Notes on accompanying Irish tunes

1, play the rhythm of the melody, like a good bodhran player.

2, The emphasis falls on the back beat. To me as a classical muso, that means beats 2+4 in common time (4 4) or the quaver off-beat. To my Irish fiddler mate, emphasising the back beat means the emphasis falls part way through the note he is playing, towards the back of the beat. I'm trying to think of words I can use to remind myself - a very relaxed, lagging behind, almost falling over feel. It sounds like an exercise in letting rhythm flow.

Sabbatical

This period of enforced time off has been much easier to deal with if I consider it a sabbatical.

Wikipedia says....
"In the modern sense, one takes a sabbatical typically to merely take a break from work or to fulfill some goal, e.g., writing a book or traveling."

My goal was to gain the movement back in my hand. Initially it felt like I had no choice, I had to do this operation. I dislike the experience of an op intensely so I was pretty unhappy about this. However if I look on it as a choice then it becomes much less onerous.

This time off also provided a break, a stop. This gave me thinking time - this blog came out - and a chance to re-evaluate. It's made me change my musical practises, my musical practise. I have much more music in my head not just my hands now. It's the first time I've really felt positive about an operation recovery experience.

Folk music research - new routes

What did I say? That I was looking for new routes to explore music. And look what has turned up: randomly following links I came across Lori Watson (www.loriwatson.co.uk) and the phd she is currently working on - Contemporary Innovation and Scottish Traditional Music (working title) (introduction online here).

This is a really interesting read for any performer wanting to tread the lines between supporting and conserving the tradition, meanwhile making their own headway with new material and approaches.

Lori also referenced other folk music researchers...

Nigel Gatherer (www.nigelgatherer.com) and his brief but very informative article on session etiquette (online here). I can vouch from personal experience that very similar things happen in the south of England as well.

Philip Bohlman and his article Continually Reshaping The Present: New Traditional Tunes In Scotland, published 1988. If you know where I can get a copy please leave me a comment.

Fintan Vallely, 1999: 345 http://homepage.eircom.net/~imusic/


Other people I may look up:
Folk music studies (Professor Allan Moore) at University of Surrey

Other sources I will probably use:

• The Journal of Music in Ireland www.thejmi.com
• Links from the National Folk Music Fund www.nfmfund.org
• Welsh folk music folk research at Bangor University www.bangor.ac.uk/music/research/groups_welshmusic.php.en
• Martin Nail's website with lots of onlien resources for English folk music including an education section: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/martin.nail/Folkmus.htm
• The National Centre for English Cultural Tradition www.shef.ac.uk/natcect/index.html
• Of course the Newcastle University Folk and Traditional Music Course www.ncl.ac.uk/undergraduate/course/W340

I just came across another trad music blog for future research:
http://myblogs.sunderland.ac.uk/blogs/newenglishfolk/

Harp technique - striking versus plucking

There are two main harp techniques: striking versus plucking. They loosely correlate: striking / folk / unprepared and plucked / classical / prepared. Here is a bit more on each technique.

Plucking:

• All fingers are placed on the strings before they are needed
• The strings are put under tension and the sound happens when the strings are released (think archery)
• Sound comes from a negative action (though you could argue that 'releasing the string' is a positive action)
  
• Your fingers are always completely prepared, this works best for complete, fixed arrangements (classical performance practice)
• This is a very consistent systematic method of playing - great for learning from score and for sight-reading
  
• Very close attention is paid to hand shapes
• Process for each note takes longer - place => pressure => release => relax
• It's important to have a good contact on each string before you play for security and...
  
• You have lots of sensory feedback from the string for tone and volume

This is particularly important for heavier strung instruments - you need this technique to get the sound out. For pedal harps, the tension in strings is equal to the weight of double Decker bus. Extra strength is needed to make the string vibrate well - hand shape and overall preparation is more critical. The hand shape is squarer (thumbs up fingers down), fingers work in parallel to your forearm, thumb works at right angles. Every digit always fully articulates.

The modern lever harp was initially a pedal harp primer with pedal harp tension. Gradually lighter strung lever harps with more in common with the traditional clarsach have evolved. In Scotland there is lots of crossover between classical and traditional players. Many harpists play both. The received Scottish technique reflects this. I learnt my harp technique from Scottish harpers so I have a technique that basically classical.


Striking:

• Hover fingers near strings you need or lightly place finger tips, when ready strike
• Placing not so important - placing shapes less important
  
• The sound happens when you strike (no pre-release pressure required)
• Sound from a positive action (like every other instrument in the world!!)
• Hands are more relaxed, looser
• Thumb may pull into the palm not above index finger
• Ornaments (especially triplets) encourage a twistier hand shape - less square
• Lighter tension means less strictness re: hand shape - more fluidity
• Often played with nails - gentle placing is with finger tips, nails create the 'strike'

This is technique is used for wire strung and other harps with very light stringing. This includes Paraguayan harps and triple harps / arpa doppias. The narrower the string spacing, the more you have to hold your hands sideways and classical squareness is of no use. Triple harps in particular force you to turn your hands sideways, otherwise you cannot get into the inner row of strings for chromatic notes. I think improvised music may be easier with this technique as you don't have to prepare so much - you get an extra split second to think and of course when the sound comes when you do something, not when you don't. I also wonder if this is more suited to ear learning.

You definitely get a different sound quality from each technique. Playing plucked harp uses the pads of your fingers and gives you a rich, rounded sound with lots of control over volume and tone. The downside is the attack noise as you leave the string and the damping sound when you place your fingers for the next set of notes.

Playing struck harp or with nails gives you a much brighter sound with a really crisp attack. I find the attack a much more attractive sound, especially for recording. I think the crispness also makes for better ornaments.

One of the things that drew me to the harp is I love the feel of strings under my pads. I've discovered that I love the sound of harps played with nails too. Can I do both? You can partially file finger nails to allow you to use pad or nail at the same time but apparently real nails tend to catch on gut strings. Mmm time for a new harp...!

personality - your mind in sound

Your movements are your mind in action. Your sounds are your mind in action.

personality

persona

per sona

per = you or your
sona = sound

Your sound is you.

Framework

Sound is our perception of motion, energy. All anyone can say for sure is that when we die we will become the silence that frames the sound.

Music and maths links to follow up

Maths patterns that occur in music:
the golden ratio
fibonnacci sequence

Maths patterns behind sound:
Pythagoras' theorem
Physics analysis of sound waves

Writers on music:
Boethius - De Musica
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter

Other maths/music links:
Tuning systems
Musical set theory (as developed by Milton Babbitt, Allen Forte
Transformational theory is a branch of music theory developed by David Lewin

The continuous in motion...

A little more info about medieval degrees and the Quadrivium.

In his book In primum Euclidis elementorum librum commentarii, Proclus Diadochus described the elements of the Quadrivium as:

• Arithmetic is the Discrete At Rest
• Astronomy is the Discrete In Motion
• Geometry is the Continuous At Rest
• Music is the Continuous In Motion

How good is that?

Learning by ear versus score

By ear:
It takes longer to be able to play a tune by ear
It feels more difficult
Once you have it it stays for longer
You get a great sense of feel, of the vibe of the tune

By score:
It's much quicker
You can do a much greater quantity
It's instant music - just add time
Sadly though: in one ear out the other

A friend reckons that learning tunes by score puts them in a different place in your brain. I reckon that if you memorise a tune then it ends up in the same place, whatever you started with. That said, I can only memorise a tune through listening, through earwork.

As I got faster at learning tunes, I found I didn't need to work as hard to "catch" a tune by ear and play it back. The problem was it went in short term memory only (in one ear out the other...) I still need to make an effort to learn tune in your inner ear, I don't expect that to change.

I'm finding I have many many more tunes that I can join in with than I can start. Time to start thinking about how to up the number of tunes I can start...

The study of music as a human phenomenon

There is music in every culture in the world. Whether we use it to change our state, for ritual / spiritual / religious purposes or to have a good time it is clearly pretty important to us as species. (Any anthropologists out there: is music as universal as I think it is? Is visual art also universal?)

One of the reasons I'm a musician is that is it possible to explore an inner world that is otherwise hard to reach. For me, music carries the most emotion of all the art forms. I think most people experience some form of emotional response and could describe an experience where music really touched them. As well as being moved emotionally, I sometimes have the sensation of invisible blocks moving inside me or around me - music allows me to interact with an intangible, invisible world. I can step beyond this body.

I mentioned before the distinction between a practical musician and a scholar of music. I studied music at university because I was seeking to understand this amazing stuff, not just wanting to play it. I got there and discovered that how and why it affected us was not covered at all...

Historically the academic study of music means the study of mathematical and harmonic relationships and the study of composers and composition from a very literary point of view. I didn't find either approach very satisfying in explaining why music is so important to us, nor what music does to us.

I'm still fascinated by this and I'm looking for any new leads. I've started to hear about people studying the phenomena of music through a modern scientific approach, mostly to do with how music affects the human brain or our behaviours. Of particular recent interest has been the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks (musicophilia.com) I'm on the look out for any other studies so if you know of one please leave me a comment!

Studying music: practical musicians & musical scholars

In Medieval times there was a distinction between studying music as a theoretical subject (mostly the mathematical relationships of harmony) and studying music for performance. As you might expect the scholars had a relatively high status, the players were lowly servants.

Music was studied as part of the Quadrivium (the second part of the Liberal Arts degree taught within a medieval university, the first is called the Trivium. Every scholar studied this theoretical music as part of their degree.

Boethius is one of the most well known medieval music scholars. In his work "De Musica" he classified three areas of music:
1. Musica mundana - music of the spheres/world
2. Musica humana - harmony of human body and spiritual harmony
3. Musica instrumentalis - instrumental music (including human voice)

His work illustrates the medieval view that maths and pattern could be used to understand the entire world. The Quadrivium itself is almost entirely maths: arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music (theory). Initially my degree was Joint Honours Music and Maths; my favourite module was the "Number and Proportion" music module looking at maths within music and maths associated with music. Sometimes I feel like a medieval scholar who was born a few hundred years too late.

Evolution of tune styles

Most of our traditional dance tunes are anonymous - whenever tunes are labelled "trad" this means that a, they are recognised as part of our aural tradition; b, no one has claimed them as their own, c, they are free to use, part of our shared tradition. However someone must have written them at some point and somewhere. What are the inspirations for these tunes, and why is there such a strong sense that a tune is "English" or "Irish"?

An idea that I've come across is that tunes reflect the landscape and the language / accent of the local population. While I like this idea a lot, I think only a little but likely that tunes do reflect the pace and common rhythms in our spoken language. Perhaps in some distant way tunes might reflect the way we experience the landscape, but it has to come back to the human experience.

I think that performance practise has a lot to do with where tunes feel like they come from. It's very possible to take an Irish jig, play it half to 2/3rds speed with a bit more swing and make it feel like a morris tune. If there are different dances used in each country then different ways of playing the tune will evolve with them.

I think the biggest factor is that isolated musics will evolve in their own direction and tiny intial differences will grow to much bigger ones. Musical performance practises are iterative - I hear what you do and make a tiny adjustment, so does the fiddler next door, so does the flute player etc...etc... We play together and come back towards a more unified style and then the tiny incremental changes start again, layers upon layers of revisiting blowing tiny changes into huge ones. Physicists would say: sensitive dependancy on initial conditions.

Maybe there really wasn't much of a difference between the styles initially but over years different sounds have evolved? You can certainly find early tunes, often slip jigs or single jigs, that are present in both English and Irish traditions and are old tunes in both. The next question that presents itself is what in our social history fostered the development of tunes in each area and why did those players not meet?

Also, now as more and more traditional players travel to learn from each other and hear recordings from all over, is our style becoming more unified?

Organising tune learning

I want to find a better way to organise what tunes I already know, what tunes I'm learning, and what tunes I want to learn. I don't have any system at present other than pieces of paper in folders, cds and sound files and the occasional list. I also want to organise my tunes such that they are easy to put into sets and so then play out (great practise - perhaps the best practise).

My score is already split into country and then vague tune type - the Irish tunes most of all. That has: old harp tunes, dance tunes that I've been taught by harpers, airs, dance tunes in general, songs. I'm collecting more and more dance tunes so I think I need a new way to separate these out. The obvious thing to do is to split them into rhythms - jigs, reels, hornpipes, etc... That's certainly ok for archival purposes, but doesn't solve the ongoing tune management.

Mmm back to the drawing board... maybe a list stuck on the wall? Can you tell organisation isn't my strong point...!

Learning tunes by ear

I love playing within the aural tradition because after a while it becomes very easy to take on new music, new tunes. Once you've got an established technique, if you can hear a tune accurately, then you can reproduce it. That said you have to be able to retain and reimagine the tune to be able to play it - until you can play with it, it's not yet your music. The nicest bit is that you can just absorb tunes passively, have the music on in the background and gradually the tune just becomes a landscape you know intimately. Bizarrely this can be just as helpful in helping you to learn tunes as really focused attention, so right now I get to learn tunes and write... wooo!

I've been up to the Edinburgh harp festival a few times now and the tune teaching method for trad stuff is as follows...

• hear tune about 4 times through
• teacher plays first phrase a few times, you have a go getting it
• few minutes practice while teacher comes and checks everyone has it
• go through rest of phrases in the same way, often taught by hand shape and certainly broken down into small easy chunks
• all the time consolidate what you know, through group playing or listening to teacher play again
• once melody is stitched together, add bass hand

Throughout the learning process you hear a bit, try it, hear it again, refine it. The teacher may slow it down for you if you've not caught a bit, or show you a tiny fragment at a time.

I don't like learning tunes from dots anymore because the dots don't give me the groove. This is my tune learning method from a recording...

• get familiar with tune, hearing it lots in whatever setting
• use an audio program to work phrase by phrase, listening and trying and listening and refining and listening again
• possibly use audio programs to slow it to hear where the ornaments are / any really tricky bits
• possibly transcribe it - very useful for setting fingering (I often transcribe tunes I've been taught by ear for this reason)
  
• if I have slowed it down at any point, listen to track at full speed again and get the groove at that pace (rhythmic emphasis changes at different tempo)

They're pretty similar methods really, just with different sources. I always prefer learning from a real person because they will spot problems with your technique, you'll get a better sense of the style (all those tiny variations...) and they'll pick up anything that you've misinterpreted. It's just nicer too!

English vs Irish styles part 1

There's so much to think about for this... there will be differences at various layers of the music. I'm going to analyse what I hear and try to take it apart. I hope that through making conscious observations I can target my attention more closely on different features. At the same time I just have to listen and listen and listen again - I will not get an instinctive ability with the different through conscious listening. It is an unconscious skill I am building.

Things that I know are different between Irish & English:

• numbers of notes within a tune
  
• length of phrases
• phrases even or irregular?
• jerky or flowing
• common modes and chords used
• rhythmic patterns - more on this below
  
• ornamentation
• mood evoked or energy summoned up
  

Things that are different just within the rhythm aspect:

• speed
• different rhythmic patterns (best thought of grouped in dances)
• "swing"
• placement of emphasis within beat - to the back or the front?
• does the rhythm sit back or push forward?
• how a tune grooves

Even now I am sure that I will remember and summon up a particular set of rhythmic patterns most easily through recalling emotive ideas - that particular rhythmic pattern will evoke this emotional response best remembered via this image. Oh the complexity of finding language tags for memories that have no words...

Mixed traditions: different accents

As a singer and harper (associated repertoires: Irish, Scottish, Welsh) but one who is also English I find there are many musical directions I could take. For now, I'm going to listen to everything that comes my way, and mainly focus on English and Irish style. I can't see myself stopping playing either tradition and I want to do them both well.

I find I know how I want to arrange, I know what chords I'd like to use, I can explore that for myself. What I'm looking for are just the right phrasing shapes and rhythmic gestures that make each tradition dance and make each really distinctive. I've always responded to harmony first so I'm finding it quite strange to listen to music just for the phrasing. I really like rhythm though so I'm looking forward to a new challenge.

I aim to develop two different styles (one English, one Irish) and be able to switch between them at will. I'm comparing this to cultivating a foreign accent - you start by copying, maybe analyse or note certain features, then through layers of listening and feedback trying to get a sense of the shapes behind the language. Gradually the phrasing becomes familiar, accent becomes less foreign and your voice comes through again.

I feel like I have three accents - my natural accent that is just what comes out if I don't think about it (informed by classical training and my personal sense of drama and movement), the very beginnings of an Irish accent and the very beginnings of an English accent. I'm expecting I will get a little bit of phrasing "bleed" between my styles but hope over time that can either be eliminated or made to be somehow complimentary. I will always be an English harper playing Irish music and I think that can be a positive thing. I have always felt that different traditions summon up different "energies" - each take the music to a set of different places. Why would you not want a wider palette to choose from?

Operation recovery

Part of why I started this blog is to distract myself while I get well after a recent hand op. One of my finger joints had ceased up so the docs did what they could to release it and the rest is down to me.

Recovery goes:
wound heals (done)
start working passive movement
active movement
control
strength
passive movt - I can move the stump with my left hand
active movt - my right hand can pull the stump in
control - fine movt achieved
strength - weights, lifting, carrying at odd angles

All while being as relaxed and getting as much sensory feed back as poss

There's still a fair way to go,b ut it gets easier to live with at each stage. I can't say that overall it's less painful yet but the feeling is still changing and as long as it does that's ok.

While music is stopped via my hands it's coming out all the place elsewhere... like a river at a dam. It's fascinating.

A folk sound world

I love the mix of a folkie or trad sound world. It's like organic food - not as instant hit sweet as over-processed pop or as totally smooth as Classical; way more satisfying than both. Real instruments making real sounds.

There is a place for loads of timbre differences - roughness, raspy sounds, nasal, reedy. There's also a lot of sweetness, resonance, warmth.

I also like the feel you get from such personal interpretations of melodies, both the momentum of a good tune and the floating space, the touching gesture of a slow air. Yum yum.

Being a musician... with a deformed hand

I hadn't planned to mention this on my blog, but I realised that I couldn't write anymore without mentioning my hand.

I was born with a deformed right hand (giant middle finger and deformed ring finger) and have had several operations for corrective surgery. I rarely draw attention to it, certainly never when I'm performing. I want any audience to listen to me and judge me on how I play and sing, not what my hands are like.

In general I just get on with life and don't pay much attention to having different hands. In terms of musicianship I don't think it matters: I just have a different tool kit. As long as I can get what I want from that toolkit, then it's ok. Music is pretty forgiving of disability - it's all about what you can bring to the sound and what you do with what you've got.

I am more conscious of my hand more when I'm teaching because I am demonstrating. That said once I know a pupil it doesn't matter, we just get on with communicating. As I have one hand that functions normally that is my model for others. I've learnt to play twice, once RH melody, once LH melody (I play LH melody, in trad harp that has 60-80% of the work).

Sometimes doing a job which is so dependant on my (deformed) hands still strikes me low. I don't know any other disabled musicians personally, though they clearly exist. I feel it odd that my vocation is at such odds with my body but then I remember that there are also disabled athletes and dancers and I feel much better.

Future Link - musicians with disabilities
CandoCo Dance Company - is a contemporary dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers.