http://voluntocracy.org/Music/Tunes.html
	Folk Music
	Online Download Released Terms tunes tunes.zip 2010-12-11 Free

About the Tunes

My tune collection has folk tunes in abc musical notation, sheet music (PDF), and MIDI to (roughly) demonstrate how they should sound. Most of these are Cambridge Folk Orchestra repertoire; others are personal favorites.

About the Arrangements

I am fond of Hungarian/Rumanian/Transylvanian folk tunes and their accompaniments (probably of less ancient origin). Chords for most of the tunes here are played by a virtual ensemble of bowed bass and contra, a flat-bridged viola body strung with three cello strings. I particularly like a style attributed to the Mezoseg region, which employs major chords almost exclusively.

About the Sheet Music PDFs

The PDFs were generated from output from the ABC2PS program, version 1.3.3.

ABC2PS-1.3.3 does not print the "part" sequence contained in the first P: field of an .abc file. Other versions of ABC2PS do print this field, but produce output which is not as compact; splitting some of the tunes onto two pages.

About the Words

Those songs whose words can be written using ISO-Latin-1 are coded in the .abc files. Sheet music for the other songs (Ali Pasa, Kendime, Mi Go Zatvorile, and Rampi Rampi) assemble the words with the ABC output via PostScript. Those words are rendered from the TeX sources of the MIT Folk Dance Club Songbook maintained by Ira Gessel. Thanks to Prof. Gessel!

About the MIDI renditions

The abc tunes are translated to MIDI files by the abcmidi program. The abcmidi translations are much improved (including turns notated in abc by ~) thanks to Seymour Shlien's yeoman work on that software. In 2008 I added another of his enhancements, drum tracks, to Acano Mlada Nevesto, Eleno Mome, Ludo Kopano, Macedonska Sedenka, Pajdusko, Pandalas, Petrunino, Starceska Racenica, Zemer Atik, and Zensko Krsteno.

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