I think this is by and large true. I don’t dis the dots; I like the dots; the dots are my friends. Where’s the snobbery? I find some classical musicians intolerable. I don’t even answer anymore those who imply that, given their classical expertise on the instrument, it will be a walk in the park to play ITM. They tend to play stiffly and without passion.
I know that the music will survive their “corrupting” influence. More important, in time these classical players might be assimilated by ITM and make a genuine contribution, like so many of the hot-dog younger players who are stretching the tradition.
I missed it too, which is why I wondered in the first place 
More often here, I see “dots haters” (I use the term loosely) bring this up than the reverse..I may have missed the rare occurance where someone here has said “I never need to hear a lick of irish music to know how to play it”, but I know I’ve heard a hundred times the equivalent reverse dogma with the same strawman as the reasoning.
Really, please, someone point me to a post that says that the ear is entirely optional..I really don’t recall ever seeing it. If such a post doesn’t exist, I’m still left wondering why the some people keep beating on this dead horse?
There are no absolutes, but there are strong tendencies. If a person shows up at a session with a folder full of sheet music and starts pulling sheets and asking musicians for tune names while people are playing, what are the regulars going to think? It just isn’t done. Not to say that it can’t be done, but it is poor manners, bad etiquette, and demonstrates a poor understanding of the genre.
Similarly, if a person signs up for an community based classical orchestra, but doesn’t know how to read sheet music, what will probably happen? The leader will probably not let him/her in, unless they commit to learning how to sight read, and are far above average talent for that group.
Take that same person who doesn’t know how to sight read and have him/her show up at a session. If they have a good ear for music, they will have found home. Or switch it, and take the sight reader to the classical orchestra, and he/she will feel right at home, because virtually everyone else will have a folder full of sheet music and the leader will say turn to page such-and-such or we are going to practice this-or-that and please pull out your sheet music.
There is no right or wrong in learning to sight read or learning by ear. Neither is “better” than the other, and both are extremely useful. However, there are definitely tendencies in how certain music is performed, practiced and propagated.
My bottom line, is for people to enjoy their music. Dots, ear training, whatever, have a good time.
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?
This is an interesting notion that strikes close to home for me. My father was a professional Jazz musician. He had an amazing ear and an amazing ability to produce musical charts when necessary. When we would go out to listen to music, he would concentrate very hard (almost a trance like meditative state) with his eyes closed. He told me that when he does this he sees a score appear in his mind of the muisic he is listenting to as it is being played. When this happens then he is able to recall and write down the music as long as it is within three or four hours of hearing it. He said he has ripped off some great riffs that way!
He was always surprized that I - or everyone - couldn’t do this. He thought that all it took was practice because he wasn’t always able to do this. But what he failed to realize is that he was always able to distinguish what note was being played just by hearing it - perfect pitch - and what an advantage that is.
There is recent evidence in the pediatric audiology research (sorry I teach pediatrics at University of Hawaii) that “tone deafness” does exist. In the experiment infants were exposed to a repeating tone that was suddenly changed in pitch. When the pitch change came the infant was given some milk in a bottle. After a few trials the infant, upon hearing the change in pitch, would anticipate the bottle and get excited; therefore, you could see that the infant could hear the difference in the pitch. What was then done was the pitch change was gradually narrowed until the infant could not hear the difference. There was quite a wide range of ability. Most could decern well within a quarter or even an eighth of a tone, but a few would get excited at just a few cycles difference. To the researchers it sounded like the same pitch, but these few babies and the instruments could hear the difference. On the other end of the bell curve there were a few infants who could not hear a difference between pitches 1.5 steps apart. It would be interesting to see if this last group grew up to be those people who can’t seem to carry a tune at all. American Idol try-outs thrive on people from this end of the bell curve for the comedy relief ala William Hung.
I suspect people with perfect pitch are those who have an ability to decern very fine nuances of pitch change - and who are musicians. Exposure to a particular set of pitches is necessary for reference. A jack-hammer operator with perfect pitch may be able to hear the fine differences between jack-hammers; but wouldn’t label them with note names.
Anyway, it is not necessary to have anything like perfect pitch to learn tunes by ear. I can learn a tune by ear during a session …but I can’t seem to remember it the next morning. That’s what I use the dots for.
Clark
It is funny because I find most of the vitriol on the other side. That the mention of learning by ear as the best way, brings personal attacks and more. Nothing wrong with using dots as a tool, but it is not the way ITM has been handed down over the past hundred or two hundred years. Perhaps it is evolving and changing and sheet music and music stands will become common at sessions all over the world. Then again, perhaps not.
Well hold on, that’s not true either. A lot of great tunes would have been lost forever if they hadn’t been written down in the great collections. And a lot of traditional players learn tunes from these collections. Look through the liner notes of CDs of respected traditional players and you’ll find that many of them have learned some of their tunes from books. And they’re not embarrassed to admit it.
You wouldn’t believe how many I’ve come across who think that because they play violin they can then play fiddle.
Happens on flute occasionally as well.
This is a good point… listening is important, but perhaps more
important is who you listen to. How do you make that choice?
Taste is subjective, but surely there’s some yardstick to identify
carriers of the tradition.
There’s always the “Matt Molloy” yardstick, if we want to get ugly.
Funny how the big bugaboo topics have a way of morphing into each other. Where’s MurphyStout when we need him to lay down the smack?
Well, ya tend to use the tools you understand.
Doesn’t mean that a different tool is better or worse,
just that you don’t want to learn how to use it.
It should not be about the tools in the first place,
it’s should be about what you can make with them.
so there 
it seems to me you are simply describing an ability to
recognize notes (sight recognition or aural recognition), which is not the same as learning a tune on the flute, two seperate abilities entirely. you ‘have a tune’ when you can actually play it thru and thru. it is at that point that dots become useless. traditionally, dots are not used in the actual playing of itm. they are good memory aides but no sheet music is used when you actually play. so as a beginner in fluteplaying, the emphasis should be on the act of playing tunes, not on musical theory which is not necessary - it is sometimes heplful and sometimes harmful, depending on how anal someone is.
also, there are plenty of people, dancers for instance, who have the ability to recognize tunes when they ‘hear’ it, but haven’t a clue about how to play the flute. funny some people think i ought to take up dancing.
i can read lyrics of song all day but i can not sing. to learn, i would need to learn how to sing or at least lip sync.
Well, I started this so I’ll chime in again with confessions and obervations.
I memorized my first 10-12 songs and thought - wow this is easy. The folks at my session were patient. And as I listened to them and to CD’s I realized I had to go back and de-construct everything I had so “correctly” learned and start over. I still use music at sessions sometimes to guide me through new tunes but I listen too.
I think anybody comes to this - or any - music because they love it - somewhere you heard this and it just ahhhhh - ya know. And then you say “I wanna do that” and then it starts: the learning the listening the false starts and detours (as I wrote above) and then on down that road.
Its the LOVE that’s most important.
Absolutely not. As has already been mentioned, many tunes would not be played today if it wasn’t for the fact that someone wrote those dots down, and considered them uselful enough to keep even though they had learned the tune.
There are thousands if not millions of pieces of music sat in archives and libraries around the world that haven’t been played by anyone alive. I’m glad that the people who once learned those tunes had the forthought to think of future generations of players, and not just condemn the idea as “useless”.
On a further point…
You should also realise that some people, myself included amongst them, have memory problems caused by various physiological conditions within the brain. Sometimes i completely forget bits of tunes (and lots of other things), even ones i play regularly. This is a disability, and i don’t think that anything that allows people with a disability to join in playing music should be called useless.
If someone wants to play music with me, i don’t care if they use notation or not, what matters to me is that they want to play music with me.
When did the simple system flute become traditional? I admit that i have very little knowledge of this, and i do sincerely invite people to correct me on this, but from what i’ve read the simple system flute was adopted into ITM from its use in other genres. So why not the notation that was being used with these flutes in these other genres?
People use guitars in ITM, and they seem to be accepted in a lot of sessions. But a folk guitar is an extremely young instrument. So why accept that and not notation?
“Because it’s not traditional!”
teehee. There, I said it!
I think you misunderstood what rama meant: he meant that when musicians are playing Irish traditional music in sessions, they don’t play from the sheet music. It’s not like a string quartet or a recorder consort where you sit down with sheet music and play from it. Nobody’s going to boot you out of a session if you bring sheet music, but you’ll stick out a bit. And there really are advantages to learning how to remember a tune and play it from memory.
You’re missing something.
A tune is a lot more than dots on the page plus style. There are also a sort of set of common variations, nuances in rhythm and emphasis, etc. The things that are nigh impossible to represent in printed music, but you always hear when a good player is playing.
Let me try an analogy. The argument that you can learn a reel from dots without any knowledge of ITM is like saying that two identical twins raised in different cultures are basically the same person – obviously crazy. But the idea that you can learn a reel from dots once you have a working knowledge of ITM is then like saying identical twins raised in the same culture are basically the same person. They’re going to be a lot more alike, but they’re still clearly different people.
People do rescue tunes that have been forgotten but for dots all the time – but when they do so, it’s like cloning a long-dead person from a DNA sample. The framework is the same, but the tune is inevitably different. For lost tunes, that’s clearly better than nothing, but you should never think that the end result is the same as the tune was when it was first alive.
Yeah, but when the classical player tries to get a sound out of the Irish flute, they found its a bit different than the metal rod they are accustomed to.
This has always bugged me a bit too… There are many tunes that I really need to see written out just so I get the basic structure/framework (landmarks) of the tune. I always write my tunes out myself from recordings of sessions/slow-sessions etc. so it’s not usually a case of learning just from the dots.
I think many people who argue against using sheet music are assuming the worst about what use people might be putting it to.
The tunes I’ve transcribed myself are the ones that really stick in my head. The ones that I’ve never transcribed seem to leak out of my brain over time.
-Brett
I’m referring to more then technical differences in the instruments. Over the summer I attended a supposedly “intermediate” workshop. We had a classical flautist in the room who did not know what rolls, cuts, or taps were, and assumed she was “intermediate” because she knew classical music. I think she had a simple system flute on hand too, and could play scales on it well enough, but was clueless when it came to stylistic things.