Album Summary: Henry Playford's Collection of Original Scotch-Tunes (1700) is the earliest printed collection of Scottish fiddle music, consisting of 39 dances, airs and variation sets in unaccompanied arrangements. Although it was soon reprinted in a 2nd edition (1701), both are now incredibly rare books. Nonetheless, it is with Playford's Scotch-Tunes that modern knowledge of Scottish fiddle music emerges from the obscurities of the seventeenth century aural and manuscript traditions. Today, it is a key text for students of both Scots fiddle and song genres. This ScotMus.com album faithfully reproduces the historic 1st edition of 1700.
Shop in the Temple-Change, Fleet-ſtreet. 1700.
Transcription Note: The above HTML/CSS rendering of Playford's front cover is an approximately-diplomatic transcription from the original. Playford's font is very close to the standard modern digital Times font, so I've just used that for sake of convenience. My layout and formatting is pretty accurately-diplomatic. If you stare closely, you'll also notice that I've retained Playford's original long-"S". This cover page is the only front-matter that Playford included. There's no list of subscribers, no index of contents, and no additional notes anywhere else. However, there are some small ads at the foot of the final page, which I'll transcribe shortly.
PS: Like most HTML that uses standard CSS, my transcription renders best if you view it in one of the more standards-compliant web-browsers such as Mozilla Firefox (some details can break in some versions of Internet Explorer!).
Note on Instrumentation: What does Playford means by most of the tunes "being in the Compass of the FLUTE"? In UK publications prior to about 1730-ish, the relatively new instrument that we now call simply "the flute" was often still referred to more specifically as "the German flute" (or, more technically, "the transverse flute"). In many publications of Playford's time, "the flute" (per se) was in fact what we'd now call the "Baroque" or treble recorder (or in US English, the "alto" recorder), which is pitched lower than the smaller descant recorder that we're more familiar with these days. So which instrument does Playford actually mean by "the FLUTE"?
Well, often, the simplest way to work out which instrument is referred to is to look at the pitch-range of the tunes you're supposed to be able to play on it. In the case of Playford's Scotch-Tunes, it soon becomes obvious to any recorder-player that about two-thirds of the tunes actually don't fit the treble recorder because they go below its lowest note of F above middle C (and this obviously isn't what Playford can mean by "most of" his tunes fitting "the FLUTE"!). But — only a small number of the tunes go lower than the middle C that's the lowest (written) note on the descant recorder. So if, in this case, "flute" means "recorder", it can only mean the smaller descant recorder. However, middle C is also, coincidentally, the lowest note on what we'd actually call a (transverse) "flute" these days anyway. So it's perfectly possible that when Playford says "flute" he doesn't mean any kind of recorder at all, but, simply, what we'd call a "flute", too. But it's also possible he means either the descant recorder or the flute — i.e. both. So, one way or another, "most of" the tunes do indeed fit both, so neither (descant) recorder-players nor flautists should feel excluded.