Sheet music for slow air..

[jkrazy52]

Jkrazy52 - I have two Mel Bay books already. All I can say to anyone, is stay away from these. These are utterly awful. They are not even written by flute players, and just seem to propagate that awful commercial enterprise with impeccable marketing that Mel Bay books are very good at. I'm really disappointed in these and have resolved to stick with the more conventional recommendations on this forum. I don't know if their slow airs are any different - but I'd dread the disappointment recurring ... from having two of these books already!

James, consider the music notation in the Mel Bay book more as a starting reference. I enjoyed it, but ITM is not my 'be-all' of music. As everyone else suggests, listening to good players is your best bet. Notation is more of a 'suggestion', or bare bones on which to build.

[keithsandra]

Amhran na Leabhan, or Cuan Bheil Inse, is a lament for the lost books of Thomas Rua, school teacher and poet. Apparently he was moving from one town to another when the barge carrying all his music, books and poems, his lifetime's work one assumes, tipped over on a canal and everything was lost - his entire library. Unfortunately, I didn't identify the source of this information when I noted it on the music I have for it. I got the music from O'Canainn's Traditional Slow Airs of Ireland. (Great book).

PS: I see I made a note to myself that Conal O'Grada plays it as well as Brian McCoy of The Kells.

K.

[keithsandra]

I can send the written music by email to you James, and anyone else who's interested, if you PM me your email address -unless someone can tell me how to get the image out of Picasa on to James' PM? Picasa doesn't even give me an URL to presumably be able to send it here.

K.

[James_Alto]

Many thanks for the background and details about the song - that's just fascinating. At least Thomas would have been consoled by such a beautiful song.

I'll send my PM!

JKrazy52 - I agree with you, however I think the Mel Bay books are actually substandard. They don't take into account that the music is intended for flute (clarinet, trombone etc). It just seems to be generically transcribed to be playable, rather than even offer the right key to the skeleton closet of the music...

I've settled on some of the other books referenced here - can't wait to see them.

[pancelticpiper]

Just keep in mind that Irish sean nos airs cannot be learnt from sheet music alone, because these airs are performed in a rubato which is impractical to notate. (Yes it could be notated, but the notation would look very strange and be quite difficult to sightread.)

Far better to leave sheet music out of it, and learn the airs by listening to a recording (of a good authentic player) and singing along. It takes me quite a few repetitions to really get an air in my head, but once I do I have it.

One aspect of sean nos airs is their flexibility: you never play them the same way twice. The tune is not set in concrete but more of a general notion.

[benhall.1]

Just keep in mind that Irish sean nos airs cannot be learnt from sheet music alone, because these airs are performed in a rubato which is impractical to notate. (Yes it could be notated, but the notation would look very strange and be quite difficult to sightread.)

To me, this paragraph outlines the nub of it, regarding slow airs. It's a simplified way of saying what's really going on with slow airs, because that word "rubato" implies to classical musicians that the timing is free. But it isn't. Most (if not all) slow airs, in my experience, have their own very distinct rhythms. There is, kind of, a framework, outside of which you'd just be playing it wrong, but inside of which there is a degree of flexibility and plenty of room for expression.

In case anyone thinks I'm disagreeing, I'm not. I'm agreeing with you, strongly, Richard. But this strong rhythmic quality of slow airs, that's so hard to pin down, fascinates me.

[DrPhill]

I am far less qualified than Ben so treat my views with less weight.

The timing of airs also fascinates me, as airs are what I really like to play and listen to. I find that the renditions which are performed completely free of structure nowhere near as satisfying as those with a reasonable degree of structure. I have listened to airs by people who claim that completely free timing is needed for airs, and I have found such renditions very hard to appreciate.

I rationalise this by assuming that some form of rhythm is intrinsic to music, and that departure from the rhythm can be used as a deliberate enhancement. For this to work a strong expectation of the rhythm must be set up first in the audience, by adherence to the rhythm. Only then can the divergence from the 'expected' rhythm have a significant impact. This may work best at the subconscious level.

My own approach is to practice rigorously to a metronome until I can manage 'strict' timing, and only then allow myself to play 'loose timing'. I find that mostly I rearrange the note lengths, still within the rhythm, as if shortening or lengthening words within a song, rather than adding or removing beats from the rhythm entirely. This seems to happen almost entirely subconsciously, and usually still works when playing accompanied ("You are not playing what it says on the sheet, but it works nicely. Play it again and I will write it down. Oh, that is different to what you played last time..... still good but different. Was that a crotchet or a quaver on the B? Play it again. Oh I think you just went back to the first version......" ).

The most common change to beat count is at the end of 'verses' or 'phrases' where there tend to be long sustained notes. Here the lengths seem to vary (from one day to the next), as do the 'dramatic pauses' afterward.......

But, as I noted above, I am far from expert. I could be doing it all wrong.

[pancelticpiper]

from The New College Encyclopedia of Music:

Rubato, literally "robbed", controlled flexibility of tempo by which notes are deprived of part of their length by slight quickening of the tempo, or given more than their strict length by slight slowing.

Rubato doesn't mean random timing.

When I learn sean nos airs I learn them by ear and I don't think at all about barlines or note values but about phrases. The phrases have their own rythmic logic, which however doesn't relate to any metronomic beat. The pauses between phrases can be shortened or lengthened at will, but the phrases themselves want to sound a certain way, and seem to be played with a fair amount of consistency from player to player.

What's interesting (to me at least) is what happened with one air which I learned from a clueless player. He had no sense of phrasing at all but played the air as a continuous succession of notes. It made no musical sense to me at all. So, as I practiced it, I strove to identify the phrases, to mark them out from one another. So I created my own way of playing it, my best guess as to how the air was supposed to sound. The interesting part was that when a couple years later I finally heard a traditional player playing the air, it was fairly close to what I had come up with.

[killthemessenger]

What's interesting (to me at least) is what happened with one air which I learned from a clueless player. He had no sense of phrasing at all but played the air as a continuous succession of notes. It made no musical sense to me at all. So, as I practiced it, I strove to identify the phrases, to mark them out from one another. So I created my own way of playing it, my best guess as to how the air was supposed to sound. The interesting part was that when a couple years later I finally heard a traditional player playing the air, it was fairly close to what I had come up with.

I mostly play Baroque and folk music, which seldom has any phrasing marks - the phrasing marks in Baroque music are usually slurs rather than phrases. Early baroque music often has no indications of any kind. So you're usually faced with a string of notes, often with a lot of passage work which has no pauses of any kind, to make sense of. And interestingly, most musicians will come up with very similar solutions to the majority of situations. It's fascinating rehearsing with other people when they have a different view of the phrasing of a passage, and leads to a lot of interesting discussion about performance.

When I do occasionally play modern pieces (I'm presently working on Invocation at Midsummer by Peter Crossley-Holland) I am always struck by how over-specified the notation is. There is far less freedom for the musician. Often this is good, because especially in the area of phrasing, the composer no doubt had a very clear view of what he was attempting to say, and it may be quite counter-intuitive until you get the hang of it. But often the rallentandos, decrescendos and other expression marks can be quite frustrating, because you'd like to make the piece more your own.

[JackCampin]

I have listened to airs by people who claim that completely free timing is needed for airs, and I have found such renditions very hard to appreciate.

Sometimes this means that there is a simpler, more metrically regular version of the tune in the mind of the player and their intended audience - particularly if the air is based on a song. If you don't know this melodic core you won't be able to appreciate or play the more elaborated version.

This why people who try to learn slow air playing by listening to the minute details of what traditional players do on record are usually on a hiding to nothing. They end up with a mechanical reproduction of what they've heard, with no understanding behind it.

I wouldn't attempt to play any air based on an Irish-language sean-nos song. I'll leave that to people who understand what it means.

[david_h]

I often can't appreciate the 'patterns' in slow airs. Playing a recording at two or three times the normal speed usually helps. I seem to remember reading somewhere that tunes played much too slowly are frequently unrecognisable, and that its something to do with the way our brains work.

[Pipe Bender]

I can send the written music by email to you James, and anyone else who's interested, if you PM me your email address -unless someone can tell me how to get the image out of Picasa on to James' PM? Picasa doesn't even give me an URL to presumably be able to send it here.K.

I have been using Picasa Web Albums for sharing family photos and it worked fine as an image source for this Forum as well. I'm on Windows 7 so right clinking on a picture did not have "Properties," but instead I chose "Copy Image Location" to place after "Img" in this Forum's "Post a reply page" and that worked for me.

[keithsandra]

Thanks Pipe Bender. I didn't find "Copy Image Location" on my Picasa, nor an URL in Properties. So, I did as our CnF experts told us many moons ago that the dimwitted like me should do, and lo and behold, I have an URL, and have posted it above. Let's hope it works.

EDIT: I see its a small image! SOB. Still, it's my first image posting, so maybe next time I can get the size right too ...

K.

[Denny]

yer pointing at the thumbnail version (by removing the "thumb_" and the "?" from your link and putting image tags around it...)

[Steve Bliven]

And there's a lovely flute version of it on Conal O Grada's "Cnoc Bui"...

Best wishes.

Stee