The Latent Cannon

by Marina Dodgson

Like many others, I spent the early part of the first 2020 lockdown experimenting with different platforms to find ways to play music with others online. For my own amusement, I would sometimes adjust the settings so that I could hear my duo partners guitar accompaniment, even though it would be out of time due to latency and accompanied by the echo of my own fiddle. I began to wonder if it would be possible to write a tune which would become it’s own harmony when played in this setting. The result is this tune, but it’s fair to say that the the canon effect works best when played digitally! I named it The Latent Cannon as a reference to this journey (though the spelling of cannon with two n’s is intentional, as I have happy memories of my young sons looking for cannons during family days out to places of interest).

These days, I just think of this tune as a standard 3/2 hornpipe, and I like to follow it with the traditional tune If You Will Not Have Me You May Let Me Go.

Marina Dodgson is a fiddle player from the North East of England. She is one of three directors of Phoenix Folk, which promotes participation in traditional music both locally and online. She is one half of the fiddle/guitar duo Miggins Fiddle, which forms the basis of several other projects including the Miggins Fiddle Ceilidh Band and an extensive programme of online tune sessions. She writes arrangements for the Phoenix Folk Virtual Ensemble and the Phoenix Chamber Folk Ensemble, and her work has also been adopted into the repertoire of a number of local ensembles including the Tyneside Fiddle Alliance. Through Phoenix Folk, she has published two collections of harmony arrangements.

Marina was awarded first place in Composing Excellence at the 2021 & 2023 Morpeth Northumbrian Gatherings. She also won the Variations trophy in 2019.