Transcribed Anglo concertina arrangements of 50 traditional English tunes as played by John Watcham

The Anglo concertina playing of one of Britain's most famous folk musicians, John Kirkpatrick, with transcriptions of tunes in musical notation and tablature, along with descriptive notes and a biography.

Have you always wanted to play the 30-button Anglo concertina with more than just a simple one-note melody? This tutor will teach you how to play with chords and full harmonies in a wide variety of musical styles.The book includes 60 tunes with full chords and increasingly complex arrangements. Of all the other Anglo tutors out there, the tablature system presented here is by far and away the easiest to understand and play.In addition to tunes and exercises for beginning players, this tutor also presents more difficult tunes that have been carefully transcribed from recordings of the top Anglo concertina players of the last several decades.The playing of William Kimber, John Kirkpatrick, Jody Kruskal, Bertram Levy, Kenneth N.J. Loveless, Brian Peters, Andy Turner, John Watcham and many others are showcased to help you learn and develop your own unique style on this surprisingly versatile acoustic little squeezebox.Instead of including a CD with the book, most of the tunes can be found on the "anglotutor" playlist on YouTube where you can both see and hear them being played on a 30-button C/G Anglo concertina.

John Antill (1904-1986) was one of the foremost composers of Australia’s ‘post-colonial period’. Although a relatively prolific and much esteemed composer in Australia, Antill’s wider reputation is sustained chiefly by his famous ballet Corroboree - a work which was perceived to bring an authentic Australian musical style before both a national and international audience for the first time. Through Sir Eugene Goossens’s championship, the work was heard by enthusiastic audiences in Australia, Britain, Europe and the USA, and was, for many years, the best-known work of any Australian-born and resident composer. Indeed it has remained, for both Australian and overseas audiences, an Australian musical ‘icon’. David Symons traces Antill’s development as a composer from his early, pre-Corroboree works, which display a late Romantic to post-impressionist style, through an analysis of the virile, dissonant, ‘primitivist’ idiom of his magnum opus, to an examination of his later output of theatrical, orchestral and vocal/choral works. The book provides comprehensive and valuable insight into Antill’s musical output, at the same time focussing on more detailed analyses of his major works which have reached public performances and/or recordings. In this way the book not only presents a developmental picture of Antill’s works, but also demonstrates why they have made him one of Australia’s most prominent musical creators of the post-colonial period.

For beginners on the Anglo concertina, this book includes 35 tunes in easy-to-learn tablature. Starting off with simple tunes on 1-row, then tunes for 2-row 20-button instruments and finally tunes for 30-button Anglos. Single note, harmonica, octave, harmonic and Irish styles are presented with the same simple tablature system used in the author's other books to show which buttons to play along with the melody in standard musical notation.

From the Preface: "This tutor is designed as a 'self-service' course for the beginner, particularly one needing to learn to read music as well as play the concertina."

A facsimile of a 19th century book is a delightful, quirky account, beautifully illustrated with the author's famous line drawings, of her quintessentially English childhood growing up as a Darwin at the end of the 19th century.

Vignettes of Australian bush life.