I thought some of you guys might enjoy this essay I just wrote for a discussion group I have with a couple of friends. Please forgive some of the references to people you might not know, I was writing for a specific audience, but thought others might enjoy it as well. Thanks,
Philip Carl Smith
In a traditional Irish session you don’t use sheet music. Every so often a so called “silver” flute player will show up, ostentatiously set up her music stand, and proceed to wow the audience with a pyrotechnical display of astounding music. By this point, of course, the real musicians are at the bar already, and unfortunately miss out on her valuable musical pedagogy.
In this example, although sheet music isn’t the only problem, it is one of the main ones. It is possible, although difficult, to play Irish music on the silver flute well, but it is impossible to play well from printed music. In Irish traditional music, memorization is essential. (Of course, it can get worse than all that. A friend of mine was once at a session in Chicago, when a man dressed in a tuxedo entered the pub, with a tuba in tow. He then played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” on his tuba, accompanied by a pianist who had come along with him, and then left.)
What is the difference between reading a tune off of a piece of paper and playing one from memory? The same question applies just as well with poetry, another essential part of the Musical spectrum. There is something grand about reciting “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” to some nubile young lass that just couldn’t be achieved by reading it from paper, even if it was written in calligraphy. Joey Miller’s best attempts aside, it is just not that awe inspiring to be read “Sir Crispin’s Day” before the Big Game. On the other hand, there is something very romantic about certain printed poetry. If you’re into seducing young women, there’s nothing better than a “Pocket Sonnets” to impress her with, as Jane Austen teaches us so well.
When I was first starting to learn the pennywhistle, I remember having a conversation with Fred Frasier at a party in Michigan. I was describing the Irish tunes I had been learning lately, how on the surface they all seemed pretty much the same, but once delved into they each took on a distinct character and story of their own. This is not to say it tells a “traditional” story, that is one with characters and action. The story of a tune is more elusive than that simple definition. Ciaran Carson tries to explain this in that Gospel of Irish traditional music, Last Night’s Fun:
‘Last Night’s Fun’, to take an example, is a name or a label for a tune: it does not describe its musical activity nor impute experience to it. It is not about frolics reveled in on some particular night, although the name might put you in mind of them. In other words, the tune, by any other name, would sound as sweet; or as rough, for that matter, depending on who plays it, and what shape they’re in.
Fred donned his characteristic look of excitement, and announced, “So that’s what that song means.” He went on to explain that he had now understood one of the lines in the song “Jock Stewart” that had always confused him, but tells a profound truth about Irish instrumental music:
I’m a roving young blade
I’m a piper by trade
And many’s the tune I can tell. *
When you really know a poem, and therefore have it memorized, you can then begin to get into the nuances of the rhythm and meter, or the swing or the lilt or whatever you want to call it. And when you have memorized a poem, you sometimes have the chance of subconsciously (or consciously) understanding it even without the violent act of analyzation. You will never again look at it the way you did before you knew it.
Again, Carson:
The first time I heard ‘Last Night’s Fun’ (no, rather, the first time I knew it was ‘Last Night’s Fun’ that I was listening to, for I must have heard it many times before without knowing its name, or knowing the tune itself, for that matter), was from a record of the accordion-player, Joe Cooley. … The recording is done in mono, and has that lively, crackly, jumpy feel of the old 78s, the kind of noise anathematic to the CD generation … Lo-fi has a beauty and logic all of its own, which has something to do with the imperfectability of listening or hearing, or of the act of recording itself. Where do you put the mikes? What are you looking for? In any session of music, no one will hear the same thing: it will depend on context, on placement, on experience – whether or not you’ve heard the tune before, whether or not the person next to you knows the tune that you might only half know.
Now that you have that poem memorized, you can now go to sessions of poetry recitation, not to be confused with the “poetry” readings that seem to occur every time I venture into a Borders, with their characteristic pauses in the more vulgar of the “poetry” to censor for a “family audience”. These might be meetings to practice the traditional art of “Useful” poetry on unsuspecting male friends, or perhaps more likely (these days, at least) at a St. Gregory’s Banquet or Poetry Night. At any rate, at these events you listen to other young bards recite their stuff, and it is a particularly enjoyable experience to hear a young buck recite a poem you know: You catch every mistake they make. More importantly, however, you occasionally get glimpses of insight into the oral interpretation of the poem, that is, how to say it, something that you would not be paying attention to on first hearing the poem. With memorization comes a more enhanced pleasure when you finally do get it.
We can accept the value of internalized knowledge when it comes to poetry and music, but how should we best internalize this art? Why at St. Gregory’s has there always been an insistence on learning poetry by ear, from the first day of freshman Literature class onwards? What is gained by this practice?
First of all, for most people, aural learning is one of the methods most conductive to retaining knowledge. You can sit and stare at a sheet of paper all day, but the best way to get it into your head is to read it aloud. (Mr. Hanisch always expostalized the “say it to yourself” method; he would often speak of the merits of sitting in a corner and mouthing words to yourself. Perhaps this explains him.)
Secondly, most people do not begin life with a highly developed ability to hear, retain and repeat sounds and information. Musicians tend to cultivate this skill: Jazz musicians, for example, often are called to hear one musician play a melodic phrase and immediately repeat it, sometimes with sly commentary added on in musical form. Master Irish musicians get to the point where they can literally hear a tune through once and join in on the second time flawlessly, so well trained are their ears. (Having once asked a great flute player to play the tune “The Lady on the Island”, he responded, “Well, I don’t really know that tune,” before stumbling through the best version I had heard.)
Finally, the printed word does not convey everything about a tune.
It is possible, of course, to ‘learn’ a tune from the page, from what is there in black and white, but this requires negotiation and imagination. It requires you to know that what is written is a mere mnemonic, not an actual performance (it is impossible to transcribe an actual performance), nor the dynamic pulse of what it can be when it’s played and heard and danced. You have to go by your experience of other tunes which seem to have the same shape, and to perceive when this particular tune is different, and the value of that difference. (Carson)
The analogy works less well, but to some degree, for poetry as well. To couch it is New Age spiritualism, the poem is a transubstantial state of being that we tap into when we feel like it.
At the risk of quoting my muse as often as Senior, allow me to conclude with another lengthy quote from Ciaran Carson’s Last Night’s Fun:
But do we ever fully know a tune, or only versions of it, temporary delineations of the possible? The boy sitting at one end of a row of five or six musicians will not perceive the tune the same as someone at the other end. Bar acoustics are peculiar. Wooden floors resound and carpets muffle. One hot-water geyser, unbeknownst to itself, will mimic the tenor drone of a barely-tuned set of pipes. The rhythmic rattling of loose change in punters’ trouser-pockets has lost its plangency since decimal coinage came in. And the sound of an accordion played by someone with his coat on is different when that same someone takes off his coat.
The grainy, hesitant voice of Joe Cooley bellows:
“It’s the only music that brings people to their senses, I think…”
- Often that line is transcribed as “Many’s the tune I can play,” unconscious error correcting obviously taking place. I cannot place precisely where it is I’ve heard the song with the correct line; The Pogues’ version of the song omits that verse entirely, but obviously the line was familiar to Fred and I. (My massive Songbook, I am sorry to say, contained the tainted line, but was quickly annulled this evening.) The St. Gregory’s version contains the verse, but I cannot recall which way precisely it is sung.
Authors note: I realize that the biggest difference between poetry and traditional Irish music is that most poetry was written down by the author, thereby implying a correct, standard version of a poem, whereas almost all Irish tunes are anonymous and freely modified from one person to the next, allowing you nearly unlimited freedom within what remains a strictly determined musical vocabulary. “When tunes are concerned, there is no final version. The notion of correctness is anathema.” (Carson)