Annotation:Köhler's Hornpipe
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KÖHLER'S HORNPIPE. AKA - "Koehler's Hornpipe." AKA and see "Hornpipe (4)," "Laybourn's Hornpipe," "P. Joe's Pecurious Pachebel Special," "Pachelbel's Frolics." Scottish, Hornpipe. C Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. The tune was first printed as an untitled hornpipe in Köhler's Violin Repository (Edinburgh, 1881-5), a three volume work which contains a number of hornpipes. The collections were complied by journeyman violinist and composer W.B. Laybourn, who is identified only as "A Professional Player". Nevertheless, Laybourn contributed many tunes, as well as collected from his contemporary journeymen composers and older tunes from Scottish and north English repertoire. In fact, Laybourn himself seems to have been an Englishman, who lived for many years in Northumberland before settling in the last decade of his life in Edinburugh.
The melody supposedly was popularized in modern times by Alisdair Fraser and Jody Stecher, although fiddler Eileen Ivers called the tune "Pachelbel's Frolics" due to its similarity to the famous cannon by Austrian composer Johann Pachelbel." It is also quite popular on Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island as "Köhler's Hornpipe" or "Laybourn's Hornpipe," and is sometimes played as a reel. Paul Burgess writes with the finding that "Köhler's Hornpipe" is actually a version of "Savage Hornpipe" (which predates Laybourn), transposed from Bb to the key of C.
Source for notated version: Paul MacDonald (b. 1974, Charlottetown, Queens County, Prince Edward Island) [Perlman].
Printed sources: Perlman (The Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island), 1996; p. 119. Songer (Portland Collection, vol. 2), 2005; p. 111.
Recorded sources:
See also listings at:
Alan Snyder's Cape Breton Fiddle Recording Index [1]
Jane Keefer's Folk Music Index: An Index to Recorded Sources [2]
Alan Ng's Irishtune.info [3]