Although I can read music I have found it easier to learn by just listening to the tune and picking up from there in regards to whistle playing.
My question to the forum is two fold;
Yes, listening and using a tutor in the form of a book are two ways to learn, but they (IMHO) aren’t worth an awful lot if you do not have the benefit of a living, breathing and experienced piper to show you the ropes and explain their construction. Tionols are priceless in this regard. Private instruction even more so.
Heather Clarke’s tutor for the Uilleann Pipes has been recommended by some of the best… it’s a good place to start.
The NPU video’s are my favorite tutors… 
I recommend learning the UPs by ear.
I think it is very important to develop, what I call, The Forensic Ear.
That’s to say, the ability to hear…and discern…what a piper (especially any of The Masters) is playing.
It took me many many years to get this. Ironically, it was the whistle playing of Kate Dowling that was the bridge to understanding what I was hearing in uilleann pipe music. Funny that, but her whistle playing is very…piperly.
t
For me, listening is the basis. I use the manuscript to fill in the bits that are too fast for my ear.
You also now have the option of www.uilleannpipestutor.com which I think almost everyone agrees is well put together.
Learning the pipes you will have to realise that basic approach and the scales are essentially and drastically different from playing the whistle or Scottish pipes. You will have to get used to tight fingerings (and realise I don’t mean playing a closed scale in the sense of playing the scale you find on a fingering chart but closing the chanter for a tiny instant between notes while maintaining the flow) and various techniques.
While this can be picked up by ear a tutor and ideally some tuition by a piper who has it will be essential as coming from the whistle you’ll find a lot of things on the pipes somewhat counter-intuitive. The pipes are as easy (or hard) to learn as the next instrument but it will help your progress immensely if you get the basics explained to you clearly.Once that is done you will have to develop the ear to recognise what is going on in a piper’s playing.
Ennis’ Master’s Touch probably gives you the most if you read between the lines and it’s even better if you already know what he’s on about. Meanwhile it makes sense learning from a piper whose style you already like or one who will give you a broader look at various possibilities other than their own approaches.
This is a very interesting question for me, since (1) I am a beginning uilleann piper (one year), and (2) I have experience teaching and learning foreign languages (language acquisition is somewhat analogous to music acquisition).
This summer I participated in uilleann piping classes in both East Durham and Elkins. The latter proved to be MUCH more valuable than the former because the teacher transmitted the material to be learned in both written and aural format (the teacher in East Durham taught aurally exclusively [and claimed that he didn’t even know how to read music]). The result was that the beginning class in East Durham trudged through one tune the entire week (and half the class never learned it well enough to play it adequately). The class in Elkins, on the other hand, learned five tunes well enough to perform two at a “concert” the last day of the program.
I contend that for beginners in a post-literate world, combining the two methods is best, at least in the beginning. I fully appreciate the quest to develop the above-mentioned “forensic ear”, but often one has to prime the pump before getting water out of it.
As I mentioned, I am a linguist by training and have a lot of experience with foreign languages (Slavic, mainly). I’ve taught Russian and discovered that most adult learners are more visually oriented than aurally (I have two kids and realize that they are just the opposite – they are “hard wired” to acquire language, music, etc.; unfortunately, most adults are not [but, I agree that this skill can be re-acquired through the hard work that others have mentioned above]). I have also done linguistic fieldwork (on Macedonian in Macedonia) and I had to be at the “forensic ear” level to handle the task of interviewing people in the target language to investigate various linguistic phenomena (this is maybe similar to an advanced piper doing everything by ear).
Finally, I find it ironic that many seem to think that working via the written medium is heretical in Irish music when one of the great patron saints of the craft is Capt. Francis O’Neill who “saved” the great harvest of the repertoire by writing it down before it went extinct.
I think not often enough a distinction is made between learning the idiom of the music by ear and learning tunes from written material once the musical language is understood. The warning against learning music from the page is mainly for newcomers to the music who may lift tunes from the page without any understanding of the approach of a traditional player.
You make a very good point. Just one correction. Francis O’Neill couldn’t read music, or at least, couldn’t write it. It was James O’Neill (no relation) who transcribed all of the tunes that Francis recalled from his youth or gathered from others.
This is precisely the dialectic to which I refer. Sorry to use the same analogy, but just as one wouldn’t use a textbook alone to teach a living language such as Chinese, one shouldn’t try the same for learning a living tradition such as uilleann piping. As a beginner, I find the combination of the two most helpful, under the guidance of an experienced instructor.
I might add that, as I mentioned above, for me (a not-so-talented absolute beginner) the aural method + experienced instructor did not yield nearly as much as written + aural method + experienced instructor. The difference was tremendous (but I may be quite the exception [but I doubt it]).
Thanks, PJ. That’s another piece of fascinating information in that incredible story.
I very much envy folks who can do this. When I was placed in the East Durham class and was expected to learn by listening alone, I felt like a miner who was ordered to dig out his quarry, only to find that his shovel was buried three feet under the ground. I later found out at Elkins that the having the tunes transcribed, on top of learning aurally, provided me a trowel to get at the shovel that I needed to proceed with mining the ore (i.e., learning the tune). I hope that over time I can dispense with the “trowel” (written tunes) altogether and rely totally on the “shovel” (the “forensic ear” as you call it).
I think maybe you neglect to consider that E Durham prepared you for Elkins. Learning by ear is not an easy skill to acquire. You have to learn how to learn by ear. It must be developed. I’ll bet it was quite a shock to your system the first time. By the second time you were maybe not too good at it, but perhaps somewhat better prepared for what was required of you. And it doesn’t just happen all at once. You need to continue to develop the skill by practising learning by ear. Now, if I could just get this reading music thing down … 
djm
IMO the main danger of written transmission of tunes in the early stages of learning traditional music (or perhaps any musical idiom) is the danger of dependency on the written note.
As Khan notes, we’re living in a world that’s ‘post literate’, i.e. one in which the aural tradition has been almost entirely displaced as a learning medium. This means that for many of us it’s “easier” to learn stuff off the page. The problem is that this can deflect learners from the vital task of really listening as opposed to reading - I’d argue that the most vital and distinctive aspects of ITM are not transcribable in standard musical notation.
My own experience has been that piping students who read tunes make much better progress in terms of musicality once the develop the ability to learn tunes by ear, and unlearn the habit of reading a tune off paper. It seems that one tends to associate finger movements and patterns with the visual notation in such a way that the ear is at least partly bypassed. Most people who read music (excepting experienced musicians and sight-singers) may find themselves playing a tune off the page “to see what it sounds like”, which illustrates this reliance on the dots-to-fingers correspondance as opposed to a dots-to-sound correspondance. I encourage learners to practice with the printed page turned face-down, even when initially learning a tune, to be referred to only as a reference and memory aid. I also find that although it may take longer to initially learn a tune that way, the retention of the tune is better in the long run.
Of course this varies from individual to individual, just as some people can learn a foreign language primarily from a written text, whereas others do much better with an aural-only approach, at least where inflection and phonetics are concerned. On a personal note, I took formal music lessons as a child and teenager in two instruments, but developed little real intimacy with either instrument; if you took the printed music away from me, I could play very little. While I am by nature a highly visual person, it was only when I approached instruments “ear first” that I could use them as “alternate voices”.
regards
Bill
Yep. I remember tunes WAY better if I learn them by ear and I feel more connected to them by doing so. When I learn tunes from a book I might be able to remember the name but it takes me a lot longer to get really familiar with them.
Patrick.
Me too. In fact, I learn tunes best by getting them into my head first before trying to play them on the chanter. If from a recording, I listen to it over and over until I can lilt along with it and in isolation as well. If from a book, I play it through a few times until I can, as above, lilt it in the shower, the car or wherever. The more I internalise it, the easier it is then to pipe it and also the easier it is to make it my own.
There are two flute players here in Brisbane who rely solely on aural and they can now, after only playing a few years, pick up any tune from a session or recording or me playing it on pipes, instantaneously. I play it once, they listen, the second time round they’re playing along almost perfectly. Wish I could do that.
Cheers,
DavidG
I know a few fiddlers who can do that (well, maybe the third time around). It’s exasperating to work for hours on a tune and then hear someone else pick it up after a few minutes 
Good point, I didn’t consider that. It does take things like that a while to “take”. I wish I knew of something like exercises to get my brain in gear to learn more by ear. Besides listening (which I do on a regular basis), what else can I do? Try to play things that I hear as best I can?
Listening to the same tune multiple times (loop it); also, listening to it at half speed can be helpful, especially in understanding and then including the touches to a tune.
Written music is great for understanding tunes. The more you’re at and start recognizing the basic forms and their typical paths, you can add on tunes without the written music.
Once a student has a tune off, they should be able to play without referring to the written music. The converse is classical musicians who seem mostly to be tied to the written page - take that away and they can play nothing.
As I’m a padawan learner for the uilleann pipes, I can only speak for the instrument I am very proficient in currently, and that’s guitar. If I’m teaching someone I tell them, "Don’t go to a store and get tablature or pick up a book and start learning tunes. All that teaches you is how to fumble around with where to put your fingers. You want to learn guitar and how to make music? Then you want to play what people want to hear. What you hear is the most important thing. You want to learn guitar because you like how it sounds, not because of where you put your fingers.
"So get all your favorite CD’s, the ones that inspired you to play the instrument in the first place, turn them on, and play along with them. Play what you hear. Play what you feel. Use your ears and try to figure out how to play what it sounds like. If you’re stuck, show me what they are playing on the CD, and we’ll figure it out. Get an Eric Clapton CD and learn the songs. Find your favorite CD and learn all the songs on that. You will learn ear training, you will learn chords, you will learn solos, you will learn rhythm and melody and harmony and theory.
Usually, at this point, I’ll lose a student’s interest completely, because they just want to learn tablature. Fine if you want to learn tab, but not on my time. These students don’t really become good guitarists.
I can only assume the same goes for really any instrument. We play what we enjoy hearing, and those are the things we usually want to learn. Books are good if you want a straightforward lesson, but you learn only so much. Playing by ear goes into more of the “forensics” of music.