I have been learning the tunes in the book that came with my Feadóg in order. The next tune in the sequence was "Oranges and Lemons." I have always pronounced the first word in that title with three syllables: "or-an-ges." However, the book broke it into two syllables: "oran-ges." That threw me off so badly that I moved onto the next tune. Is the book wrong, or have I been pronouncing "oranges" incorrectly for over 30 years? Or maybe it was pronounced with two syllables at one time, but not anymore?

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Three cheap whistles and a cheap recorder!

If it's two syllable, shouldn't it be "orn-ges"?

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I would think so. Now it's throwing me off even more!

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It's a Mother Goose nursery rhyme.



And yes, to fit the meter, the word 'oranges' has to get squashed into an iamb, ie, two syllables. Orn-ges comes close, but you can linger a bit on the orn so that it hints at or-uhn.

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Nursery rhymes are poems that have lingered so long in the nursery that all the extraneous bits have been pared away, leaving only what it takes to catch and hold a toddler's attention. Music and (especially) rhythm are everything to Mother Goose. They're not babytalk, but their target audience can't really speak, either. They're just learning to speak. The words are secondary to holding the kid's attention.

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The churches are all in London, and, incidentally, Bow bell (The great bell of Bow) is the traditional determinant of who's a cockney. If you were born within earshot of Bow bells, you qualify. Londoners, I add, can swallow unnecessary syllables with the best of them.

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Edited: Whoever laid out the music likely scored the first verse that way so that it has the same number of syllables as the other verses (the last verse has a different rhythm & melody; dunno if its included in the feodog book). It's less confusing that way for beginners. However, in music it's a simple matter to squeeze in an extra syllable by breaking a note into two notes of half the value, so that together they take the same time. A quarter note into two eighths, or an eighth into two sixteenths. If you were singing the song rather than playing it, that's what you could do for the first verse. Since you're playing it instead, try thinking two words while playing one note for both.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.
There lie they and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree.

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That's not the case, the way the song is sung here in the UK. It clearly has three syllables, with the first two being on notes half the length of the note on "ges". Kind of like diddle dum.

Ah, and now I have had a moment of enlightenment! If the words were set to the music, it would indeed look like the first two syllables were as one: "oran" followed by "-ges". However, the way it is pronounced is definitely with two syllables on "oran" followed by "-ges."

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This makes it even harder to write haiku.

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Right or wrong that's what I thought right from the OP. It happens all the time with lyrics. Part of the fun of English 'folk songs' is the way the rhythm of the tune and/or words get pushed around for best effect from verse to verse.

The last verse in the Feadóg book does show that difference.

After reading the replies in this thread, I might have to think of the song as "Apples and Lemons" to play it correctly.

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Three cheap whistles and a cheap recorder!

Why? What's wrong with playing it as one would sing it, with three syllables/notes on "oranges"?

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But they're not constant anyway; the Shoreditch, Stepney and Bow verses have fewer syllables than the first three, with modified notes for Shoreditch and Bow the way I know it. And 'you owe me' has an anacrusis/upbeat.


My thoughts exactly!

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Master of nine?

To someone who does not have the rhyme ingrained from childhood do the rests between the short lines take some experimentation to work out?

I suspect the OP - and pardon me if I'm wrong - is learning to play whistle by taking the pitch from tab and the duration from the words printed below the tab.

This will not work well. As you're discovering, this makes it impossible to learn a song you don't already know. It takes less than two weeks to learn standard music notation as it pertains to whistle, and then you'll never have this problem again. It'll take even less time if all you concentrate on is rhythm.

If you haven't done this, you lack even the vocabulary to understand us when we try to tell you what's wrong and how to fix it. We'll both find this completely frustrating.

I don't know the feodog book, but I suspect that it has at least some lessons about reading music. I recommend that you take some time, now that you have stumbled upon this limitation, and learn them. It really is a LOT less difficult that you think, and getting this down now will make learning unfamiliar music a lot more easy in future, and will greatly speed your learning process.

You don't need to know this [yet] if you're learning by ear or by video, but if you're learning by book, you absolutely do.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

P.S. The last verse as given by s1m0n, which may not be in the Feadog book, is chanted.

Yeah. The verses alternate between 4 and 6 syllables in the first line. For a technical explanation of this, I refer you to the explanation of Sprung Verse (seriously) as it relates to nursery rhymes and music in The Collected Work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He covers it.

In the arrangement we're discussing, I suspect that the arranger decided that settling on the average of 5 syllables for this line was the simplest solution, and fudged the hyphenatin' to make it work out. The learner is supposed to understand this and vary the melody of each verse to reflect the differing number of beats.

But if, as I suspect, the OP is ignoring the rhythm notations in favour of trying to work out the rhythm from the words, then none of this will be of any use.

You will not learn to play the whistle that way. You might as well try to learn with mittens on your fingers.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis