JSPDF

I sincerely hope that users will find the Traditional Tune Archive to be a useful further step in organizing information about traditional music for both general interest and research. It was originally “seeded” with the entire project I had been working on from 1996 to 2010, the Fiddler’s Companion tune index, in which tens of thousands of traditional melodies had been cataloged alphabetically by title into separate entries that also included descriptive information about the tune, including form, key, structure, fiddle tuning, source information, where it could be found in print and on sound recording. Additionally, I entered as much anecdotal information as I could find regarding how the tune was embedded in culture, its provenance, authorship, peculiarities, stories, and mention in the historical record, etc.—a pot pouri of material about the tune, whether factual, speculative, apocryphal, hopeful or simply amusing. Initially, I thought of each separate entry as simply a bin in which to store anything that was said or recorded about the tune, and I made little attempt to sort out fact from rumor, nor truth from speculation, leaving the qualitative work to others. As the project matured, however (along with my own knowledge and experience), it became obvious that the annotated material needed organizing, and I began to employ a much more analytical and qualitative approach, attempting to discriminate between factual information and speculative, however culturally interesting, and to apply some discipline to speculative thoughts. I had no thoughts of abandoning anecdotal material, for it gives considerable information in and of itself of the cultural milieu that is the rich medium for traditional music, but rather to attempt only sorting out what was demonstrably or even reasonably certain from that which could not be verified. One can read, if interested, the original introduction and premise for the Fiddler’s Companion, which outlines my original thoughts about what the project was about and what I was trying to achieve, and judge if I have come anywhere near it.