Young people can play most instruments very well if they apply themselves. There are many child prodigies that can really play technically perfect but I have never really listened to them. Usually it just doesn’t seem to have feeling. As mentioned on another thread some people can play or sing music with depth. Cisco Huston is probably not technically great, but I can sense that he feels the music and places experiences behind his tone. Young artists seem to have power and energy, but often seem without direction, lashing out without direction.
It frightens me that with today’s MTV videos (okay even that is getting old), that no one wants to see, and therefore hear, an old geezer. Look at the most popular music and you will find three week old CDs with teenager singers.
So my question, can young players really give music the depth that makes good music lasting?
My guess is that it’s as rare to find a child musician who can give a piece real depth as it is to find a child actor who doesn’t remind us of the kid who played the young Anakin Skywalker.
My sentiments too. How I wish I’d acquired the skills to play ITM when I was young. Who cares if I’d been crap for 20 years, as long as I eventually got myself well-steeped in the tradition (cliche there - sorry! ). And it would have been much easier had I been a whizz-kid on my instrument first - one less aspect to worry about!
It depends on who the player is and where they come from (…influences etc…). I’ve known quite a few young players who have shown great deph of feeling behind their music… but then, their parents and other older members of their families and friends were/are musicians, and I am sure that mave have had a lot to do with it.
That’s a good question. I think that in some cases technically accomplished but emotionless young players become more technically accomplished, emotionless older players. Yoyo Ma comes to mind – he’s probably the most technically accomplished cellist around today, and he’s an incredible interpreter of Baroque music and some other stuff, but IMO can’t play Romantic music worth a damn. Glenn Gould was the same way – the moment the music came to depend more heavily on interpretation than on execution, he was a fish out of water. (I know some will take issue with the idea that Baroque music doesn’t take any feeling – I’m not saying that at all, but the ratio of technical requirements to emotional requirements in solo playing is much higher in Baroque music than in Romantic music.)
Then, take someone like Ofra Harnoy or Midoori. Both very good technical players, actually Midoori is unbelievable, but they can just make me weep with the feeling they put into their music. I know Ofra was a soloist when she was about 14 or 15, and I saw Midoori when she was about 12. They both had “it” at a very early age, and I think they have something that can’t be taught.
I think that playing with emotion is something that’s more innate than technical skills, and therefore, much harder to pick up. Of course anyone who puts forth the effort to become a professional musician has a deep feeling for the music, but communicating that feeling is an entirely different thing.
chas, I could well imagine someone not being able to play Romantic composers not because the music requires more emotional expressiveness in interpretation, but because those particular composers do not speak to that person. I have definitely listened to fewer composers from that category than from earlier ones. I have felt very emotionally affected by earlier music, I am thinking of Bach in particular. I think that the emotional depth and expression requirement could not be less for any kind of music. Certainly the style of expression is different, but I think the requirement is equal. It has been a very long time since I listened to Glenn Gould, but I recall being very disappointed by his playing when I listened to it long ago. It was something by Bach, but I have no idea what.
Gould interpreted Bach as if he were building a cathederal. The effect is structural, angular, strong, and graceful. It has the same immediacy of emotion as a stone, but the sum of many stones becomes an artful accomplishment.
Gould’s playing speaks, not to my angst or love or lusts, but to the part of me that is marked with the handprint of God.
It seems any musician, technically proficient or not, plays what they feel. However, not all feelings are common to all tunes, nor felt with the depth by all players. The young play light, joy, prancing, and dancing with an energy that many geezers have lost. The ‘vintage’ player can play loss, regret, frustration, and resignation with the depth that only a lifetime produces. However, catch the younger player’s release at the loss of his or her first love… then you’ll hear it, in slow air or even their most frantic jig. Perhaps, the main difference is the older generation has had time to master their feelings, and store them up and bring them out as the repetoire requires. While younger players have less skills managing their own emotions so we fail to see it when they are trying to dance at a wake.
Also each group has his own developmental tasks to accomplish as it passes from Childhood, to puberty, to young adult, to parent, and onward. If you look to youth, remember what you felt when young, what you yearned for. As a teen, I wanted power, not over others, but the power of standing on my own, to glory in the freedom to go and do as I pleased. I felt anger with what my elders had done with my world. I felt wonder at all of life’s possiblilities. If we elders appraise a teen’s play, we should listen for their emotions, and not the emotions dominant of our stage of life. As our numbers of days lengthen, so does the complexity and ambivalence of our emotional life. Each moment becomes more and more a mix of contradictory feelings. So we listen for that in the music, but simple joy, exhilaration of the race, or disappointment, may seem shallow to us. So the kid who plays like lightening in a bottle, or rage on wheels, may be tomorrow’s respected geezer as life works out its destiny on the heart from which the music flows.
Just my thought on how the young and the old can …
There are so many ways to get at this, young musicians are often looking to find a form, to let their energy out. At an early age people seem to be able to absorb a lot, we’ve all seen children able to play with technicial brilliance but no feeling whatsoever, just playing back what they’ve rehearsed. On the other hand I have encountered young (10-12) people who had the technique but als othe ability to amaze with musical insights just bubbling up in their minds. I strongly feel the latter is closely tied to the way music was aquired, in all case I encountered music was absorbed from the surroundings as aprt of a continuity stretching back generations.
(I am wondering here did my remarks in another thread, the future face of Irish music, prompt this discussion. I made a remark there prompted by something related to this, hearing the music there I thought of John Kelly’s remark: ‘this is all fine but where’s the cry of the corncrake on the mountain?’, where does this come from, what’s it tied to, what experiences does this represent, where’s the footprint of the players who handed it down. What I find in the playing of some young people I hear wasn’t there, not in what I heard anyway.)
I also think Lee has a strong case, I remember playing in England with pipemaker Geoff Wooff during the late 80s, a young piper came up to us asking how we managed to play with such feeling and emotion. Stopping short of telling him what was going on in our heads at that time Geoff told him to wait, raise a few children, care for them, wipe their arses, bury a few loved ones, live life. That would do the trick. Fifteen years on that young man got what he wanted anyway, not something you can ‘learn’ or ‘teach’.
I remember hearing someone say “You can’t play the Blues unless you’ve lived the Blues”
And then, there’s the Pinkard and Bowden song about “not being able to sing country if you’ve never stepped in cow shit behind the barn…”
I do think it’s the rare youth who has enough life experience to FEEL the music and put that emotion into it. I grew up playing piano, and I was technically pretty good. But it wasn’t until I was an adult, and really learned how to LISTEN to music, that I feel I became a good musician (and I’m not saying I’m that good of one now). For me, it comes from having the confidence that I know the technical stuff well enough to let my soul come through, instead of worrying about how I’m making the next notes, etc.
And - again - I think it’s a rare youth that has that type of confidence.
I’ve also had the privilage of watch some great musicians “grow up”. In most cases, it’s also the journey of them “finding themselves” - knowing what they are good at and incorporating that in their work to make the songs their own, instead of playing as another would.
The whole thread made me think of it. Between Dale’s introduction and wombat and your comments, I started to think of modern music and ITM. ITM (and fife music for that matter) amazes me in the fact that in one room there will be children adults and teens all interacting with each other. In modern society it seems that people try to find any chance they can get to drive a wedge between people of different ages. I think that this interaction keeps the music lively.
Pop music on the other hand, Seems to be one dimensional and is not inclusive. Modern recording techniques and instruments have made it so that a performer can sound better with less talent. Add to this the age range that the industry looks for and you end up with a limited perspective (in both directions of the age spectrum) and average music. Do you think that Leadbelly would ever get a recording contract today?
I think it’s this what gives traditional music (and I use ‘traditional’ in it’s original sense, referring to how it’s handed on) it’s particular flavour.
I realise it’s very hard to bring across what I mean if you haven’t actually seen it at work but the whole social interaction, the relations etc is part and parcel of this music. I was afraid I sounded unduly negative in Dale’s thread and I didn’t want to knock it on the head but what Iheard (in the one track I listened to) was a bunch of kids who put a lot of work into learning the tunes and playing well. But there was also a lot I didn’t hear that I do hear in at least some young players here, what I heard was more a ‘performance’ while the music I am used to is part of something bigger.
A long time ago I quoted an experience here with one of my piping students, she’s Brid O Donohue’s eldest daughter and has played the whislte since she was 4 (she was 12 at the time). I am teaching her the pipes and at the time I gave her the West Wind, pretty straight forward three aprt reel in G from the playing of Willie Clancy (who in fact is a relation of her). The way it works is I play the tune while the student picks it up by ear. First time around she was picking out the bones, the important notes, filling out the tune as we were going along. She basically had the tune second time around but going through the third part she didn’t have it as I had it but filled in around the important notes as she went along what came out was a variation folding back both the melody and the rhythm and it was utterly brilliant, pure music worthy of willie Clancy himself. It knocked my socks off, it was totally wonderful. and above all it was totally unself conscious, in fact she didn’t know what she was doing at all, it jsut came out. It’s that sort of being inside the music I am referring to, that instinctive understanding of structure and melody that only comes from being around it a very long time while interacting with all sorts of players from all generations.
I can think of other examples, 14 year old Anne Ruth Benagh playing the Dear Irish Boy on the whistle as she learned it from her grandfather Tommy McCarthy, I have seen Edel Fox honing her skills since she was 11 or 12 (twenty two now), Paddy Canny grandchildren and loads and loads more.
I see it in my own son who has a head full of tunes, and if only he’d work at it he could bring them out too. But I remember finding him discussing cocnertinas with Jackie Daly in the local supermarket when he was 8, he goes to Noel Hill for his classes and is comfortable enough to sit down with Kitty Hayes for a tune.
You get the picture, before I ramble on too long. I seem to come back to the same point, learning by example, by absorbtion. I don’t think you can beat it in music.
I have Glenn Gould’s early interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and I have versions by others too. He does play fast and loose by the usual standards (only profound scholarship of the sort I’m not prepared to undertake will tell me whether he’s “legit” or out of order!), but his playing is supremely good and he’s obviously committed to Bach with love and enthusiasm. I’ve always professed to reject the playing of Alfred Brendel on the grounds that it’s rather musty and didactic. But the other day I switched on Radio 3 part-way through a Beethoven piano recital and was moved by the performance. It wasn’t till the end that I found out that it was Brendel (of course!). Open your mind and predigest nothing!!
I’m a bit worried by the modern trend in “commercial” ITM towards the speed-and-slickness culture of the young bucks, personified by the likes of McGoldrick, Lunasa and the rest. They are technically supremely proficient (nowt wrong with that…) and play with superb fearlessness and panache. But if you ask me whether I’d rather listen to them, or a couple of old boys scraping away slightly out of tune and with a few bum notes, yet with that indefinable “heart and soul,” I know what my answer would be. But maybe they were young bucks themselves once upon a time!
I see two interwoven themes here. One is the theme of youth and the affect of aging on music. The other is the importance of time and place.
I suppose it’s a bit of a cliche that musicians tend to start out as flashy and technically proficient when they are young and acquire depth with age and experience. This is true enough as far as it goes. But some people are technically proficient when young and stay shallow all their musical lives. My guess is that the musicians who acquire depth later in life by and large recognise it when they are young. Just being alive won’t give you depth; you have to be on a quest.
Another thing is that certain very gifted musicians seem to be highly expressive from their first flowering. Some get more so with age but occasionally really young people seem to have a talent for it.
Another thing that actually seems at odds with these observations is that we often remember musicians best by the music they make in their first flowering. That might be in their teens, is usually in their twenties but could be later for those discovered late. I don’t mean that first records are best although often they are. I mean that the first peak is often best remembered. People like Coltrane, Miles Davis and Dylan rather cheated this tendency by reinventing themselves several times. I don’t think this is necessarily at odds with the idea that we improve in depth with experience. People have often been preparing for years for their first real recording and the outpouring of energy and novelty of sound is maybe something they won’t quite repeat. (A lot of jazz musicians are really grumpy that people only buy their first great records: ‘I play much better then that now.’
Now think of the influence of time and place. It makes sense that people born into societies that still retain quite a bit of their traditional structure tend to have a better early understanding of the depth of the music of that culture. I think Peter was describing this and the way it intersects with young people already sensitive to depth. I think African music is so vibrant today because so many societies still have a strong sense of tradition.
Unsurprisingly, places that involve a mixing of ethnic groups and cultures seem particularly suitable for producing new styles. New Orleans, New York, parts of Brasil, Liverpool in the early 60s are obvious examples of places where exciting new musics have developed. If you grow up in that kind of place, you are very well-placed to fuse ideas from an early age; but only if you can sense what is worth fusing with what, you still need that sense of being able to recognise and seek depth. Growing up in post WWII-Melbourne was like this both musically and in terms of literature, art and scholarship.
Just a final remark about the smooth facile styles as against the rougher traditional styles. This isn’t just happening in ITM, it is happening in a big way in old-timey mountain music. Compare a not-terribly-old record like the Watson Family CD with a recent offering by say Tim O’Brien or Alison Krauss. What really strikes me about these younger people is a smoothing out of the intonation, mainly in the singing but to some extent in the playing as well. Now, it wouldn’t surprise me if an album like Songs From the Mountain would have bombed completely commercially if O’Brien had a real backwoods yelp in his voice. It might have sunk without trace. But I’m familiar with the originals of those songs and I miss the funky intonation. I guess to modern ears the old stuff just sounds out of tune. But what do folks in the mountains think of the sanitised versions of their music popular today? What’s bad, I think, is not that smoother versions exist and are popular, although I wonder how many Uncle Dave Macon or Doc Boggs albums will be sold on the basis of them. What bothers me is that people will come to think of the earlier rougher modal versions as inferior, as crude approximations to something better, rather than as wonderful expressions of the very best a time and place had to offer and as perfect performances in their own terms.
I agree with you things are too complex to catch easily and the examples I gave work in Irish music because of it’s social contexts etc but may not apply everywhere. I imagine they would apply in old time music.
It is a worry that some styles become to be seen as inferior. It’s worse even when the players themselves start feeling they are in fact less proficient than the younger generation and get discouraged to an extend they down instruments. A few of us still remember Micho Russell trying to learn rolls off us as he was made to feel his playing wasn’t up to scratch without them. I played at a concert with Kitty Hayes some a few years ago, Noel Hill was on after us and whiel he was doing his Bucks of Oranmore Kitty leaned over and said to me ‘I am glad we have our bit done, I wouldn’t have dared playing after that, I would have looked a right fool’. While really, both Kitty and Micho’s music is so rich in little rhythmical complexities and musical spirit, I’d take it over most of today’s virtuosos any time.
On the other hand we must remember there’s a cycle to these things, while some younger crowds are still going towards more complexity and fusion already there’s a movement looking towards the players past for inspiration.
). And it would have been much easier had I been a whizz-kid on my instrument first - one less aspect to worry about!
I’m sure it is not that! It just didn’t do anything for me.