Fantasia On “A” String: A Song History

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Deborah Hamouris includes “Fantasia On ‘A’ String” in Indian Summer, her own publication of 24 tunes for standard mountain dulcimer with notes on each tune, where it appears as a melody part and a harmony part, both in DAD tuning.[1] The table of contents on Hamouris’s website lists it as a duet.[2] She recorded it with The DulciMates, her folk duo with a partner named Buffalo, on the album The Green Man, whose description counts it as one of the album’s two original tunes.[3][4] Her biography dates that album to 2012.[4] None of the sources consulted here names the tune’s composer or explains its title.[1][2][3]

Six-string viol with a plain dark body, tuning pegs and sloping shoulders

Henry Smith, Division Viol, maple, spruce, 1629. Shown for the stringed consort music the word fantasia once named; it has no connection to the tune.

The word fantasia in the title is also the name of a musical genre, which Britannica, listing fancy and fantasy as other names for it, describes as loosely structured and freely imagined music, typically written for one player.[5] In England in the 1500s and 1600s the word was used chiefly for imitative, fugal pieces played by ensembles of string or wind players, and the genre’s liberty survived in fantasias by C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Fantasia On “A” String"

Sources

  1. Deborah Hamouris: "Indian Summer".
  2. DJ Hamouris: "Indian Summer: Music & Reflections by Deborah “DJ” Hamouris".
  3. DJ Hamouris: "The Green Man by The DulciMates".
  4. DJ Hamouris: "My Story: DJ Hamouris – Musician, Teacher, Producer".
  5. Britannica: "Fantasia".
  6. Image: Henry Smith, Division Viol, maple, spruce, 1629. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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