I can say with confidence that I have never heard the term “cut note”. As GorillaMan says, it’s simply a convenient way to notate a sixteenth note (semiquaver) with beaming. If you removed the beams, it would simply be a dotted eighth (with a flag), followed by a sixteenth (with a double flag). It would seem to be unique to piping.
The sixteenth-dotted eighth figure is often referred to as a “Scotch snap”, for what should be obvious reasons.
You could have what you call a “cut note” without a dotted note in the following scenario: sixteenth-eighth-sixteenth (beamed together). I can’t find any convenient examples right now.
Oh, OK, I’ve seen those in many pieces of music; I just didn’t realize they had a specific name. In 4/4, that construction usually seems to be followed by a half-note to finish the measure, right?
I had the opportunity to play in a rehearsal with a town brass band in England several years ago, and was surprised to find the terms quaver, semi-quaver, and so on actually used by the conductor when speaking about the music. It was clear that this was pretty common over there; I spent the whole session trying to remember whether a quaver was a quarter note or an eighth note.
Over here, in the circles I play in, those terms are never used; I’d only encountered them in a theory class I’d taken long ago, and they were only mentioned in passing then.
The biggest adjustment, though, was trying to play on the absolutely massive B-flat bass they let me borrow, with a fourth valve operated by the left index finger. It’s not that rare a configuration, even over here - but I’ve never played one like that. Even after two hours I still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it.
coming back, I just realised I screwed up what I said earlier in post # 19 - meant to be referring to eighth notes, not quarter notes - can only plead that I was posting in a hurry :rolleyes:
so it’s a piping nickname for a sixteenth note, when played with a dotted eighth, rather than a regular music term. thanks for helping me to make the connexions, guys - I’m weak on my theory.
that I couldn’t say - as I’ve already demonstrated, my theory isn’t very strong. :smack:
most of the tunes I play don’t have half notes in them, except for a few tunes that use them at the end of a part of the tune. (Amazing Grace is the exception - it uses half notes extensively.)
Any links to recordings of this or similar, in the style you’re familiar with? Playing that through on the piano is rather intriguing, not quite what I was expecting…
I don’t have the book with me, but it goes something like this: Susan is thinking about the implications of having DEATH as a grandfather, and she recalls “Lady Odelia Flume in the fifth form, who was always bragging about how the god Blind Io seduced her grandmother in the form of a vase of daisies, thus making her a hemi-demi-semi goddess. She said she always found it got her good seats at restaurants.” Susan concludes that being related to DEATH probably doesn’t come with the same benifits.
The Greek-Latin similarity is because the words in both languages come from Proto-Indo-European, not because these Latin words come from Greek. In the cases you mention, the reconstructed PIE forms all start with s. Why Greek (and Persian and Armenian) switched it to h, I don’t know.
Demi- is unrelated. It’s from the Latin dis- (“apart”) and medius (“middle”).
I don’t have a link to a recording, but here’s a midi version, from the same web-site as the score: Amazing Grace - midi.
What did you find unusual about it on the piano? Did the notes not quite sound right? It might be because the range of the pipes have shifted upwards, so what we write as A is getting closer to B♭, with other notes shifted accordingly. As well, the intervals between the notes doesn’t match the normal music notation; F is closer to an F♯, and C to a C♯.
A bagpipe scale is approximately A mixolydian (with some slight tuning differences). I’m fairly certain that C# and F# are notated as plain Cs and Fs in bagpipe music as a matter of convention.
edit: Ah, I found the website I looked up a few months ago with the explanation and relation to ET tunings: here ya go. What is notated as an “F” is actually a slightly flat (-15.6 cents) F#, and what is “C” is a slightly flat (-13.6) C#. This is in addition to bagpipes being sharper than A=440 (A=466 - A=475). This is also in addition to not all bagpipes being tuned exactly the same.
Ah, right, the difference in intonation, especially of the C, does explain it. Now I can hear that version in my head, and that sounds much more ‘bagpipish’
