A collection of tunes

Find traditional instrumental music
Revision as of 15:09, 2 February 2010 by WikiSysop (talk | contribs)

The primary purpose of this web site si to collect British Isles, Irish, North-American and related folk music in ABC music notation, and store them in semantically linked and annotated web pages, thus allowing this wiki to function as a collaborative database.
In this collection each tune is assigned a set of semantic properties. The idea is to create a cross-referencing system whereby tunes with a shared property can be found listed together.
Many of the older traditional tunes have been published under one or more titles; sometimes, it has been argued, for not entirely innocent reasons (For example, the Gows are alleged to have "borrowed" a number of tunes by Marshall and others and republished them under different titles).
In the case of some of the most familiar vocal melodies, short titles and first lines are virtually interchangeable and this has led to confusion in the past.
While there are many other ABC collection in the cyberspace, the goal here is to provide a boundless tool for scholars and researcher.
Where possible, tunes in this archive have also been indexed using the Theme Code Index.