I have just discovered in the 500-year old colonial Brazilian VIOLA CAIPIRA culture that they use mostly open D, and some of G and G minor. In the 50 year old colonial guitar culture of Papua New Guinea, they use two interesting open tunings, called "five-key" (i.e. 5 different notes: EABEG#E, AND EABF#BD (the latter having the bass in the key of E and the treble in B!)

We also know about Mississippi and other blues cutures using open tunings.
And Hawaii, Mexico, Africa, Indonesia, India, Philipines, Cuba

Do es anyone on the Forum know of any other open tuning cultures? Especially, are there ANY in Europe?

My premise is that the further away from european music system education, the more likely it is to find open tunings! Even within colonial cultures, proximity to cities seems to increase likelihood of standard tuning and diatonic thinking, more in the country, more open tunings, more modal thinking. (Think Blind Blake vs Charley Patton.)

Because these are no open tunings, this tradition probably doesn't fit into your observations concerning modal/diatonic musics close or far from cities. City-life certainly has a homogenizing effect and thus kills local traditions. The "zigeinarische" tradition develloped when city-life was far away (back when you had to walk) within a culture definitely "country". Yet it is fully adapted to the diatonic system.

From the rest of Europe, I only know of DADGAD been used very frequently in "celtic" music (Ireland, Scotland and Bretagne). The guitar tradition in these musics is very short , only about 50 years or so (similar to Papua New Guinea). The traditional tunes most frequently are in ionian, dorian, mixolydian or aeolian mode and DADGAD seems to adapt to all those modes quite easily.

Regarding colonialism: It seems to exist on many different layers, the most obvious being "horizontal" (from one culture to another, e.g. Portugal-Brazil in the past), but there was (and is) definitely an inner "vertical" colonialism (rich-poor, city-country, whatever) which IMO makes categorization (colonizing culture - colonialized culture) rather difficult (at least in Europe, maybe also everywhere else).

I hope you didn't know all this before! Enjoy your trip to Hawaii!

Back when my sitar was still playable (25 cold Norwegian winters has ruined it...), I once 'jammed' with a Norwegian player of our 'Hardanger fiddle',- a violin type instrument with four or five resonator strings. The sound of those two instruments blending together was amazing.
But I guess I'm drifting way off topic here.............

More info here: http://home.online.no/~kgjetmun/page4.html

I have a different theory which might well be consistent with Bob's. From what I can tell when small groups of "amateur" musicians play in small communities they use a large number of different tunings, often with a tuning per song or song family or per tribe or family group. Extant examples include the hundreds of banjo tunings and slack-key tunings.

As musicians travel and become professional they have to work with other musicians from different backgrounds and instruments and they have to embrace ever broader styles and fit into standardized ensembles and keys. This puts pressure on the professional musicians to reduce the number of tunings. It also results in the abondonment of traditional instrument families (e.g. jarana) in favor of standardised more versatile instruments (e..g guitar). This evolution can be readily seen in the Sones Jaroches music of Veracruz which used to have a dozen shapes and sizes of guitar and easily as many tunings and now has just 3 with the guitar eclipsing even those. And this same thing happened as the Oud went to the Lute and as the precursor guitar instruments became the guitar. It has happened with the woodwind family: as the range and chromaticiy of instruments was improved the number of different instruments was reduced. I notice that that the number of Oud tunings has been reduced in the last hundred years.

This theory is consistent with Bob's because the forces I am describing are intensified in cities: they have big enough populations to support professional musicians. Those musicians compete for gigs. Competition selects winners who are efficient, efficiency demands less tunings. One efficiency is to have less songs and focus on selecting popular ones so you can get more work. The recipe is something like this: Specialize. Work with composers to develop even better and fewer songs. Fewer songs, fewer instruments fewer tunings. Call it a style. Make the style more exciting than tradition (add coca cola, sex appeal etc.) sell the instruments that support the style, print the sheet music and chord books in a dominant tuning. Put the traditional music and musicians down, call it old-timey, folk, "classical indian" or whatever. Divide and conquer it from more cheaply marketable music and tunings.

The colonial aspect of Bob's thinking fits in because the first thing most colonizers do is grow a city, typically a port to bring slaves (or "immigrant labor") and settlers in and plundered treasure (and slaves) out - usually in a place where there wasn't already a city.

Curious about this kind of thinking? Check out "Noise" by Jacques Atali. He is an economic anthropologists who specializes in studying musicians. He also wrote a disturbingly accurate book last century called "Millienium". He predicted many of the troubles of the last 5 years.

I have a different theory which might well be consistent with Bob's. From what I can tell when small groups of "amateur" musicians play in small communities they use a large number of different tunings, often with a tuning per song or song family or per tribe or family group. Extant examples include the hundreds of banjo tunings and slack-key tunings.

As musicians travel and become professional they have to work with other musicians from different backgrounds and instruments and they have to embrace ever broader styles and fit into standardized ensembles and keys. This puts pressure on the professional musicians to reduce the number of tunings. It also results in the abondonment of traditional instrument families (e.g. jarana) in favor of standardised more versatile instruments (e..g guitar). This evolution can be readily seen in the Sones Jaroches music of Veracruz which used to have a dozen shapes and sizes of guitar and easily as many tunings and now has just 3 with the guitar eclipsing even those. And this same thing happened as the Oud went to the Lute and as the precursor guitar instruments became the guitar. It has happened with the woodwind family: as the range and chromaticiy of instruments was improved the number of different instruments was reduced. I notice that that the number of Oud tunings has been reduced in the last hundred years.

This theory is consistent with Bob's because the forces I am describing are intensified in cities: they have big enough populations to support professional musicians. Those musicians compete for gigs. Competition selects winners who are efficient, efficiency demands less tunings. One efficiency is to have less songs and focus on selecting popular ones so you can get more work. The recipe is something like this: Specialize. Work with composers to develop even better and fewer songs. Fewer songs, fewer instruments fewer tunings. Call it a style. Make the style more exciting than tradition (add coca cola, sex appeal etc.) sell the instruments that support the style, print the sheet music and chord books in a dominant tuning. Put the traditional music and musicians down, call it old-timey, folk, "classical indian" or whatever. Divide and conquer it from more cheaply marketable music and tunings.

The colonial aspect of Bob's thinking fits in because the first thing most colonizers do is grow a city, typically a port to bring slaves (or "immigrant labor") and settlers in and plundered treasure (and slaves) out - usually in a place where there wasn't already a city.

Curious about this kind of thinking? Check out "Noise" by Jacques Atali. He is an economic anthropologists who specializes in studying musicians. He also wrote a disturbingly accurate book last century called "Millienium". He predicted many of the troubles of the last 5 years.

"The lyra of the Greeks of Pontos (the region on the southern coast of the Black Sea), also known as the Pontic lyra or Greek kementse, is a small rebec-like bowed stringed instrument. Unlike the tear-drop shaped Cretan lyra, from which it also differs in that its strings are stopped violin-wise against the neck by the tips of the players fingers, it could be described as the shape of a flattened wine-bottle, having a narrow body with parallel sides. It has three strings tuned in fourths; common tunings include: A-E-B, B-F#-C# and G-D-A, but there are many others. (Since in the past the instrument was often played alone the tuning often conformed only to the preference of the musician and his vocal range). Normally held in an upright position on the player's knee, two strings are frequently bowed together harmonising in fourths or an open string providing a sort of drone to the melody fingered on the other. "

I have a thumb piano that I got in Uganda when I was in the Peace Corps there. Everyone who played it adjusted the reeds (bicycle spokes hammered flat) to his own liking and played like crazy. I think there is a case for an infinite number of tunings with no regard to any specific key or scale.

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Tyler, James, Charles Dobson and Ephraim Segerman. "The tunings of the four-course French cittern and of the four-course guitar in the sixteenth century", Lute Society Journal vol. 16, 1974, Great Britain, pp. 17-23.

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* Williamson, Muriel C. The Burmese Harp: Its Classical Music, Tunings and Modes. Southeast Asia Publications / Northern Illinois University, 2000, 182 pages.

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Is a small guitar with 4 or 5 strings, each string can be "double" or "triple".
I think is tuned E; B; G; D; A.
But is interesting that all the strings have the same thickness/gauge; more or less like the first string on the folk guitar.

On this site (in italian) you can see how is made and you have a sound sample: http://web.rdn.it/nofla/battente.htm

In northern Romania, in the Maramures region, a normal cheap guitar is made into a four string local guitar called "zongora" (which is the Hungarian word for piano, oddly enough)tuned AEC#A, and fretted using the thumb while holding the guitar upright and faciung the player. The strings are usually made from cable wire. It never plays solo, always being used to accompany fiddle players. Younger musicians have been starting to use regular guitars in EADGBE tuning, while a few have developed vamp styles using the traditional open tuning.

In southern Romania (gorj region) guitars used to be re-made into cobza substitutes, also called zongora, but tuned DD AA. Most modern Gypsy bands in Bucharest (and increasingly, in Budapest) have been replacing the cimbalom with guitar, tuned regular and played vamping chord style. A lot of the countryside bands use a tuning called "Russian."

The music of transylvania also uses a three stringed, flat bridge viola tuned GDA for chordal accompaniment in fiddle bands.

Saz players in Turkey use a lot of different tunings, called "duzen" often switching tunings between songs. These are considered to be within the "folk" tradition, as opposed to the Sanat (Art music) tradition. So although you may find various tunings for Oud, in any one area the Oud player (a serious classical type) will only use one tuning.

I don't know if you can talk about "open tuning cultures" as such. Many of these tunings are adaptions whereby an musician tries to achieve a drone effect, (Resiani fiddlers in Northen Italy) or conversely tries to get a more varied harmonic texture in a culture with too much drone effect (i.e. Bulgarian tambura players jazzing out.)

adieu,
Lovat
------------------------------------------------
From today's Daily Telegraph (London)

Britain 'acknowledges' expulsion of Acadians
By Marcus Warren in Grand Pre
(Filed: 06/12/2003)

The Queen is to atone for the past deeds of British redcoats in Canada in an unusual foray by the Crown into the fraught sphere of relations between the country's English- and French-speakers.

A royal proclamation, expected to be issued next week, will acknowledge - but not apologise for - the expulsion of the Acadians from this bleak corner of Nova Scotia in the 18th century.

'The Arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana', by Robert Dafford. The French speaking settlers, landed after being shipped out of Canada by the British

More than 11,000 of the French-speaking farmers and their families, now known as Cajuns, were rounded up and shipped abroad and their houses burned during the deportation, which began in 1755 and lasted eight years. They had refused to swear allegiance to the Crown.

For many Acadians the episode was an early example of "ethnic cleansing". Some Anglophones, however, regard the episode as just one brutal chapter in a series of brutal colonial wars. English settlers, they say, might well have suffered the same fate if France had won the wars in North America.

Grand Pre, the Acadians' main settlement and now the site of a memorial to their fate, was blanketed in snow yesterday. But before they were scattered across the globe, many of them regarded the place as paradise on earth.

Many ended up in the steamy bayous of Louisiana, where they were called Cajuns and became better known for spicy cuisine and dishes such as gumbo as well as the distinctive sound of their folk music.

Now the Queen has been prevailed upon to make symbolic restitution for the wrongs of the past by Canada's outgoing prime minister, Jean Chretien, who steps down next week.

Her governor-general, Adrienne Clarkson, will sign the proclamation recognising what the Acadians call le grand derangement on the monarch's behalf on Wednesday. On such sensitive matters, the Queen and her representatives in Canada have little choice but to heed the advice of her government.

The activists who petitioned her to recognise the events of two and a half centuries ago have pronounced themselves satisfied with the gesture.

However, their leader, Euclide Chiasson, would like the Queen to make further amends by visiting Grand Pre on her next trip to Canada in 2005. "It would be wonderful if she took a day or two to visit the site and read this proclamation," he said. "Imagine what this would mean for our people. There is no desire for vengeance. We don't want people to feel guilty."

However, the revisiting of the saga has provoked controversy in some quarters, with one columnist complaining that history was being rewritten to recast "a legitimate tragedy as a cheap little robbery".

"The Acadians of 1755 do not merit the stamp of victimhood some of their descendants desire," Colby Cosh wrote in the National Post. The one good thing about acknowledging the events was that "it probably won't cost too much", he added

Ethnic Japanese, Chinese and Ukrainians have all protested at their past treatment by the Canadian authorities in recent years, and the Canadian establishment has readily expressed contrition for historic wrongs.

The sufferings of the Acadians, who number 300,000 in today's Canada, are slightly different in that blame for them can be put squarely on the British Crown. The mastermind of the whole operation was the then governor, the Englishman Charles Lawrence.

However, most of the troops who carried out his orders came from the colonies to the south - New England. While English-speaking civilians were not directly involved in the expulsions, they were their main beneficiaries, swiftly occupying the land and the dykes built by the Acadians.

The Acadians should "thank the good Lord that they weren't at the top of George II's hit list," joked Jim Meek in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald.

Canada's wider linguistic strains between the English-speaking majority and the Acadians' cousins in Quebec make the battle over their history that much more piquant.

Juan Bermudo in his "LIbro primo de la declaracion de instrumentos" (1555) says that a five course can be made by adding a string to a 4-course one fourth above the first course. He also describes "new and improved" tunings such as CGCEG. This tuning is of course a prototype for all the open ternary tunings: a triad and octaves of the I and V intervals. Add an octave above the high string and you have Open D transposed to C (guitars were shorter then).- or add the V below and you have Open G transposed to C.

In Pisador's Vihuela book (1552) he mentions Vihuela's tuned as the lute was, dropping the sixth course a tone (i.e. dropped-D), raising the third-course a semitone (EADGBE), and GBDdbgd, (i.e. High G dobro tuning). He says the adventurous vihuelist "does not content himself with the tuning of the vihuela commun, but tunes according to his wishes and ciphers according to the tunings, and... [that] only he will know how to play on such a vihuela".

Apparently, the cittern was played in
GDGBD (Open G)
DGBD
CDGBD
ADGAD (DADGAD!)
DGDGD (Open Cish)

From my brief exploration of the literature all the common "alternate" tunings were known in Europe and since most of our knowledge comes from art music that was written down presumably there were many more in common use.

CEGCEG,
i.e. the C Major version of what we call High G tuning on the Dobro

Here's a very interesting site - http://www.juliopereira.pt/index.htm - by one of my favorite Portuguese musicians, Julio Pereira, who has been making great neo-trad music on Portuguese folk stringed instruments for decades. The site is more or less bilingual Portuguese and English, so just click around. It also focuses on traditions beyond the "fado guitar." Click on the "Portugal" link and you get an interactiuve map of the country, which you can click around on and various regional traditions are presented. Neat stuff. This is a musician who deserves a lot more attention.

The guitarra portugesa ('fadio guitar') is also known as the "English" guitar. Apparently, one Scottish instrument maker moved to Portugal in the early 1800s and introduced the cittern, where it gained in popularity and remained in fashion. The tuning, though, is far from open. (Unforutnately, the whoever is working on Pereira's new site hasn't gotten around to posting audio files of the tunings...)

Portuguese guitar sites: http://www.iol.ie/~mjol/GuitarraPortuguesa.htm http://www.melomusic.nl/i_guite.htm

I bought a guitarra in Oporto for $130 (with case! And they fit in airline hand baggage racks!) a few years ago. It was my musical Waterloo, a complete brick wall for me. It was fun but the tuning was really restrictive if you wanted to do anything besides fado (you had a choice of keys: D major or D major), and the string gauges were such that it wasn't really conducive to other tunings. I gave it away to a Moldavian musician who fell in love with it. Next time I'm in Portugal I'm getting a cavaquinho.

Tonite I have to get to work on a film score using instruments that I can understand - oud, gadulka, pontic lyra, and resonator guitar (slide in D minor!)

I’ve been listening to viola caipira recordings for about 20 years. An important thing about the viola caipira is that it’s a five-course instrument, essentially another New World vihuela and a relative of the other vihuelas from Latin America that arrived here before the modern guitar had evolved on the Iberian peninsula from the European vihuela and early five-course guitars. Strad made mostly five-course double-strung guitars into the early 1700s. The six-string single-course guitar basically appeared in the early 19th century.

Several folks have already talked about this from various directions, but the antecedent for the open tunings in some far-flung American subcultures, notably Mississippi and Hawaii, go back to some really important parlor guitar pieces that were all the rage in the US around 1850. These were of course sheet music, from Spain, pirated by an American who claimed authorship, that utilized a couple of scordatura tunings very prevalent in Spanish guitar music at the time, which we today call open G and open D. These pieces were notated normally, but with the understanding that the player had retuned the guitar to the specified tunings and played the chart *as if it was in the original tuning*. The piece would therefore come out right.

The two pieces were:

- Sebastopol, which Libba Cotten later called "Vastopol" and played nearly perfectly according to the music she never saw. It was originally written to be played in open D tuning.

- Spanish Fandango, which has had an enormous life in folk and popular music, having been rendered as a Victorian-era banjo piece recorded by Vess L. Ossman, as well as recorded by Libba Cotten, Bob Wills, John Dilleshaw, Pete Steele, Etta Baker, Mississippi John Hurt, Chet Atkins, the Carolina Tar Heels, Lena Hughes, Snuffy Jenkins, Mance Lipscomb, and many more since. It was originally scored for open G, which is how pretty much all these people played it. It’s safe to say none of them learned it from sheet music.

John Renbourn has done a tremendous amount of research on this, and has recorded both those pieces direct from the original antebellum sheet music, which he turned up in the Libe of Cong many years ago. What did the folks who bought Martin guitars before the Civil War play on them? Parlor music, especially *interesting* music in open tunings!

Obviously, guitar repertoire and technique would have been much the same in America as in Europe in the 19th century, with one or two fingers resting on the soundboard, and a right-hand technique still alive in folk playing now, even though classical technique (a later development) changed all that. Some of the early classical composers used scordatura tunings, but most eventually adhered to the EADGBE tuning we now think of as standard. The repertoire was passed around in folios the way it gets around now as CDs.

European music didn’t just go from Europe to America, it went across Europe (Vienna and France were the other two main hotspots of guitar activity at the time) and spread throughout the various colonial empires, which is why you find such similarity between the guitar traditions of Hawaii and Madagascar.

Open tunings on any multi-stringed instrument are kind of a no-brainer; of course they cover the earth and have since strings were plucked. However, I don’t see open tunings in guitar music as any sort of devolution of the so-called standard modern guitar tuning; rather in most of the instances you’re thinking about, they’re an atavism from a vogue for Spanish guitar music dating to the first half of the 19th century. Your premise is that the further away from European musical erudition, the more likely one is to find open tunings. I agree with you, but I believe the cause is a bit the other way around: open tunings were once integral to the standard (such as it was in the early days of the guitar), and that that standard has survived outside the evolving influence of European art music and pedagogy in folk culture, which itself has shifted away from its roots.

You might be amused (as I was) to learn that the practice of placing the little finger on the top plate is taught in 16th century lute books and there are pictures and sculptures showing this playing position during the middle ages. It was recommended for both fingerstyle and pick players (large eagle feather picks). It was also common practice to fret by hooking the thumb over. It is amusing that such techniques are looked down on by many classical players now.

One of the stranger techniques which as far as I know hasn't survived is the "thumb-under-index -finger" for the picking hand.