I had written the following paragraph in another thread and I decided I would open a new topic and start another discussion:
“Don’t wanna hijack the thread but this idea of a separation between “dots” and “by ear” bugs me. When I read music - see dots - I hear sound. When I hear sound - I see written music. It’s the same thing. When I learn a song by ear, I usually just go and write it out. When I learn a song by reading, I hear it in my mind the same way and play it.”
adding more now:
I do understand the value of listening to hear the nuances that do not come across on paper. I’m not a “trained” musician - I learned my trade on the bandstand writing horn parts for the bands I worked with over the years. Listen and write - write and listen.
I try to learn by listening because. . . in a session, when you want to pick up tunes quickly, it’s an insanely useful skill to have. I also tend to remember aurally learned tunes better.
It certainly doesn’t work that way for me. I don’t get visual images when I hear sounds, or vice versa. When I learn tunes from sheet music, what I learn is the sound and finger pattern; the visual representation of the notes doesn’t stick in my head to any real degree.
…and it was being the wind section in high school orchestra for me…
Nothing like having 3-5 stands with different parts for differently keyed instruments.
The dots show the intervals, ya figure out one note and play the interval to the next.
After a while ya just see the dots different.
In Irish music, the dots can be useful for nailing down a basic structure of a tune for learning or remembering. But even detailed transcriptions showing every ornament can’t substitute for listening to good players. The dots capture at best 40 percent of what’s going on, maybe less. I have nothing against using sheet music as a reference. Problems arise when 1) people can’t play a tune unless they have the sheet music in front of them and 2) people learn everything from sheet music and don’t spend enough time listening closely to good players.
The reason that #1 is a problem is that you don’t really know the tune if you don’t have it in your head. I have friends who can play Irish tunes convincingly by sight-reading sheet music, but then they learn the tune by heart; they don’t need the sheet music after that. The problem with #2 is that it’s impossible to learn to play Irish traditional music in a convincing manner by reading sheet music alone.
Why does it have to be “either or?” My opinion is that playing/learning by ear is incredibly valuable, plus imitation is the best (possibly the only) way to assimilate the nuances and general feel of a tradition. On the other hand, the ability to read music (whether dots or notes) can come in quite handy. It’s nice to be able to learn a tune without having to hear someone else play it first. BTW, reading the notes on a page to learn a tune is not the same as playing with the correct style. Ya gotta learn that by imitation/immersion/lessons, and so forth.
…it’s impossible to learn to play Irish traditional music in a convincing manner by reading sheet music alone.
.
I would add, “unless you are already an accomplished player.” I think you can learn a tune, if not “Irish traditional music” as a genre.
Frankie McEnnis is a lovely banjo player from Liscannor, Co Clare, who was embarrassed when he told me that he’d learned The Flowers of Brooklyn from net-dots. But he already had his Irish music chops well in hand.
Dana, you said it all!
And very well indeed.
The dots capture at best 40 percent of what’s going on, maybe less.
The walls of your house are probably about 40 percent of its total weight.
But if you don’t have the walls, you don’t have a house.
I’ll grant that there is no substitute for listening. I’ll grant that there are real advantages to being able to pick up a tune by ear, on the fly.
Unfortunately, like any other talent, some folks are great at this, and some folks aren’t so good. From time to time you encounter players who have sworn off the dots but shouldn’t have. We’ve got a name for this: psychotic songbirds.
You’re experiencing a disconnect that I noticed when I tried to teach a
lab in college. I had a hard time putting myself in the students’ shoes
and remembering what they didn’t know.
You have to remember that a lot of people don’t have your experience
with transcribing music by ear. For some people, learning every song
from paper will make it harder later to pick up new songs by ear in a
session. This is why becoming “bound to the dots” is often discouraged,
especially for new players who have no musical experience.
Well yeah, that’s what I meant when I said I have friends who can learn tunes off the sheet convincingly…they’re great sight readers. I’ve learned plenty of tunes from sheet music myself, and I always provide sheet music to my flute students if they want it. I’m just saying that it’s impossible to learn the music by sheet music alone; you can’t take a classical player who’s never heard Irish music and sit him or her down with O’Neill’s or the Dance Music of Willie Clancy etc. for an hour, a day, a week, or a lifetime and expect the person to sound like an Irish musician, unless they also listen to the real thing live or on recordings.
In fact, I wonder is there anyone on these forums who actually believes you can learn the heart of irish music by never ever listening to a single note of it?
I would bet there isn’t…which makes me wonder why this “dots vs ear” thing keeps coming up in the first place.
There have been and it ended badly. I will not name names, but vaguely refer to stories of people. They practiced and practiced with ABCs and sheet music and got to a point where they felt they knew what they were doing. They then shared some of their “expertise” with others on board and the veteran session goers gave them a very bad time.
It is a shame really, and why beginners need to know that listening is much more important in Irish Traditional music than most other genres. One person put it at 40% for ITM, for other genres, sheet music might give 80% or 90%.
Yeah, I don’t know the circumstances, but I have certainly heard “professional” recordings of Irish traditional music that sounded exactly as if the player had never actually heard an honest-to-God traditional musician.
That’s actually pretty close to par for the course for professional classical musicians playing music inspired by traditional music, too…
Of course, in both cases, it may not be learning from the dot that was the problem – there are plenty of so-so to outright crappy recordings of Irish music to learn from, and a lot of them have greater exposure than the good stuff.
No, but you can’t say the same about the converse. There are lots of great Irish trad musicians (some of the best actually) who can’t read a note of printed music. Some of them (Mike Rafferty for one, IIRC) don’t even know the name of the notes they are playing. They learned and play entirely by ear and aural memory.
Because “ear” is required, while “dots” are optional. Naturally, there are always those who are weak in the ear who want to advance the position that ear is merely optional. Thus the eternal “dots vs ear” argument. Unlike the beer ads, though, this is not a case of “less filling” vs “tastes great”!
…and those for whom the very mention of dots sends them off in a fury.
I missed the post in this thread that suggested that dots were more than a tool.
It was mentioned that if you can read the dots well enough you can hear the pitch and tempo as notated.
This, it seems to me, would sugest that the ear is developed enough to recognize the pitches and intervals between them.
No?
The ear players on these forums seem to come across that one has to listen to every reel played by a confirmed ITM player before one can play it properly. But surely once one knows how a reel feels in ITM then one can play any reel in ITM?
A jig is a jig, a hornpipe is a hornpipe. Once you know what they are supposed to feel like in ITM then surely you can take the dots to any of them and play it with the correct feel and ornament it however you please to get the required feel.
Or am i missing something?
Please don’t blast me. These are genuine questions that seem, to my mind, to be being overlooked here.
listening is much more important in Irish Traditional music than most other genres. One person put it at 40% for ITM, for other genres, sheet music might give 80% or 90%.
I think this is a little bit of ITM snobbery. You can’t play classical music from the dots unless you know how to play classical music, you can’t play ITM from the dots unless you know how to play ITM, you can’t play blue beat, and ska from the dots unless you know how to play blue beat and ska, etc., etc.. It’s all the same thing, they’re absolutes, there aren’t any percentages in it.
I really don’t see why ear players have to keep dissing notation players. Just because you heard a few people who learned from notation who were pants doesn’t mean it’s the notation’s fault. It’s the fault of those people for not learning the genre. Whether you play by ear or notation in any given genre, you must learn to play in the feel of the genre in order to play the music in that genre.
They are plenty of awful ear players out there as well as notation players.
