Thimblefuls of Beer by Daphne Arthur
Shaenon: Look at this! Daphne Eftychia Arthur wrote music to accompany Sergio and Artie getting drunk at the rat bar. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to do more catching up with Sergio and Artie in this storyline, but at least now they have a love theme. Thank you, Daphne!
Channing: It is absolutely amazing to get custom musical pieces based on something you helped write. Thank you so much, Daphne!
This is wonderful. Thank you, Daphne!
Oh, nice — it’s so lovely to see a music-friend get recognized like this (I have some others having played through it, but I’ll bring that up with Daphne 🙂
Aieee, extreme cognitive dissonance here, as I just spent five minutes studying a reel on a different website, then changed tabs and clicked to see a comic strip, and just got another reel. Thought the Internet was collapsing or something.
Looking forward to giving this one a go once the rest of the household has woken up…
Okay, very rough recording of the reel, as written (though with bonus mistakes): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sdnLaSZOz70amwN5VopQDNkw1AUgxWuU/view?usp=sharing
My impression, looking at the structure, key, etc, is that maybe this is done in the style of the highland piping tradition? My thing is more the Irish flute tradition, and in that, given that the second four bars is only very loosely related to the first, instead of playing it (each letter is four bars of music) as ABABCDCD, my ear wants it to be arranged AABBCCDD. (And my flute teacher would scold me for breathing at the syncopated bits, but it seems really natural the way this is written.)
Emily and Dirk could probably do a more stylistically appropriate version of this…
Wanted to clarify (don’t think I can edit) that it’s a fun little tune, and I’m sure my playing is not doing it justicce.
Very nice! Bravi to Daphne and to you.
The leader of the Celtic band I play in, the Homespun Ceilidh Band, made the same comment about wanting to play it AABBCCDD instead of ABABCDCD! (He’s a fiddler.) I ran through it that way on mandolin, and yeah, it works that way too — I should probably add a note about that variation being an option.
I wasn’t specifically thinking highland pipes, but I was thinking mixolydian and Scottish, which is like 2/3 of the way there.
Glad you like it — and it’s cool to hear someone else playing it!
Thank you for sharing, sounds great!
I swear I’ve heard this tune before
It looks great. Lots of notes, some repeating and nearly-repeating bits that I’m sure sound really good. I just wish I could read music.
Saved. Soon to try playing on my violin
“rat bar”
In (at least) one of Lois Bujold’s stories, ‘rat bar’ was used as a contraction for ‘ration bar’
…while in this piece, bar 13 is the “rat bar” because of those three squeaky high “A”s. It seems to be in myxolydian mode, so the drunken rats have been myxing their drinks.
Wow, I underestimated how good it was going to feel to see this posted here! 🙂
Nice work, Daphne!
[raises hand] Permission to try making a midi of this? FFXIV allows playing midis as part of the Bard’s Performance action, so…