I think there is a need for finer definitions than that. I suspect most people don’t ‘memorise’ Happy Birthday but that they ‘remember’ it. Just as we go home from the concert, film, or session with a tune going round in our head.
I wonder what innate abilities killthemessenger’s neighbour has built on and brought to the fore that most of us don’t need to rely on. I was recently involved in making a video and audio record of a community meeting in an area where most adults were illiterate because their language did not have a script when they were children (and there were no schools in any case). A few jotted down notes on a scrap of paper and referred to them when their turn came to speak, most listened and then gave what (from the translation to English) was a reasoned response to what had be said before.
Have we got underdeveloped skills in remembering what is said ? Is music going that way ?
I think David hit it on the head by redefining the question with " Learn" being the key word. I don’t disagree that learning to read notation is a benefit, like using stabilisers on your first bicycle. I suppose there is a cultural difference too. Most of the tunes I first learned on flute were tunes from ballads that I had heard sung by family members at social occassions in our house at birthdays, wakes, cultural celebrations etc. The melodies were more simplistic than reels, the tunes were already in my head and when I’d worked out where the notes were on the flute I was able to play them and as I can still play them from memory.
The difference I am finding with Trad Irish tunes is that many of them are very similar sounding and the more tunes I learn, the more I am finding these similarities in the tunes. It is easier to start off playing one reel only to slip into the B part of another. For this reason, I can see the benefit of having the tune written out in music or abc notation but, If i can’t recall that tune from memory, have I truly learned it?
I know I know some tunes/songs…
The tune may be learned and in the memory, but it’s the time delay in the recall that becomes the issue as I age. Time delay!
No, nothing like using stabilisers, which are of purely temporary and possibly dubious benefit with some folk apparently learning quicker in the end without having to readjust to their removal.
Learning to read notation is a valuable tool of lifelong benefit with uses way beyond temporary crutch to aural learning of short tunes, which is not a skill mysteriously negated by musical literacy. Not essential to everyone, but a quantum leap beyond ‘stabilisers’!
I won’t disagree with you on this but it certainly isn’t essential and just because one can read the music doesn’t mean they have learned the tune. If music had never been written down, we would still be playing it.
But a lot traditional music has been written down over the centuries, and actually preserved for later, through times where the aural tradition did decline. I am very grateful for this preservation of music by all those people collecting tunes, and writing them on paper.
ytliek wrote that? How strange when I thought it was me!
I won’t disagree with you on this but it certainly isn’t essential and just because one can read the music doesn’t mean they have learned the tune.
Don’t think anyone’s actually suggested it does!
If music had never been written down, we would still be playing it.
The bits that survive through purely aural transmission, yes. But not only would we still have lost many of our cherished traditional tunes as per Hans’s post, but there are whole areas of music presumably beyond your personal sphere of interest that are quite unthinkable without notation!
I don’t understand the “this vs. that” mentality with many things discussed, especially on the 'net. Reading sheet music and learning by ear are both good tools to have, so why not improve upon and use both?!
I think it’s because that, particularly within the Irish Trad context, we are enjoined to learn that music by ear at every possible opportunity. And I think that’s a good, even the more desirable, approach for that idiom. Unfortunately in the course of those efforts people may take a leap and infer that this means notation in itself is bad, but this is a mistake of reasoning, or at worst, just another example of the human tribal reflex toward division.
All good points. I think that in this information age and fast paced way of life a lot of people choose, taking time to reason things out isn’t happening as much with a lot of people.
Could be. To be honest, I’m not wholly convinced that we’re reasoning less than ever; seems overall like the same flawed, dodgy business as in the past I recall; we’re just doing the same old stuff faster to a wider audience. We’re more heard than we ever were. But I do think that for all its benefits and potential for the better, the information age has also brought to glaring light some of the worst in us, and it must be admitted that splash has more entertainment value than reason does. There’s a seductive world of bread and circuses out there, and now we can be part of the show.
Ah yes, our lack of reasoning (and other flaws) are just more noticeable now, and to a wider audience. Lately I’ve been cutting down on social media. I can be enough of a pain in the backside in the real world, let alone subjecting people to it online. It’s been a great way to improve my general mood, and have more time to get things done, along with actually having fun playing the tin whistle lately. And going whole days without even firing up the PC… More people should try it!
Now that I’ve thought about it a bit, I don’t really have a particular method for learning a tune, with the tin whistle anyway. Maybe in a few more years. Sometimes a tune will be in my head (whatever the style) and I’ll work it out without evening listening to a recording of it, other times I use sheet music, and then other times I’ll listen to a recording and learn by ear. Come to think of it, it’s been a few months since I’ve learned any tunes. All of the focus has been on getting better at overall playing, relaxing, and having fun. There are a few that have been standing out lately. Maybe it’s time to add a new one to the repertoire for some variety.
I’m like Mr Ed there, I might hear a tune on a recording and learn it off that, or see it in a book and learn from that (though the arrangements of book-tunes never seem quite right to me, and many things get changed around).
As far as sightreading not being a necessary skill, it is if you do gigs where they plop sheet music in front of you and you have to play it! There are many gigs I would have had to turn down over the years if I couldn’t sightread.
About the somewhat different topic of ‘knowing’ a tune, with me there are many different categories.
With sightread tunes:
-tunes I can sightread cold
-tunes I can sightread after a couple run-throughs
-tunes I have mostly memorised but still want that music in front of me like a crutch
With ear-learned tunes:
-tunes I can play at a session, following the group, but that I couldn’t play on my own
-tunes I can play on my own in a basic straightforward way, more or less the way I heard them
-tunes I’ve spent much time working on, which have been considerably reworked to suit me, and for which I’ve come up with a number of variations
Richard, I’m guessing it’s merely an accident of how you phrased things, but notice how in your sightread tunes, the highest level is “I don’t need the music but keep it in front of me just in case” whereas with ear-learned the highest level is “I have made this tune fully my own.”
Even so, that’s kind of representative for me. I’m a decent sightreader, but I don’t think there’s any tune I learned solely from the dots that I’ve really reached a high level on. If you hear me playing a tune and just rattling off variations, that’s a sure sign I’ve either listened to it hundreds of times or perhaps composed it myself.
That said, there are plenty of such tunes that I’ve listened to hundreds of times AND used the dots as a learning aid, usually because there was a passage I couldn’t suss out properly by ear. (That reminds me, I meant to use that lovely collection of fully notated flute tunes that popped up on here earlier this year to figure out that turnaround I’ve never properly gotten from Peter Horan’s “Boys of the Lough”…)
