Aird's Airs

a multimedia edition by Jack Campin

Available in Summer 2008:

These six books, containing 1200 tunes, were the largest and most popular Scottish music books of the 18th century. Designed to be practical and portable - genuinely pocket-sized - rather than as coffee-table ornaments like some books more celebrated today, they were the source Burns used for most of his melodies, and the earliest known source for many familiar Scottish tunes. They are also a good source for English tunes of the time; they were used by village musicians all over Britain for decades, copied into manuscript books as they fell apart from use. Most of the settings suit many different instruments; Aird suggest the fife, flute and fiddle as possibilities, but they were used by Northumbrian pipers too, and usually work on the harp, tenor banjo, melodeon, concertina, hammered dulcimer... They have never been reprinted before.

I have made them available on a CD-ROM, using "website on a disk" technology - very simple, future-proof HTML linking graphic and sound files. I have had the first 200 tunes on my website for some time in ABC; the CD-ROM uses the same approach as my other publications, Embro, Embro and Old Scottish Flute Music, using the same file formats and the same tested structure.

• 1200 tunes: reels, jigs, marches, strathspeys, hornpipes, waltzes, slow airs, song tunes
• every tune in ABC notation, QuickTime and MIDI sound files, and staff notation GIFs
• computer-playable; you don't need to read music to use it
• fully accessible to blind users
• print sheet music as you need it
• works with any web browser; no Internet connection needed
• historical introduction
• hyperlinked tune index
• for Mac, Windows and Unix

Price £19.50 (payments by cheque or cash only), or the equivalent of £21.00 in Euros or US dollars (cash only) - this is higher to allow for airmail to Europe, Australasia or North America.

An example of the formats I use for the tunes; it's an earlier (and barely recognizable) form of the tune I used on the Old Scottish Flute Music page, this time as a reel rather than a strathspey.

• ABC tune file
• Staff notation
• QuickTime sound file
• MIDI sound file

I don't include facsimiles of the original books - it would be far too expensive. But to show you what they look like, here's a facsimile of the page that tune came from (140K).

I don't provide chords for the tunes; Aird didn't include any sort of accompaniment and many different style could work. Here's a sample arrangement of this tune:

• QuickTime sound file
• MIDI sound file

aird@purr.demon.co.uk

Jack Campin
11 Third Street
Newtongrange
Midlothian EH22 4PU
Scotland
phone 07800 739 557

CD-ROMs already available:

• Embro, Embro: the hidden history of Edinburgh in its music, a social history of Edinburgh as seen through the music it created, with 750 tunes, 250 songs, and a historical commentary that deflates Edinburgh's official pretensions with unprecedented ruthlessness.
• Old Scottish Flute Music, the largest collection of Scottish music specifically for the flute to have been published since the early nineteenth century.

Jack Campin's Home Page: http://www.campin.me.uk