I'm not unsympathetic to this position but in selfish terms here I sit in suburban DC and ITM is relatively rare and scarce. We're not poor but money and time for spending months in Ireland at the foot of the masters is also scarce.Mr.Gumby wrote:I was generalising a bit and in fairness I qualified the statement to make sure it showed I didn't think it applied to all musicians. The tunepal thing is an issue, perhaps more prevalent in naming tunes : I see a lot of instances of people taking up names that come straight from thesession.org. 'I buried my wife and danced on her grave' rather than the traditional 'I buried my wife and danced on top of her' being one of my bugbears (try sing the title to the first phrase of the tune and see which one you think is right) but to an extend there some of it happening with regards to settings as well.
I feel that the ease of finding notations and playing in sessions are homogenising music, in some musicians anyway. It's a shame. There are also musicians deliberately cultivating regional and personal styles so perhaps that balances out things.
It's important to be able to hear a footprint of a musician's influences in their playing, a lineage if you like, where their music came from. That is more important than playing homogenised 'session settings' (session playing is another skill again so I will let things involved with that rest for the sake of clarity).
FWIW, I usually try hard to avoid falling into the trap of complaining about what generation after my own are doing because there's a lot of lovely music out there (I have been revisiting the 'Tunes in the church' recording this week, hard to beat the musicianship on that one).
This is a true story I often use in class: When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC was being planned, in the 1870s, there was very little classical art in the US. So the museums directors sent skilled artisans to Europe to make plaster casts of classical statuary. These were each as perfect a reproduction as possible to make at the time, and they put them on exhibit. Immediately came the criticism: these are not just a bad idea, they are actively evil because they are imitations of the real thing. The response would be "isn't a good thing that an ordinary working class person can go to the museum ad see great art? And the answer was "They are not seeing great art, they are seeing a copy. If the plumber wants to see great art, he should save his money and make the sacrifices necessary to go to Italy and Greece. Nobody ever said art was easy." They took the casts down and stored them. A lot of them are now in place on the campus where I work.
I'm sympathetic to both positions, really. There are so many examples of songs available and many of them even I with my relatively untutored ear hear as terrible. And it often find more "obscure" (to me( version of tunes that I like better.
Your man Francis O'Neill starts the homogenization, I think, and then it's augmented by the Sligo Fiddle records and McKenna. My dream is to find communities of people playing music because they like the music, rather than because it's desperately important to play it like somebody else. Yes there's a degree of contradiction there.