Carl Volti: Glasgow fiddle tunes for the dance floor

About Carl Volti

Volti was born Archibald Milligan in Glasgow on 29 January 1848, into a family of violinists: his father and several uncles on his mother's side played, and he grew up inside the Scottish dance-band tradition rather than the conservatoire. He died in January 1919 and used the Italianate 'Carl Volti' for his published music.

His working life was tied to the Glasgow publisher James S. Kerr. He contributed more than thirty-five original melodies to Kerr's Merry Melodies, the multi-volume collection that supplied dance bands across Scotland, and he produced tutors, albums of popular songs and national overtures for the same firm. That explains the shape of the catalogue: short, functional pieces in strathspey, reel, hornpipe, schottische and waltz rhythm, written to be played through and repeated as the dancers needed. The series ran to several volumes and became a standard source for Scottish dance bands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The 67 entries are nearly all classified as classical, with two left unclassified, and several titles are typed in capitals in the source metadata. A handful are named for people rather than dance forms, such as Mr. Thomas Burt and Kirsty MacFarlane, and others for places, including Strachur in Cowal, Corriegills on Arran and Inveraray Cross.

Listening and playing notes

These are functional dance pieces, so tempo is a practical decision before it is an expressive one. In the strathspeys, the Scots snap, a short note before a long one, should be crisp but not exaggerated; in the reels, keep the quaver flow even and let the accents fall where the dancers need them. The hornpipes want a heavier dotted lilt, the schottisches a steady lift on the second beat. Ornamentation is best kept small and repeated consistently, since the same figure usually returns in every strain. A piano or a single fiddle can carry all of it.

Selected scores

1. Cuckoo Valse

   The most-viewed score in the collection: a waltz in triple time, unlike the reels and hornpipes that dominate the collection.

2. Highland Fling

   The Highland Fling is one of the older solo Highland dances, danced to a strathspey. A second setting is catalogued separately at id 203028.

3. Mr. Thomas Burt

   Named for a person rather than a dance form. The catalogue does not record which form Volti used or who the dedicatee was.

4. Mother Kilwinning

   The title belongs to the Ayrshire lodge known as Mother Kilwinning, and the tune is one of many in the Scottish repertoire named for it. A second entry is catalogued at id 135813.

5. Corriegills

   Named for the clachan on the Isle of Arran. The catalogue gives no key or form beyond the tune type implied by the collection.

6. Kirsty MacFarlane

   A tune named for a woman, in the manner of the many dedications in nineteenth-century Scottish dance collections.

7. The Village Festival

   A descriptive title of the kind used for quadrilles and country dances in Victorian Glasgow band books.

8. Strachur

   Named for the village in Cowal, Argyll, on the shore of Loch Fyne.

9. Schottische

   A generic label rather than a title: the schottische was a staple of the Victorian ballroom, in moderate duple time.

10. Albion Hornpipe

    A hornpipe, the dance form in triplets or dotted quavers that closes many Scottish and English sets.