Maybe just different folks, different tastes?
–James
Well, James, normally I would agree with you about different tastes and all that, but the fact that she dismissed out of hand the concept of session recordings without any further discussion, much less curiosity, struck me as odd, especially coming from someone who attends sessions.
Having a preference for highly-produced recordings is fine, but I must add that the woman in question has not applied her preference re: learning to accompany trad music in a trad manner, although it seems that lately she’s finally trying to break the bonds of her rigidly classical training (this after years of session “accompaniment” that really added nothing, but tended to drag down the tone of the evening). I hope she accomplishes it. We need better backup where I live, but I say that because for good or ill, backup players will attend. I would prefer to have backup be appropriate to the genre, and even high production trad music offers reliable examples. All any of us has to do, regardless of our preferences, is listen.
Best,
N
(edited for clarity)
It’s a Thursday night at the local chess club.
We observe a conversation between Sheldon V. Stodgy and Johnny Hip. Stodgy is sitting at his chess board waiting for someone to join him for a game of chess. With a friendly and affirming “Howdy,” Hip takes the place across from him.
Hip: Nice to meet you. I am Hip. Let’s play some chess!
Stodgy: Nice to meet you too, I am Stodgy. Why don’t you take white.
Hip: Sure, I’d love to. But I see you’ve set them up all wrong… Here I’ll fix it.
Hip rearranges the pieces to only sit on the black squares in three rows.
Hip: Funny pieces you have here, Stodgy…
Stodgy: But…
Hip: Hey, no sweat. Don’t take it wrong. OK, here we go.
Hip starts moving a piece diagonally.
Stodgy: But that is all wrong. You have to set up like I had the pieces. You have to start by moving a pawn or a knight. Pawns move straight forward, and never backwards, and they take opposing pieces on the diagonal. Knights move two squares forward and one to the side, in any direction, and they can jump over other pieces, and…
Hip: You know what the problem with you is, Stodgy: You don’t enjoy yourself enough. Look, just relax and let’s have a nice game of chess. It doesn’t have to be about rules and dos and donts. Who has time to learn all those rules? I just want to have a nice game of chess with you.
Stodgy: Put you are playing checkers, or something! That’s not chess. Chess pieces don’t move that way, and they don’t set up that way. You have to do it right: The pawns go in the front, and the officers behind. The rooks (or castles) are on the edge, see like this, I’ll teach you. Then come the knights, that look like horses…
Hip: Ugh! You’re stifling me. I like it the way I did it. Don’t tell me about right or wrong. Who are you anyway? Did you invent chess? Do you own it? Don’t act like you have some sort of authority here. It’s a game: It’s supposed to be fun…
Stodgy: Fun? It’s not fun if you don’t know what you’re doing! I took years to learn to play chess properly, I’ve memorized openings, I practice openings and endgames every day, I have analyzed thousands of matches played by Grandmasters and Masters. I go to chess conventions and I’ve played with old masters, and…
Hip: And you think that makes you better than me? There is nothing wrong with how I want to play. Maybe it’s just “different folks, different tastes?”
Stodgy: Look, you can do what you want. But what you’re doing is not chess. This is a chess club, and this here is a chess board with chess pieces. I want to play chess, not checkers, Sorry!, or Monopoly. There is nothing wrong with checkers, Sorry!, or Monopoly. It’s just not what I want to play.
Hip: You know, you are really a stuck-up snob, looking down at others who don’t come up to your standards. I am surprised you don’t have bodyguards for your precious chess game that carry anyone off who doesn’t move one of those horsies right!
Stodgy: Knights. They’re called knights.
Hip: I think you must a be very mediocre chess player, Stodgy. All you care about is bloody rules and picking on beginners like me. You go around insulting people who just want to have a good time with a game of chess, as is their perfect right to do. I mean, you probably can’t even tell me how I am supposed to double these stupid pieces when I get a queen. We should really use my chess pieces: They’re much better because, you see, they’re flat. Shows you how much you know.
Stodgy: Right. Oh, it’s 6:30 already, the evening is getting on. I think I’ll have to get going. Bye.
Great parable, Bloomie. 
Well, if I’ve been insulting, I apologise. If I’m stodgy, I don’t know. I have, despite my own tastes, been attempting to be evenhanded in this discussion.
And yes, it’s 2:30 pm (you’re off by 4 hours, guy), and have to go to work.
'Ta for now.
N
It’s just a little story. I didn’t mean to offer a reflection on anyone…
Actually, since Bloomfield was quoting my post, I would imagine I was the ignorant gamer in the chess parable.
Listen to what you like, and learn from what you can, and so will I.
Here’s another parable for ya, this one from the Jargon File:
"A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: ‘You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.’
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked."
–James
Interesting, Bloo…but it raises a question in my mind. I’ve used this illustration before, but will use it again here:
At the Belfast Harper’s Festival in 1792 (I believe that was the year) ten harpists came together to play traditional Irish music. Only one of them, a 90-year-old man, still played the “traditional” way - with long fingernails. Does this mean that the true traditional way of playing harp was lost at that time and no one since then (who doesn’t play with long fingernails) has played truly traditional harp?
If the rules of ITM are as hard and fast as chess, where’s the line?
(or did I miss the point - again?)
Susan
My point is: Much in these discussions about “misleading music” or “the tradition” etc. is driven by people who think that they know what ITM is, but they don’t, like Johnny Hip. They’ve listened to Enya and Riverdance and are ready to sit in on a session where they get offended for being asked not to play washboard or hammered dulcimer.
ITM is like chess in that there are “rules” by which you can tell whether you are doing it or not. It is strange that those who do not take the time to understand the rules (admittedly an ongoing process) and do not have the openess of mind to try to find out about the rules by listening to those who know, should be insulted upon hearing that what they are doing is not ITM.
ITM is perhaps unlike chess in that the rules are less hard and fast. (Although, I daresay, once you look at chess and chess tournament rules, you’ll probably find much less hardness and fastness than you think.) It’s at this point that my simile breaks down, I guess. But I think that ITM rules are not nearly soft enough or vague enough to blur the edges between ITM and other styles of music. (For instance I saw a fiddler at an Irish session speak quite openly to another fiddler who was doing Prince-Edward-Island-style foot STOMPING, telling her that it was ruining the music, because in ITM it “all happens between the beats”. He knew she was playing like they do in PEI, but it did not seem to suggest to him that the rules of ITM were soft or vague.)
I am making a deliberate choice not to take offense at this, and I hope it was meant neither for me nor for where I live.
–James
Per the question of where one draws the line, IMO that would definitely be at sessions. If one wants to make stylistic departures on CDs or stage performances, no problem. That’s a matter of general agreement for the musicians involved. However, I do have a hard time being okay with people sitting in and bringing an obtrusive musical element to the mix that anyone would say doesn’t fit the trad sound. It ain’t easy to say what trad is, but it’s pretty easy to hear what it’s not.
For instance, a backup player with a jazz swing style is a big ouch. And we get that now and again. I don’t even bring my cittern to most sessions anymore, because the ill-fitting backup players refuse to take turns, as common courtesy might indicate. Is my backup playing a good fit? If occasional approving glances and encouraging comments from the veterans is an indicator, then maybe I have a leg to stand on in my opinions here.
Or how about a sight-reading-only trumpet? Seen that, too. I question the appropriateness of that. But, as it’s a social situation, we play nice and put up with a little pain, knowing that it’s not likely to happen again. I’ve actually encountered “visitors” who make no bones about the fact that they couldn’t care less about the tradition, but just want to sit in, convinced that they have something fitting to contribute based solely on their otherwise considerable skills in their own genre; the result is usually not unlike putting catsup on quiche, if you will. Edible, but trammeled.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there are times when it’s okay to push the envelope, and times where a sensitivity to those who love the Pure Drop would be a point of basic etiquette. Sadly, self-entitlement is more the currency of the day, at least here in the States.
And Bloo, no more giving out my name! 
Best,
N
Think about it, Jim, then you won’t have to make a deliberate choice.
As to the washboard and dulcimer, I could have mentioned nyckelharpa and djembe just as readily, and you know it.
At least you’re not stucked with a recorded player in your sessions. We are, and he thinks he’s playing ITM!
The oddest (other than the trumpet) we ever had was a guy playing a melodica on his lap via a rubber tube, ugly lime green plastic. A pro piano player, he did it enuf justice once he didn’t need staff notation for a tune or two, but one of the geezers was calling him “that poor retarded boy” until I set him straight that the guy was just playing fast and loose with a traditional setting.
Hmm this is a little OT but I’ve heard a few things from my obsessed harp learner of a friend who is hell bent on figuring out how to play the harp in a traditional bardic style. If I’m not wrong it was from this harp geezer that Edward Bunting the harp music collector got a lot of the music in his collection from. According to the version of the story my friend relates to me that the old guy with the long fingernails was supposedly one of the last of harp players from the olde tradition in that particular festival.
Needless to say the old bardic harp tradition is further lost to us now, after the destruction of the bardic order and persecution. Most of the “Celtic/Irish” harpists nowadays use harps fitted with nylon strings instead of the old brass wire ones. The style and plucking techniques are all adapted from the Western Art Music traditions. Techniques like dampening, essential to the playing of the brass wire harp are no longer commonly used.
Yikes! Djembe or dumbek are worse, though, they’re too loud for a session setting. These sorts of percussionists just make me wish I had a Turkish shawm so I could flatten them up against the walls for a bit. 
Eldarion, a friend of mine plays (and builds) wire-strung harps and has long fingernails. His teacher is Ann Heyman. I love the sound of both, but wire harp sounds so much better, IMHO (then again, anything hearking back to ancient origins gets my vote ). If your friend needs contacts, perhaps I could be of some assistance if you send me a PM.
Best,
N
Az,
I met that dude when he came down to Boston. He played pretty well, but recorder just does not work in Irish music… period.
Chris
Just for the sake of completeness: there is a growing international wire harp community, with a considerable number of people reviving the historical playing techniques. It’s not an unbroken tradition, but it’s not dead either.
Chris,
I’m glad that youve met him. Yeah, he plays well, and for sure that’s not the point. It just doesnt sound irish, but for someone like him, it’s not important. The problem at the end is that you end up having someone playing his own tunes his own style, at a rythm that sucks when it comes to ITM, and the chemistry between musicians at the session is going havroc. He’s been one of the main reason why I avoided that particular session on saturday night, because he was always there. But now that session has been partly cancelled, altough he will show up elsewhere. If he could just get his recorders stolen or something, that would help us
Yeah Az, the worst part was that he did, completely, dominate the session, because he was playing a loud instrument, with a very distinct sound, with a style, rhythm and ornamentation unsuitable to Irish music. It was kind of funny seeing Tommy Peoples try to play along on his fiddle ‘recorder style’.
Chris