When I chose learning to play penny whistle as the thing I wanted to do to keep me occupied and happy in my retirement years, I did so in the belief that I would eventually be able to play any tune that I could (lip) whistle. I presently listen to new tunes repeatedly, search until I find a written version in dots, and try to memorize. Naturally the tunes I like a lot I manage to learn a lot quicker. Popular tunes, Christmas tunes, songs I learned in my childhood are in that “quicker” category. I don’t expect to ever become a recording artist or to play professionally but I have progressed to the point where every now and then a tune will echo through the vast emptiness of my head for a while and then I will pick up my whistle and play at least parts of it with no real problem. Wow! ! ! That’s why I started this a year ago and why I found you folks in the first place.
Like most, I memorize by learning phrases. I know the “A” part of a bunch of tunes and the “B” (and “c”) of some. Why did I have to wait until now for Bloo to gently suggest that I learn from the other end and therefore know the entire tune and also always be able to have a strong finish? :roll: Geez, the older you get the longer it takes to figgure this stuff out.
Learn by ear, learn from dots, watch and learn - its all good as long as you eventually learn the tune and have a good time playing it.
when i was with pipe band.. we were given set of tunes to memorize for every new season. these tunes number in 4 to 7 tunes for competition.. and few others for parade and things. usually i could get them memorized in a day or two, if i really care to.
trick is “singing” along with the tune while practicing. sooner or later, like learning popular music, it will in stick in your head. once you can sing it, you should be able to play it. technique could be improved once the tune is memorized. of course, like so many other posts suggested it.. if you don’t like the tune and you don’t play often enough, you will forget it in short time, unless you have really good memory. i usually keep set of tunes in my head for one season. once the next season comes around and i have new tunes to work on, i forget the last season’s tunes.
I was using Amazing Grace as a simple example of something which is easy for almost anyone (of Western heritage) to memorize. I’m a little beyond that in my capabilities. I’m just renewing my acquaintance with the whistle; I play other instruments.
Sorry, I’m being a little knee-jerkedly defensive, but the point of this thread was to solicit others’ thoughts on the benefits of memorization…
and yet another edit: a friend just suggested via pm that I overreacted to Peter’s post (American vs. Euro sensibilities!) Sorry Peter.
Bloomfield’s mention of learning the last part first is a technique used a lot in animal & dog training; it’s called ‘backchaining’. Suppose you want to teach a dog (for agility competition) a behavior chain of jump, jump, weave, tunnel; you’d start at the last thing and add the others, one at a time. Don’t add anything new until the previous things are learned. That way the dog feels he going for the homestretch to something that has already become familiar and ‘easy’. Incidentally, this technique helps build speed. Oh… in the dog’s case that is…
But that said, I have to admit some easier tunes are learned in a much less structured manner, and traditional music is far from scientific.
I have stages. The first stage is just understanding the tune, which is better if I hear it played by someone good. Then I can read it off the sheet and play thgough it. Then I have to memorize it in order to be able to improve my musicality. Because I’m still learning the instrument, I find that my brain cannot read the music AND work the fingers and breath well at the same time. So in order to make any progress at playing it well I have to memorize the tune.
On my other instrument (drums) I can sight read most concert music and make it sound fairly musical because the technical part of hitting the drum comes naturally and I can just focus on the music.
I’ve been watching the recent to sheet or not to sheet (music) discussions. Here’s my 2 cents.
I’ve been playing in different fife and drum corps for 30 years. We don’t have the luxury of being able to march with sheet music, so everything has to be memorized.
I am a strong proponent of start with sheet music and work towards memorization. Many tunes I know, I have picked up in jam session by ear. I’ve played and played and played them without ever looking at the music. Then after playing a song by ear for years on end, my fife and drum corp decides to play it. I start looking at the sheet music and find I’ve been play a certain section wrong all these years. It is VERY difficult to un-learn what you’ve put in your head.
I have no idea how many songs I have memorized over the years - and I can’t remember thge names of half of them! Some I’ve forgotten, but most are still there. Tunes you love will always be there once they are memorized.
Start with sheet music. Learn the notes. Fit the notes with the tune. Once the tune stops being work, and you play it without thinking about it, then you can start to embelish and play with it.
You’re assuming the sheet music is right, and that there is only one “right” way to play a traditional tune. That may be handy simplifying assumption to get a fife and drump corp playing together, but it doesn’t represent what the music is really like.
In my experience it is very rare to find Irish traditional tunes written down accurately – and even then, all you’re capturing is sort of an outline of what the tune really is, and no experienced player will ever play it exactly that way.
(Which isn’t to say that sheet music is sometimes useful for quickly getting a notion of what notes go into a tune.)
I think it’s called “different version” rather than “wrong”, isn’t it? For Irish dance tunes, starting from the sheet music is certainly not the way to get it “right” because (a) there are transcriptions of various version of the same tune floating around, (b) transcriptions are often prepared and used by people who like relying sheet music, a group that coincides (for whatever reason) with people who aren’t very good at the music (I know, exceptions apply), and (c) many transcription of tunes contain mistakes from (No one worth transcribing plays it that way).
I think it’s called “different version” rather than “wrong”, isn’t it?
This maybe true in some instances, but not in all. Writers of music are human and mistakes are made. As Bloomfield states:
In my experience it is very rare to find Irish traditional tunes written down accurately
If so few pieces are written correctly, what is correct? That which isn’t written down?
Of course there will be different variations written depending on how the writer interpreted the tune, and assuming s/he didn’t make an error in their notation. After reading numerous hand written manuscripts, mistakes Everyone likes to add their own nuances to what ever they are playing especially once they’ve got the tune down and are playing beyond the notes.
For instance I would not recommend someone looking at to Ian Anderson’s fantastic version of Bouree as a source for how the tune should sound.
My point was basically to state that although Irish music and other traditional musics come from a very primal source within the player, you’ve got to start somewhere, and for me I recommend the sheet music. I love to hear Matt Malloy play flute. Primarily because I enjoy what he adds to a piece, but I can’t necessarily agree that the embellishments he adds to the piece is how the tune should be interpreted by everyone.
Sheet music provides a foundation on which to build from. once that foundation is laid, then you can interpret it in your own fashion to make it unique and interesting.
Obviously you don’t find any session musician worth their salt ( and I don’t pretend to count myself amongst them yet ) playing behind a music stand. Nor do I believe that once a musician learns the basic scale and a few ornamentations, they can walk into a session and just start playing the tunes just because they have a feel for the music.
Sheet music does serve a vital purpose in learning how to play any instrument. Where else can you learn the basics of time signature, tune structure if not from an understanding of reading music?
I don’t sight read very well, and I do need to know how the tune sounds before I look at music. But there is enough Irish music played out there that I couldn’t possibly begin to follow by ear without the assistance of musical notation.
For fecksake, when I said there were issues here touching on those in the sheetmusic discussion I didn’t mean we should immediately re start that one, once a years enough to re assert established positions.
I don’t want to get into more than I should, but just a couple of comments.
But you were not talking about “Writers” you said
If you pick it up by ear, who cares what mistakes any one makes in a transcription? One of the points of learning by ear is that you get a version that is actually being played.
I don’t see why listening & learning the tune by ear wouldn’t lay an equally strong foundation; in fact a stronger one: How many tunes that you’ve learned by ear have you forgotten vs tunes you’ve learned from sheet music?
Huh? I think you understand the tune structure by listening to a tune. After all, it’s meant to be heard, not read. I am surprised that you can’t hear the difference between a jig and a reel (for example). You need the time signature to tell you? We may just be very different (and I read music fluently), but 4/4 or 6/8 or whatever was meaningless to me before I heard the rhythm and the lilt.
I don’t mean to be too blunt about it, but after trying to learn this music for some years now I’ve come to the conclusion that if you can’t begin to follow the music by ear, you can’t follow it with the “assistance” of musical notation either. (Once you can follow it by ear, musical notation might actually assist you.)
Hope you don’t mind my just saying it straight, nothing personal at all. I think I used to feel pretty much like you did a few years back and I just hit a wall. I listened to myself playing at it was complete crap. It sounded nothing like what I heard around me. I was lucky enough to find some people who told me that all I had to do was chuck the notation and learn by ear. Boy, it was hard. Not so much the actual learning by ear, that worked despite my long-held conviction that whatever musical talent I have is at best rudimental; no, it was emotionally hard to let go of sheetmusic, to take the plunge and trust that there is some hidden capacity of my brain to process music, to understand it, break it down, and translated it to finger movements, breaths and so forth WITHOUT the help of my eyes. It was a novel and a scary thing to learn, and I still often feel at sea when I find myself playing along at session with tunes I don’t know, that I am just picking up. I still get feelings of “hey, how can this work, how can I be playing this tune, I don’t even know it.” But of course I do know it because I have heard it, it’s in my head. It’s made an enormous difference in my playing (as my session buddies can attest). To this day I can hear the difference between tunes I’ve learned from sheetmusic (flat) and those I’ve learned by ear (alive). A tune learned by ear for me retains a fluidity or flexibility, some special quality that I can’t quite describe.
You tell me now? After just typed a long testimonial?
And you, Peter, are one of the ones I thank every time I play, everytime I sit in a session, or play for a dance, for pointing me in the right direction. Thanks!
Until I can find some decent ear training, sheet music will have to do for me. However, I do keep in mind that many parts of playing music cannot be notated on paper, and hearing it actually played by someone is a great help. I use sheet music only to the point of getting all the notes memorized, then I work on making music out of it.
Another bit of advice: the more you understand the mechanics of the music, the easier it is to memorize it. Likewise, it’s easier to memorize a song in English, than to memorize the words of a song in a language you don’t know.
In Irish music there are some very common phrases, themes, harmonic progressions etc, and the more you recognize them the easier and faster it will be to learn by ear.
The other piece of advice is to find someone to teach you—not necessarily full-blown lessons, but just to teach you a tune. The easiest and most enlightening way to learn a tune by ear is from another human being.
As for the intimidating number of tunes, you’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll absorb them once you get going. When you try to learn tunes by ear or from memory, you are also practicing those listening and learning skills, which at the beginning are much more important than the tunes themselves; and the more you work on those, the easier the next tune will be.
You’re subtly confusing “writing” with “composing” here, I think. There are plenty of Irish (and other) tunes out there which have never been written down at all, and most certainly not by their creator. And there are many tunes whose origins are lost in the mists of time, and we know because they were passed down orally. Most Irish traditional sheet music is just an attempt to get the tune down on paper; it is never the primary defining statement of the tune.
There is no one correct version of a tune – there are just a collection of variations which are “right”, a collection which are close, a collection which are clearly wrong, and everything else probably counts as a different tune. And the exact boundaries between the sets are extremely subjective.
Take, for instance, the “Humours of Ballyconnell”, which is the first thing that pops out of my 121 FIST when I open it up. Now, as written versions go, this strikes me as a fairly nice one.
It’s missing the pick-up note to start the tune, then there’s a weird extra pick-up to start the third bar. The second half of the third bar of the second part is given as triplet FED FA, but I play F A-roll. Then the second eighth note in the next bar goes down to an F, whereas I go up to a D. In the third part, I play pretty much everything other than the first note, the second bar, and the last note differently – but not wildly diifferently.
The Midwestern Irish Session Tunes version is much worse, but weirdly enough, captures some ideas from my playing which don’t show up in LE’s version. For instance, this one has the BdAF D2 pattern to end a strain – it’s just not the strain I end that way. The second part is all screwed up by any version of the tune I’m familiar with – the second half of each bar does something strange. The third part is actually closer to what I play, but the lead up to the last note is different.
Compared to audio recordings, mine is pretty close to what Paddy Keenan plays on his first album – no surprise, as that’s what I studied when I was learning the tune. I still think I’m missing some of his nuances, though. Peter Horan and Fred Finn’s version is actually closer to the 121 FIST version, though still not the same.
Who’s “right”? Arguably all of us. (Though maybe not MIST – it’s version seems pretty wonky to me. But who knows, maybe there is someone out there who plays it that way!)
And this is a simple, straightforward tune. There are many which are more often varied, or have fairly big common differences in how they are played (like “Out on the Ocean” – is it AABB or AABB’?).
I tend to learn most of my tunes by osmosis, I’ll hear it a session dozens of times and then it get stuck in my head and I’ll start working out little bit of it at a time, by the time I can play through it at speed I’ve got it memorized.
Are, but there’s an important distinction here. I’ve got nothing against sheet music – it’s a useful tool, and I use it both as a learning aid and to help me remember tunes I’ve written.
I just want to emphasize that it is really important to recognize that the sheet music is a guide, not some essential statement of what the tune is. It’s more a matter of reminding or informing you where the tune might go next.
There is definitely a distinction that needs to be made: Transcribed music versus composed music.
Composed music (if it is composed to sheet) is meant to be played that way. It is “right”.
Transcribed music is a guess at what someone played. Sometimes they are guesses of guesses. As such the do vary a lot.
The thing is that what most beginners (or people who are starting, or want to continue to use sheet music to learn) want is the “composed” sheet music of tunes. ie, the definitive tune. The “right” one.
I am not ashamed to admit that I use sheet music to learn tunes. I did that long before I got around to learning tunes by ear. But all the tunes I learned by ear, I can only remember if someone plays the first few notes for me, whereas if I have the sheet music, for any tune, I can remember it and play away! And I know that I play a sheet music tune the same way I play others.
So what I am saying is that anyone who says that only one way is correct.. they are wrong. I play some tunes from the sheet music and give them that same “heart”, “feeling” or whatever you want to call it that people want in a tune.
