Some while ago there passed through my hands a 39 key Jeffries Anglo which was renowned as the best ever. It is now back with the person who sold it to me and I hope I still have first refusal should it ever move again. It is a superb instrument and has never been tuned since it left Jeffries. This is one of the features that make it so special because, in addition to being - of course - in ‘old pitch’, this concertina is also tuned in uneven temperament. This gives it a beautiful sound quality which I have never heard matched. Ironically it is also why I parted from it as I enjoy stretching the range of the instrument and chording extensively - though not when playing traditional tunes, I hasten to add. These chords - diminisheds, augmenteds, etc. were extremely discordant because, with uneven temperament, it was quite possible for none of the notes to be in tune.
Most Jeffries have by now been retuned into concert pitch and even temperament and I had always assumed that Jeffries originally tuned unevenly and this was lost in modern retuning. Recently I sat down to consider a short presentation that I had been invited to give at the AGM of the ICA and at which I intended to talk, amongst other things, about the playing of Fred Kilroy. An article in Musical Traditions (1975), which incidentally mis-spells ‘Jeffries’ throughout, was a great help here. Fred thought that playing the Anglo in only two keys was not making the full use of the instrument and one of his ‘party pieces’ was Lady of Spain shifting through a range of keys. I have a recording of this! I then planned to show a small notebook which I have in Jeffries’ own hand which gives the fingering for no less than twelve different scales.
When I was planning this talk it suddenly hit me that neither Kilroy’s extensive use of keys nor Jeffries’ scales would have sounded in tune in uneven temperament. I then recalled a comment of Tommy Williams, recorded as part of a spoken item on Springtime in Battersea, FRR 008, that when he started tuning for Lachenal his work was considered to be too perfect. Is this a reference to Tommy achieving perfect tuning in the home keys (i.e. uneven temperament) but preventing the playing in other keys across the rows?
There are therefore two issues joined here. How many early concertinas were in uneven temperament and just how widespread was the belief, and the practice, that the Anglo was a fully competent and functioning instrument in much more than the two home keys?