Memorize=better sound...?

[Cayden]

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.

[Bloomfield]

I don't want to get into more than I should, but just a couple of comments.

SInce I feel I need to respond to this remarks:

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?

But you were not talking about "Writers" you said

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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 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.

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.

Ok, this got longer than I meant it to. Best,

[Bloomfield]

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.

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!

[antstastegood]

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.

[Caj]

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.

Caj

[colomon]

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.

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'?).

[illuminatus99]

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.

[colomon]

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.

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.

[janice]

Read "Musicking" by Cristopher Small (1998)...

[NicoMoreno]

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.

It never is a matter of how you learned it.

[riasgt]

To all who pointed out the difference between writing and transcribing, it was indeed the word transcribing I should have used.

Writers of music are human and mistakes are made

[Damn symantics!]

Bloomfield, you have gone that next step after as you say "hitting the wall." I am still new to this realm of music and I do feel like I have hit a wall. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a local group of musicians who are open to newbies sitting in.

My resource for picking up session tunes -outside the spill over of tunes from my fifing experiences- has been exclusively sheet music. Until other options appear, I'm stuck with what's available. To echo another thread here recently: You would think in Eastern Massachusetts there would be more Irish sessions and ITM teachers than you could shake a stick at. Alas, I have not found it to be the case, at least in my area.

As I read your last reply, I kept hearing a voice in my head saying, "Use the Force Luke . . ."

[Cayden]

Written tunes as an aid for the memory and to learn phrases the ear failed to pick up can be useful. Breandan Breathnach who said this, was right ofcourse as he usually was in matters of Irish music [read up in 'The Use of Notation in Irish Traditional Music']. Whole strings of musicians used notations, hundreds and hundreds of tunes written for their pupils by Leo Rowsome, Padraig O Keeffe, Tom Billy Murphy etc were recently published in books, and aren't we lucky they used notations so we have their tunes.
These discussion always derail at the point where some people can't make the distinction between learning tunes from music and learnign the actual music by ear. I have actually at this point enough of the issue.
Personally I don't bother anymore with tunes I have to sit down for and commit to memory, not worth the hassle and I will probably forgot I ever learned them within the week. I learn tunes as they come, today I learned 'Crehan's Banbhs', a reel composed by Junior Crehan I wrote down some years ago, but I never played it. I heard it on a tape and it stuck without any effort.
Often I play tunes I have not previously played or even heard in sessions, sometimes I come home without a clue what they were, if I picked up the name I may be able to lift the bones of them out of a book or tunedb. The best way to learn is looking up a tune in a book but ending up finding a tune you heard recently on the same page and then learnign that, that usually works very well for me.
Also I may arrive home with a tune picked up, knowing it will be lost the next day I sometimes record them before going to sleep [one of these tunes, the White Petticoat I committed to Clips and Snips if you care for an example, I hadn't played it before nor have I played it since but I took it home that night, there's having casual tunes for you].
People learn in different ways, memorising, learning by heart, fine but if you can, let tunes grow on you. In my experience they are more likely to get a life of their own.

[colomon]

As I read your last reply, I kept hearing a voice in my head saying, "Use the Force Luke . . ."

How about, "Use the CD, Luke..."? It's definitely not as good as having people there to play the tune for you, but there are a lot of good CDs that would be a decent substitute. At the moment, I'm particularly fond of "The Mountain Road", "Music at Matt Molloy's", and "Island to Island".

[Dictyranger]

As I read your last reply, I kept hearing a voice in my head saying, "Use the Force Luke . . ."

How about, "Use the CD, Luke..."? It's definitely not as good as having people there to play the tune for you, but there are a lot of good CDs that would be a decent substitute. At the moment, I'm particularly fond of "The Mountain Road", "Music at Matt Molloy's", and "Island to Island".

Seconded. I'm also a fairly new player (~5 mos.), but I've been listening to IrTrad music for about twenty years. I also have some other mental repetoire from my checkered hobby career (fife-and-drum, medieval-reeneactment.) Many of the songs in the tutors I'm learning from are ones that I know cold, often in several variations.

Like Bloomfield described above, I can usually work these out crudely on the whistle in about half an hour, with a slight assist from the sheet music. It still takes me a while to play them smoothly and with good rhythm, but I know what I should sound like...it's just a matter of getting my fingers coordinated with my brain.

My current learning piece is Ryan's Slip Jig, which I cannot imagine learning correctly from sheet music, because of the odd rhythm. However, the sheet music was useful for figuring out exactly what notes were being played in the faster B part.

Lately, I've had an odd experience while playing tunes I know well. I've just about mastered cuts and taps, but I don't have a handle on the harder ornaments like rolls yet. As I'm playing, some notes will feel sort of...empty, like there should be an ornament there. I expect that the version living in my head does have an ornament on that note, and I'm now just realizing it.

Dicty

[FJohnSharp]

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.

Ok, this got longer than I meant it to. Best,

I wonder why you cannot make the sheet-learned tunes sound "alive' even after playing them awhile. I mean, if you take the base tune that you already know, and then listen to someone from whom you might have ear-learned it, can you not modify what you've learned and make it better? I fnd myself taking something I've learned and after hearing someone play it on a CD, trying to imitate that version.