ITM’s “technique is more challenging” !!! Blimey! How easy is the other stuff?!?!!
Huh. Worrying. You see I read it last night and found it fascinating - once he started to talk about music. But I was relying on the fact that you guys who knew about this stuff thought it was OK, because that rather contrived introductory bit about speaking - newsreaders, preachers etc - was contrary to my experience. The only ‘newsreader’ I have ever heard use the same tone of voice for consecutive items where good news followed bad news was in a comedy sketch. And he may be right about preachers not having such a strong style nowadays but to mention them without commenting the one thing that many have in common - a habitual style of style enunciation that works well in places with a long reverb time - makes me wonder if he if is really listening. Or maybe he was brought up with excitable news deliverers and fire and brimstone preachers, and late victorian-style mantlepices overladen with ducks, geese, toby jugs etc.
So - jem, Ben, Steve, denny, others - is he right on the music stuff ?
I guess he is. The impression I get is that he was talking about what ornaments did, their aesthetic effect, rather what sort of twiddles they were.
So if I learn a tune on whistle or flute from a recording of a fiddle player I don’t try to copy the ornaments, I try to see past them, on the one hand to find the things my playing and the fiddlers has in common - a basic tune - and on the other to appreciate the overall effect for which I will have to do something that suites the instrument. But being at approximatly the ‘handful of tunes stage’ as Steve put it, it would be possible to describe that as learning a basic tune (right notes, right order, right rhythm) and then getting it to sound right.
Egad, I’m not talking about turning ITM into improv jazz. No, I just mean to say that while one musician may prefer to leave their high D unornamented in a song my preference may be to use crans. Or another musician may roll two notes in a song while I may take a simpler route and just cut them. Same tunes. Same notes. Same beats. Different ornaments. I believe Father Ryan Dunns called this “finding your own voice in the Irish musical tradition.” 
Yes, if that’s all it is, fair enough. Hence why I said I may have misinterpreted. Delighted to see that I did. But, even so, I think the added clarification was worth getting, partly in case others also misinterpreted.
Meanwhile, I for one don’t really care what anyone does in a song. I just do whatever I like with them.
I’ve just been adding some comedy relief!
The pdf never opened on my PC. This is not uncommon, I’m sure that it will open on the controlling PC of our little network. I am waiting to see if I remember it on Monday.
Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, associated with the trad. police.
I refute absolutely the implied slur.
Have at you sir!
as a displaced sax player
what only took up flute 'cause it was small
I have no idea what yer on about.
however,
Old-time American music at least can for the most part be played slower than ITM. If you’re thinking of bluegrass, yes, that’s played at break-neck speed and quite technically challenging (I’m not that talented!), but in its present form with so many flourishes, it didn’t really emerge until the 1930s or so. So to play it at Civil War re-enactments wouldn’t be musically period-correct. Southern mountain music also includes slow ballads, and of course we play Civil War songs such as Southern Soldier and some Stephen Foster like O Susanna. I guess we play different genres, whatever was in America by the 1860s. Also, bear in mind that my group isn’t professional and doesn’t play for period dances, so far just around the campfire and at the unit Christmas party!
Well, even if the navy can’t win it, our gallant boys 'll win the war in the air
Oh, come now…
Ornaments are flippin’ hard! Especially at lively tempos!
They require finger actions several times faster than the basic tune!
On numerous occasions I’ve heard players focus so much on the ornaments that the basic tempo + phrasing were totally lost.
In terms of skills-acquisition, you can learn a bare-bones tune and play with others (by keeping a steady beat and not conflicting with the melody) much sooner (and with much less time+effort) than you can if you demand ornaments from the outset.
Of course, if you’re a trad-master, the ornaments are like breathing for you: the feel essential. But that’s because you’ve totally mastered and internalized their sound + fingerings through years of devoted practice. But for people new to the instrument, ornaments demand skills a quantum leap above those required for a basic tune.
I vote for learning the basic tune first.
trill
I get what you’re saying, trill. However, what I’m saying is that you’re more likely to get to be able to play this stuff with any semblance of conviction (be a “trad-master” if you like) if you try, right from the start, to play it the way it is. Strip away bits that you think are unnecessary and you’ll lose the tune. And the so-called ‘ornaments’ are not unnecessary.
I think - but not sure - that others may be saying something similar.
is that better than a
Oh, I think so. What is it? An Aardvark-copter?
llama-copter 
If you wish to play a tune by focusing on learning the skeleton structure of the tune, the “bare bones”, without what is misleadingly called “ornaments” and articulation and emotional expression, you may as well let AbcNavigator play the abc notation, and listen to that.
If you wish to play music which can move you and others, you need to be better than that, and right from the start develop an ear for what is appropriate. “Bare bones” playing will never do and is utterly boring and soul-less. I fully agree with Ben that each tune is much more than its skeleton structure as expressed by notation.
If you are new to it only listening will provide you with the clues of what is appropriate, and how to make the music alive. In time sensibility develops, and even ability to bring alive tunes which you have not heard played before but only have the skeleton of notation. But not from the beginning, not even if “ornaments” were given in a tune notation.
Ben and Hans are spot on. The bottom line here is that you learn to play diddley music by listening to a lot of diddley music. A lot. There is no other way. We don’t all live in Ireland or near a good session but we devour the music whenever and wherever we can and we listen to lots of recordings, tune into online broadcasts, etc. If you think you can learn from notation, tutor books, tablature, ABCs or midi files you will be at least 150 years old before you’re any good. This is very simple peasant music (which is not to say it isn’t great art when it’s executed very well) and you apply formal or academic methods to learning it at your peril. I challenge anyone to name a great player who learned that way. Atomising it into artificially separate attributes is just as bad. Ornamentation and variation are not add-ons. They are integral, vital parts of the music, and to say you can safely ignore them until you get good at the tunes is entirely fallacious. You are not good at the tunes without being good at them at the same time, because the tune is not the tune without them. You might as well listen to useless advice about using metronomes or practising scales, which will do nothing at all towards getting the music under your skin and will simply put off the day you start to really have fun. You listen to tunes and learn to play them from that alone. It’s fine to read up about and practise the ornaments your instrument is capable of if you really must, but there are no rules about how you should incorporate them. Playing the tunes is the way to practise, which is why most good players of diddley music don’t have the word “practise” in their vocabulary.
kinda like the other genres in that then, eh Steve?
Being relatively new to this effort I implore your patience.
Almost every musical teacher I have ever talked to, regardless of the instrument, starts their new students out on simpler (less complicated) songs. This, they say, is to lay a firm foundation on things like fingering, chord structure, notation, etc.. I have yet to meet a piano teacher that begins his or her students on complicated pieces of music. I am sitting here looking at my copy of The Clark Tin Whistle. It starts me out with very simple rudimentary songs with no “ornamentation” (the books words not mine.) Then it advances through time signatures. Then it goes through a section of actual songs. Then it has it’s own chapter on “Ornamentation”, again their words not mine. This seems to fit into more the norm than the exception when it comes to music books, although I could be wrong.
As a guitar player, I learn by figuring out a chord structure first, then the melody, then I try to figure out riffs and such. But that’s just me.
I agree that you must listen to the music you aspire to in order to learn it properly. But there must be a foundation laid first. If I take a particular ITM song in all it’s glory “ornamentation” and all, and try to learn it just as it is written, or as it is played by a particular person (which is another thing altogether, all of the “masters” don’t exactly play the same song the same way) then I have learned that particular persons version of a song. If, on the other hand, I learn the fundamentals, the fingerings, the scales, the notes and become adept at finding my way around an “instrument” and becoming one with it so to speak, then I can listen to a song and my mind should tell me basically how to get that sound. One thing I found in just learning songs for the sake of learning a song - say Hotel California on the guitar- then in the end that’s what I learned. One song. And when someone comes along and says…hey let’s play it in this key…or let’s play it and add a section here…then I’m lost. Because I learned it “one” way.
As to listening to a song and immersing oneself in a song over and over again and working one’s way through it, I still believe it’s harder to do without knowing your instrument and how to get around it on it’s own. It can be done, and is quite often. I just think it may be harder.
I agree that we should learn what has been called ornamentation. It’s integral to this style of music. I just don’t think you have to learn a particular song a particular way with a particular set of ornamentation to be able to learn and play the song.
I agree, you gotta crawl before you can walk. At least I do as I was not blessed with a blazing talent! Shatfield is right, you learn Mary Had a Little Lamb and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before you can even think about any reels or jigs, much less the speed of them. Baby steps . . . for me the ornaments do come after I’ve learned the basic tune. If I tried to play a tune like Mary Bergin right off the bat, I would have given up playing whistle because I will never approach that if I play for 30 years. Heck, I’ll never get up to the ornamentation and speed of local ITM pub players who aren’t famous.
Well, as I say, I don’t care about songs. Do what you like with them. They’re probably better unaccompanied in any case, if they’re trad. Tunes are another matter altogether.
A particular set of ornamentation? Only as much as there would be a particular set of notes for that tune. They’re the same thing. The tune is the tune, with all that goes into it.