Dear JP,

Indeed, why no faoidheall mhór, good question. Working with only the
two main major keys mentioned by Bunting works quite well and most of
the time there's no reason to assume a third tuning but it might be
that he occasionally used the faoidheall mhór. Basically, any
Carolan C song with a modal range of dd-G or cc-G could be moved up a
string very easily for faoidheall mhór. For that reason, such
tunes would be fairly invisible to normal modal analysis and that's
one of the reasons why I haven't even tried to identify tunes which
would use that tuning.

However, having said that, I note that if the Elevation (194) were in
##D, the end of the first section would land on sister G rather than
on the F below. The song Frank Palmer (146) would fit an ee-G vocal
range in faoidheall mhór.

The G mode songs John Jamieson (61) and Mary O' Neill (137) could
both go up a string in faoidheall mhór tuning to avoid awkward
melodic movement around the sisters, with ranges of dd-G and ee-G
respectively.

These last two cases have dissuaded me from getting into the whole
faoidheall mhór question. They're Carolan's only two G mode songs.
John Jameson seems to avoid hitting the bottom pitch for most of the
song, especially the first half of the chorus, so you wouldn't lose
much by whipping it out.

Bunting said that faoidheall mhór was the 'key of D', 'sometimes made
use of', 'seldom used' and that he 'rarely met with an instance of
it'. He runs the gamut from sometimes to seldom to rarely but never
says never. Perhaps I should note these tunes down on the website as
being particular candidates for two sharps tuning and not say never
either.

Beannachdan,


Alasdair