It can all be notated in one key signature (with no accidentals) though because it’s a GHB tune.
I also agree ,to a point. If a musically trained person does indeed hear trad music and sort of subconsciously analyzes what he hears ‘he should try and resist because of the tendency to impose non-traditional qualities on the music. Say for instance a student of English and English grammar was to analyze the lyrics of an old blues song without understanding the tradition and then imposing his standard of English on the song .It would be a disaster . Its the same with trained musicians and trad musicians.
RORY
Yes. Take PCL’s anecdote: “I couldn’t hear from his playing which note it was meant to be.” That’s the trap. Micho played the note as ‘meant to be’ … it could’ve been different each time through, pitched neither C nor C#, sliding pitches through and past both… In the end, the 2 categories of ‘C’ versus ‘C#’ are inadequate impositions from a different approach to music.
Rory, the hypothetical English-major in your example is obviously an idiot. Every field has their fair share of those. But if a linguist studies idiomatic English as spoken in the Mississippi Delta region of the U.S. (or Chicago, Memphis, etc.), and if that linguist lives and breathes Blues music, listening to recordings or live performances of Blues masters day and night, and practicing his/her own singing fairly well compulsively, they’ll probably do just fine.
I’m good & sick of this idea that formal training kills musicianship. Our tradition has always had formally-trained prodigies (just off the top of my head: Leo Rowsome, Willie Reynolds, and wasn’t there some obscure bird named O’Carolan?) who were never accused of lacking musical passion.
If you play out of idiom, or lifelessly, or for any reason sound like a doily-sniffing git, you’re doing it wrong, DUH! I never learned differently in music school. On the whole, my teachers were way more apt to demand more passionate playing, than they were to split hairs over verbiage.
Music theory doesn’t teach you to treat music as a math problem (at least, it isn’t supposed to). It just gives you a big vocabulary for describing that which you already love, live, and breathe.
It occurs to me that this is all spectacularly off topic. But I feel better now. 
–Mick Bauer, BFA (MusEd), MS, BYOB
NOTE: The faculty and Regents of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee disclaim any and all liability for defects or shortcomings in my musicianship, which are purely my own.
I agree with you 100% that training in music does not diminish musicianship at all, but I think there is an issue.
Specifically, I believe that many musicians who study classical music, literally their whole lives, don’t realize how much time they have invested in learning the styles of classical music. and lose sight of the fact that classical music doesn’t encompass all the possibilities. Not that they are dissing other kinds of music, only that they haven’t thought of the style that way, as a vocabulary that needs to be learned.
There are probably exceptions, but I think it’s pretty common. So then some trad musician (or maybe they play blues or rock or whatever) hears some classic musician trying to play their style without having put in the time to learn the style and believe that it’s the training getting in the way.
I agree with you 100% that training in music does not diminish musicianship at all, but I think there is an issue.
Specifically, I believe that many musicians who study classical music, literally their whole lives, don’t realize how much time they have invested in learning the styles of classical music. and lose sight of the fact that classical music doesn’t encompass all the possibilities. Not that they are dissing other kinds of music, only that they haven’t thought of the style that way, as a vocabulary that needs to be learned.
There are probably exceptions, but I think it’s pretty common. So then some trad musician (or maybe they play blues or rock or whatever) hears some classic musician trying to play their style without having put in the time to learn the style and believe that it’s the training getting in the way.
Fair points, highland-piper. Certainly, there are classically-trained players who, when starting out in Irish traditional music (or whatever other non-Classical style they decide to pick up), don’t initially appreciate the importance of style and idiom, and even a few who try to lord their background over people who are more accomplished and experienced than them in playing ITM.
Many more of us, though, quietly get to work learning the new style by listening like crazy, and trying to adapt the skills we already have to acquire the new ones. A firm grounding in music theory can help that process go a lot quicker.
My point is that there are people with and without Classical training who cling to their prior notion of how to play things regardless of whether it fits a given tune/genre/audience; one shouldn’t automatically blame their training. Opinionated people tend to be that way from the cradle to the grave regardless of what they’re exposed to in between.
Back in music school, one of my music theory professors was a disciple of Frank Zappa and a composer of avant-garde electronic music, who showed us how melody, harmony, and form work in lots of different contexts, not just “Classical” music. My other favorite theory professor was/is a respected authority on Greek Orthodox liturgical music, which, as it happens, diverged from the rest of Western music about 1,000 years ago; she too would have been appalled for any of her students to end up playing every piece of music they encountered in the style of, say, Schubert (excepting actual Schubert compositions).
One of my dumb party tricks, back in the day, was playing tunes from Mahler and Dvorak symphonies on the accordion, in really bad polka style(*). My music-major pals always got the joke (such as it was). You’re supposed to play Handel in the style of Handel, Mahler in the style of Mahler, and German polkas in the style of German polkas.
Cheers,
Mick
(*) Mahler and Dvorak actually both wrote some fine polkas. Those weren’t what I played on the accordion. [sigh]
I agree with all that.
There are some people who just won’t listen (to the music or to words…) but for people who have the classical background who are open to learning, I think pointing out that they really have spent a lot of time learning “how Mozart goes” it can help them understand.
continuing in agreement. some things ARE immutable…a cadence is a cadence, a phrase is a phrase, meter is meter, tempo is tempo, pitch is pitch. To propose that training in musicianship ruins traditional aspects of interpretation is simply pure http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=bollocks&submit=Submit 
There’s such a stigma about trad masters who cross styles. Versatility is expected from musicians in other endeavours. Baroque one gig, BeBop the next, Flamenco next tuesday. big deal. But when pipers (in general) push the boundary, they get cries of ‘fraud’, ‘cheap-trick’, yadda yadda yadda. 
Are you suggesting that some traditional musicians are… REACTIONARY? [shudder] Don’t be surprised if someone challenges you to a duel over that statement, but with any luck the weapon leveled at you will date from 1710 or so, and will have really unreliable moving parts. 
But I digress. I suppose the legitimate beef is when people haul out their Flamenco style in the middle of “Gander in the Pratie Hole.” But then again, so what if you do? It doesn’t damage the integrity of the zillion other performances of that tune, past, present and future.
So, I guess the truly legitimate beef is playing the wrong style because that’s all you know how to do, versus making an educated decision to push boundaries in order to breathe new life into warhorses.
Yours in further agreement,
Mick
The only thing that is “right” is doing what you enjoy. If you like it and if other people like it then it will continue on. If people don’t like it then it will die of it’s own accord.
I think it’s really interesting that if you talk with Highland pipers, no one really cares all that much for how people did it in the past. A few academic types. But by and large “the past” is the last contest you went to, and “ancient history” is Strathclyde Police from 1981 to 1991.
It’s really a completely different mindset – the pervasiveness of competitions makes us all focus on what we’re doing, and how we’re going to change it to do better at the next contest. By and large that keeps us too busy to spend too much time reflecting on the way things were…
Well, in a larger sense, I am suggesting that it is the rare musician that can see beyond styles, have the chops to get there, and keep their ego in check long enough to realize that theyre simply a conduit for larger things…
It takes courage.
What we call ‘Hidebound Traditionalism’ was doubtlessly once upon a time shockingly new and experimental. All music was once ‘new’! It was either the appeal to fellow practitioners, students, rivals, imitators, the target demographic, or commercial circumstances, that enabled its continuation and codification into a narrowly definable genre, such as ITM. Would anyone today really know ‘Mack the Knife’ if it wasnt for the Kurt Weill foundation scholarship grant for composers??
Sorry to belabor, but that is one relevant point. There’s a difference between absorbing so much of an aesthetic to allow one to push the boundaries from within, versus overlaying external aesthetics which kinda ‘pretend’ to push boundaries from without…
I wouldn’t claim ‘education’ ruins musicianship. It’s only when someone misinterprets theories for rules, and judges the music from a perspective which didn’t forge the music. Hence my quoting of the C versus C sharp question. At it’s very core, though admittedly subtle, there’s a non-mutual understanding of what makes up a pitch or a note. Expand that into the concepts of “keys” and now you have why this even came up in this thread. The most important question for a traditional musician is not “what key is it in?” but “how does it go?”…
Its a good point,if you push a boundary from the outside you make whats inside smaller but pushing from the inside makes it bigger. but it should not concern 99.9% of us anyway . We should leave the boundary pushing to the likes of the Paddy Keenan.s and Seamus Ennis’s of the trad world. Its enough from most of us just to play well.
Heres a good example of boundary pushing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saAfoCMuazU
RORY
Yah, but you could pull from the outside, instead of pushing.
My example is going to be fiddler Jamie Laval. He started out as a violinist and got interested in “celtic” fiddle. The first time I saw him perform he said something like they weren’t trying to play “authentic” Scottish or Irish fiddle, but things that were inspired by tradition that they hoped we liked it anyway. I really did like it.
In the years since then he as studied Scottish idiom in depth. Particularly Scottish highland piping. What he plays today isn’t traditional Scottish fiddle, but it’s really good. Speaking as a piper, he has done a phenomenal job of translating Highland pipe style onto fiddle – that’s not really “the tradition” but so what? He does a lot more too. There are clips on his website if it sounds interesting: http://www.jamielaval.com/listen.html
It may well be that some Irish trad musicians never drew a distinction between C and C#, but I’m pretty sure some of them have. Certainly in the parallel Scottish tradition fiddlers have been composing wrt key signatures for more than 200 years, which is definitely long enough to qualify as traditional, imo.
re C/C#… the French chabrette has a neutral note as its upper leading note, neither sharp nor natural…in between…