in there, make a recording of me playing the tune and give it to my student as a reference.

Although as time went on, fewer and fewer people had a way to play a tape. Sometimes they could play it in their car only and eventually no one could play it at all. And I really wanted another way for my students to practice at home to be able to look at the sheet music, listen to the tune and have a reference for that. So that was when I got the fiddle studio domain and I started putting sheet music up on the website and sound files that I collected sometimes at school, at Fiddle Camp, or that I recorded and I used it for many years.

Every time I had a student who was learning a tune that's when I would post it on Fiddle Studio and say go go look it up on the website and practice it there. I would say in later years, I use the website less because I was more likely just to record it on their phone. Okay, get your phone out, press record play the tune for them and have them just take a picture you know if I have the sheet music with me just take a picture of it.

So that's a little bit about my website Fiddle Studio. Our tune today is from that same Irish session that I went to in Dublin, Ireland at a bar called the Bru House, and this was in June of 2022. They played the Flowers of Edinburgh, played it as a hornpipe. I grew up playing this tune as a New England tune. It's really a Scottish tune but I grew up playing it as a reel but this is a setting of it as a hornpipe. And I've also actually after looking it up, I've see that it's used a lot as a Morris dance tune also, I really liked it as a hornpipe. When we play it will play it a little slow. Try to get that hornpipe sound for you.

There is a lot of speculation online about what the name might mean. I saw on the Session somebody was talking about the Flowers of Edinburgh being a sarcastic way to refer to the contents of chamber pots being thrown out of the windows onto the streets of Edinburgh. But a lot of tunes are named after the flower of this place or flower of that place. It often would just refer to a beautiful woman who lived there.

So we don't know if it's referring to somebody lovely who lived in Edinburgh or the stench of the city or what else it could be talking about. This is a very old tune. I saw it referenced in John Walsh's Caledonian Country Dances Volume Two out of London 1737. So this tune has been around a lot and it is a Scottish tune, but it was being played in an Irish session. Will wonders never cease. Charley and I are gonna play it here for you.

Thanks so much for listening. You can head over to fiddlestudio.com for the sheet music to this and all of the tunes I teach. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.