Apollo's Banquet

Apollo's Banquet

Henry Playford
1687

This directory contains ABC transcriptions of Henry Playford's "Apollo's Banquet" collection. This is a transcription from the copy in the John Glen Collection at the National Library of Scotland. It's labelled as "5th Edition".

Experimental file-listing programs: Tune lister - Collection lister - Session lister

Transcription notes:

There are no page numbers. The tunes are are numbered sequentially in each of the 3 "parts". the part number (1-3) and the 3-digit tune number (001-121) are used at the start of the file names to preserve the publication order. The same 4-digit number is used as the tune's X: index number. The rest of the file name is the tune's title, minus punctuation, with underscores instead of spaces, plus the ".abc" suffix. Initial articles are present, but in lower case, to make it easy for software to ignore them. The book mostly uses "la" for "the" in French titles, even for masculine words.

Each of the 3 "parts" has a separate file with just the title-page info. These have "000" as the tune number.

The book does something odd with tune titles: The initial letter is before the first staff, in a very large capital letter. The rest of the title is below the first staff, and its first letter (the 2nd letter of the title) is also upper-case. I've reverted the title to the normal capitalization, in both the file name and the T: header line.

This book uses the common practice of :||: repeat symbols between the strains, but usually just a plain double bar at the end. These have been transcribed as-is, which may cause problems and/or error messages from some ABC software. Since there are no dances in this collection, there is no way of guessing what repeat patterns were intended. Readers will have to decide which repeats work for the intended audience For use in dancing, you'll have to discuss this with the dance leader(s) to decide what fits each dance best.

There's an odd symbol in a few tunes. This has a similarity to the ":S:" segno symbol in some other collections of the time, and is used the same way, so it has been transcribed as !segno!.

Many tunes have "incorrect" rhythms at repeats and/or between strains, due to unequal "pickup" notes in different strains. In a few cases, this can easily be fixed by adding a few rests, which I've done. In other cases, no simple fix is possible, so I just transcribed the boundary notes as-is.