Types of Tunes
Types of Tunes
Tunes can be used in many different ways – as songs, instrumental listening pieces, marking special occasions and as accompaniment for social and performance dances. Dances have travelled across regional and national borders for centuries, and been enjoyed by all sections of communities – from royal courts to village squares. This accounts for some of the similarities between the types of tunes used in English folk music and those found in the British Isles, Europe, America, and further afield.
Folk tunes in the British Isles and England in particular are grouped by their rhythmic characteristics or time signatures; often this is because they are the traditional tune for a particular type of dancing. Just as people dance at weddings, clubs and discos, in the past social dancing formed an important part of family and community gatherings and live music played a huge part in this.
Common types of English tunes are jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas and waltzes though there are other types as well. The tune types are grouped by the same names as the dances.
The structure of a traditional tune is usually quite short. A typical English folk tune will be made up of an 8 bar phrase (commonly called an ‘A’ part), which repeats, and then a subsequent 8 bar phrase (‘B’ part), which also repeats. In practice, the whole piece (AABB) would be played through a few times before finishing the tune. It is common for tunes to played in ‘sets’ – one tune played a few times, followed by a second complementary tune – before stopping or continuing into additional tunes.
There are, of course, lots of exceptions to the ‘typical’ example above – with some tunes having more bars within each part, or not repeating some of the parts, or tunes having several different parts, and sometimes repeating different parts at different times!
