Harvest Home
“Then, filled with the spirit of thanksgiving, they held the first harvest-home in New England.”
— Good Stories for Great Holidays by Frances Olcott.
This tune takes its name from an old English festival celebrated at the end of September, on the last day of harvest. It seems that it involved decorating with tree boughs, and even a doll made from the last sheaves of grain harvested, and may still be celebrated in a few places in England. In any case, you will find below the basic melody and then I have an arrangement with two accompaniment parts…to enliven the harvest spirit that much more, of course!
Notes on playing the tune
For a hornpipe sound, be sure to make the 8th notes very uneven, not quite a dotted eighth to sixteenth, but more of a triplet where 1 and 2 are tied. You can also do it with straight 8th notes and it will be a reel.
The triplet scale down in measure 5 is a bit tricky to get up to speed and sounding clean for many of my students. I would suggest practicing with rests between each group of 3. And you can practice each group fairly fast. This helps you practice for speed, but in control…figuring out how to do this in general can be very key for your practice! (A teacher of mine called fast practice with rests slow-fast.)
I would recommend being in the middle third of the bow mainly, throughout this piece. It can feel too cramped at the tip, plus the string crossings are more easily done farther away from the tip or frog.
Be sure to bring the bow to a stop where it is marked with tenuto and staccato together, for a crisp sound. It takes some practice to be able to switch between normal bows with stopped bows, I have noticed. But it is good to learn how to stop the bow in a crisp way (in fact, I always go back to staccato scales when I want to clean up my sound and warm up my bow arm). If it is hard to stop only some notes, you can begin by stopping all the down bows and once you get the hang of it, do only the ones that are marked.
Also note that the grace notes should be played nice and firmly (requiring bow weight on the string before the note starts) so they have a bit of a “bang” sound to them. I’ll try to post a mini-lesson with more about this in the future.
The turn symbol (the one that looks almost like infinity) is meant to be the note that is written, then one scale note above and back to the original note. Some Irish players call this a cut (as if you are cutting one longer note into two by adding the grace note). I am clarifying this because in the Classical world this symbol means to start with a cut but also go a note below (which Irish players call a roll).
Of course, to focus on getting the basic melody you can ignore all the grace notes and extra things at first.
Here is how I play the tune (albeit with no repeats).
Here’s a cool version by Jay Ungar, which is pretty close to the way I play it.
For other tunes with string crossings, click the link below: