Sheet music

Trad Irish Music
1

Many people believe you should not learn this music with sheet music. That you should only learn by ear. I have to disagree.

Here’s what I realized as a learner from sheet music.

I attend a session only 6 hours a month. I listen to a lot of recorded Irish music in the mean time, usually during work hours. Much of this recorded music seems to be out of the range of my instrument or has too much fancy variation to be usable for learning. I find this frustrating.

I admit my ear is not so well trained that I can just hear a tune and then start playing it. But I do feel that I’ve gotten pretty familiar with the phrasing and sound of the idiom.

So a lot of times what I do is sit down with the sheet music and play an unfamiliar tune. As I’m playing it, I can apply the phrasing that I have heard from other similar tunes. If I haven’t heard that exact tune, I’m sure I’ve heard a similar one. It’s not like every single reel in the world is a completely different beast. Many bits and pieces are the same from tune-to-tune, so I find that my fingers know where to go more often with each new tune I attempt.

I will play for a while with the sheet music until I’m to the point where I find myself humming the tune while I’m out taking a walk or whatever. Then I know I am ready put the sheet music away. It’s always a struggle to learn it anew from my memory, but at least now I have heard it before and when I make a mistake, I can correct myself and keep going.

Sometimes yes, the tunes do sound different in real life when I finally hear real musicians play them, but it’s not a complete disaster. I just adjust my mental image of the tune and keep going, learning the things I missed. The nice thing is by then I will be familiar enough with the tune that I will recognize it when someone plays it and be able to more easily incorporate variations or fix my mistakes.

In other words, I use the sheet music to create a scenario where I have heard the tune before enough that I can play it by ear. It’s certainly not ideal, but it seems to work ok.

At some point I expect I will have enough memory to be able to learn tunes on the fly. But at this point, both learning the tunes and the instrument, I’m not capable of it. I’ve heard many people say it was 10 or 20 years before they could do that.

So here’s to the communication tool they call sheet music!

2

Realise there are things you don’t know you don’t know, which are not in the written music. Your ‘credential clips’ tell a different story than your post if I may say so and confirm the advise against depending too much on reading while learning.

3

I think it’s OK to use sheet music once you’ve learned a great number of tunes the proper way, i.e. by ear, and once you’re well up there with ornamentation and variation. It’s bad news for beginners though. Just listen to your CDs or sessions till you’re sick of listening and then do some more listening. The best thing about sheet music is that you can occasionally use it to sort out some tricky bit of a tune that you haven’t quite got your head round.

4

You may be confusing “learning the tune” with “learning the music.” Once you have learned the music, learning the basics of any particular tune from sheet music is fine. But for people starting out, the caution is to not expect to learn the music from sheet music - it’s not there.

If you can apply what you’ve learned from listening to the music, then you are already learning to play by ear. Keep practising this.

djm

5

At some point you actually have to learn the tune.

I don’t actually care how you learn it–pick it up from someone else’s playing, figure it out from a recording, check the dots, or make a deal with the devil–but if you’re going to play it with other musicians you actually need to know the notes.

Listening to someone play “hit and miss” with a tune sets my teeth on edge.

–James

6

Listening to someone play “hit and miss” with a tune sets my teeth on edge.

Hearing a tune without any structure and poor rhythm because the player doesn’t use his/her ears is a lot more common if you care to listen to clips posted on the internet, and that is one hundred percent down to players being lazy and refusing to use their primary tool for the job: their ears.

7

I did not say it made me an expert. And most of those clips I posetd are tunes I learned by ear, some only a few days after starting the flute.

I said that I believe that it helps me to learn by ear because when I finally do get a chance to hear the tune, I’m familiar enough with it to know what to look for. It’s kind of like when you take a film studies class. You have to watch every film twice because the first time you are paying attention to the plot. The second and third time around you are finally seeing.

I have to get over the plot before I can learn. Or at least in my case, the plod.

8

You may be finding sheetmusic efficient for learning tunes, but I think you’re missing the point.

You get a lovely sound out of your flute and your playing sounds nice (I mean this both as a compliment and a criticism - many people like “nice”, I like something more fierce, more passionnate - but this is a question of personal taste). It just doesn’t sound like irish traditional music. Speaking as someone who doesn’t put up any flute credentials (though googling my moniker should find videos and mp3s galore) because he really doesn’t play that well, my advice may be of as little worth as yours (regarding sheetmusic), but I’ll give it anyway (because I’m stubborn).

Ditch the whole aspect of tune learning and focus on listening and playing. At the moment (listening to your recent recordings), you sound like a stream of notes. A rather lovely stream, but a stream none the less. Look for what makes a stream of notes irish. The rythm, the phrasing, the articulation (breath, tongue, throat, finger), this is the terrain that the stream flows down. All your stream needs is to find the right terrain (and the continuous work we all do on making the water “cleaner” - you’re years ahead of me on that count :/).

Is sheetmusic relevant to this problem? Not directly. It’s just a tool and a very useful one in my opinion (even though it has a very bad effect in terms of mis-representing variations - it doesn’t show which notes should be preserved and what the variation possibilities are). However, it can’t influence the terrain your stream of notes flow down. It may even have a negative influence, subconsciously bringing back old habits. I myself am incapable of playing sheetmusic correctly. It will sound like one of the dance tunes I know: a jig, a reel, a waltz - give me some baroque music and I will fuck it up.

Sheetmusic is also making you spend more time on learning tunes (new streams of notes) than on getting the right irish idiom (terrain).

Some things you might consider are breathing points - you are breathing in decidedly non irish places on some occasions - check brother steve’s advice on that and emphasis - you are too “monotonous” - in the sense of each note having the same value, not in the sense that it is boring. These are small things and will take months to fix and years to perfect. But you will play really well. You have so many technical aspects of playing flute down - once you have the rest you will play wonderful music.

Of course, you may say that you’re not interested in sounding more irish or that I’m just some kind of elitist who thinks there’s a “right” way to play ITM. I confess to giving this unsollicited advice from the point of view of someone who doesn’t see any point in playing this music if it’s not to play it “right”.

9

It takes a while to absorb all that you are learning. Your opinions will change over time. Having a lot of sheet music takes you down many blind alleys because it’s like an explosion of information that takes one away from the basic act of acquiring a tune and learning it, really, really, well.

It can reach a point where you acquire a false confidence because of your exposure and it kinda ruins the impact of acquiring a new tune because it sounds like so many others and you miss the nuances. I get a lot of “B” parts of reels mixed up because there are so many out there that are similar. It would have been better to have slowly acquired them, one at a time, rather than being able to imperfectly rip through 'em off of a music stand.

Good luck though. And, I think you are brave to post clips. You never know what people might say here when you do so.

10

I’m guilty of being totally dependent on sheet music to learn a tune. As an excuse I kept telling myself, I started playing an instrument too late in life and I must have a bad ear. At a tionol a couple of weeks ago, the instructor had us lilt a simple slide, “A Trip to the Jacks”. We kept at it until we could dum dede dum it by heart. After picking out the first few notes on the chanter, I was able to make it through the A part without looking at the sheet music that he also provided. His point hit home, as long as I have ears, I don’t really need the sheet music. I’m assuming that the more I do this the easier it will become. The added benefit is that it’s easier for me to pick up the rhythm by listening since I’m not all that great at reading music anyway. I think I wasted too much time these past four years that I could have spent listening.

11

That is so true. I know the first parts of so many reels, but have a very hard time remembering the second parts, they all seem to blur together.

Being able to read music is a valuable skill, but I really wish I hadn’t been musically literate when I started playing Irish music. I would have been a much, much better player today if I’d been forced to rely on my ears.

As for posting redordings of your playing on the Internets, I’ve played the flute for more years than I care to remember, but I can’t see the point of putting up recordings of my playing (unless I’m looking for advice on what to work on). There is a wealth of well played music to be found on the net. If learners listen to recordings that lack the blas, they’re missing out on an awful lot of a what makes this music what it is.

12

I think you (and all the others on c&f who have posed the same question) are facing a choice: Either you trust the people who have the music and have gone through what you’re going through at some stage in the past. What they are telling you is that you should learn your tunes without sheet music (until you have the music). Or you don’t trust the people who have the music and muddle through learning from sheet music and listening and doing what’s easiest until at some point you realize you’re off the mark and hear what others hear in your playing now. At that point you’ll go back and relearn. Both ways are tried and well-trodden and if you keep with it, chances are you’ll eventually get there.

Here is a suggestion: Just give it a shot and learn the next 10, 20 tunes by ear. You apparently have the Fliuit book, which is ideal for this; start with the Off She Goes and Larry McDonagh’s and work your way through the polkas and barn dances into the jigs (I see that you are already playing the Hills of Tara and Deer’s March). Put the book itself away. Yes, it takes effort but if you consider that you can’t seem to remember tunes you learn from sheet music, I doubt the effort is greater when you do it by ear. And it’s very satisfying as you’ll discover. After you’ve got your 10, 20 tunes by ear, record yourself and compare the tunes you learned by ear to those you are playing now from sheet music. You’ll have tried both and you’ll be able to decide what works better.

13

Learning by ear does not equal picking up on the fly, and it does not need to be frustrating.

There are great software tools where you can mark sections of a piece of music to repeat over and over, slow it down without changing pitch, or transposing from one key into another without changing speed (or all of the above mixed as you need it of course). I’m using a program called Transcribe and love it, but there are others too.

Best I like a real person teaching me a tune, but it’s a luxury I don’t have very often.

cheers,
Sonja

14

Transcribe! is great. It’s what I use, too.

15

I’m conflicted. I agree that it is probably correct to learn by ear however, I agree with SBflulter as well because she and I have just about the same time in on our flutes, and she is right about learning from sheet music. Although she does it in a little harder way that I do.
I think what is bothering me is that you all are leaving out the part of SB’s point about learning the flute. That is separate altogether from learning ITM.IMHO
In Grey’s book there is an article on how the body learns to play, to make various repetitive movements. In short, if you practice wrong movements then that is what your body will learn, it will build pathways to the brain that will make it easier for you to play wrong. If you practice correct movements that is what you will learn. Your body doesn’t know which is which; it doesn’t even care really (of course everyone else in the room has a pretty good idea of which is which, and not only do they care but they will probably tell you about it!!) The point is that we are trying to do two different things here, learn the movements correctly and quickly (which you guys have already done years ago) and learn the “music”.
These two things are separate in my mind. You guys (those of you who have been playing for years) can hear a series of notes and you recognize them because you have already learned how to play that same series many times over. You have said yourselves many times that the very same series of notes has appeared over and over in tunes that you already have tucked away in your little brains. The pathways are already in place in your body and you are really on automatic as far as actually playing the notes. Your hard work is in tone production, phrasing and breathing, although breathing is something else that you guys have already tucked away in your mind…we (beginners) have not and breathing for us is probably the single biggest problem we have. (I say “we” but of course I can only really speak for myself.) You have the leisure to just learn the tune and work on your ornaments. We are in a different league and I think that is the second part of what SB was getting at. Correct me if I am wrong SB.
Listen, I love the sound of my flute…I sometimes just listen to long tones because it sounds so good, I don’t even have to play a tune to love playing. What I really don’t like is hunting and pecking while listening to a tape and trying to figure out what notes are being played. Why not just get out the dots and learn the correct pathways right away? That is what I do. I just get out the dots and play, and I think that is the right way for me at this point in my flute journey. I would say to a beginner, “learn the mechanics as well and as quickly as you can so that you can get on with learning the music.” (oh, I can hear the yelling now)
Learning the “music” is the place where I agree completely with you. To learn phrasing, to learn which notes to emphasize and when, and to learn all the other parts that go together to make up ITM is a lifetime study. That can only be done by ear, at least that is what I think…I don’t see how you can get that from a book. Although you can get the mechanics of a roll from a book you can only know what a roll is by listening to some of them being played by a good player. I also know that I am not about to hunt and peck the day away trying to learn by ear when I could be playing off the sheet music in advance of memorizing it. Maybe in five or ten years I will learn all new tunes by ear…I think I probably will as a matter of fact but not now, the mechanics are getting in the way.
Anyway I agree with both sides of the thing but for me the only thing I want now is to learn the instrument inside and out. The phrasing will come with time and with hundreds of hours of listening to good players. Hundreds of hours of pleasure…oh how I wish I had discovered this years ago!!!
So, there is my two pennies worth.
Jim

16

I think this is the core if the matter. I don’t think “just getting the dots” works because you are not getting the correct pathways. You are practicing without phrasing or variation. You are grinding troughs into your musical mind that you will later have to struggle to get out of. The flute is really a pretty simple instrument and the basic going from xxx xxx to xxo ooo stuff doesn’t concern me as much as getting the musical idiom ingrained from the beginning.

But just to make that clear: I am giving advice that I wish I had gotten earlier (and cough listened to earlier). You should do what you like, and you’ll get there by a circuitous route, as well.

17

Ooo, what a giveaway. Your impatience is what is causing you to take longer to learn this stuff than necessary. Hunting and pecking proves that you still don’t know your instrument well enough to recognize which note is being played when you listen to others. How do you get that familiarity? By hunting and pecking, of course.

As you noted, you are learning many things at once. The only thing that dots can satisfy right now is to keep your intellect engaged. All the other things you need to learn, posture, breathing, tone, etc. are more physical, and require constant repetition that drives your intellect up the wall.

Recognize that learning the music and the instrument is a non-intellectual exercise. Give up trying to force things intellectually and just sit back and relax. Enjoy the repetition of practise.

Or you can beat yourself up and take twice as long to learn. That bit is up to you.

djm

18

[
But just to make that clear: I am giving advice that I wish I had gotten earlier (and cough listened to earlier). You should do what you like, and you’ll get there by a circuitous route, as well.[/quote]
You know, I can hear myself saying that to someone too…but not for ten years or so. :slight_smile:

19

Yea, I was never able to sit by the river on a lazy afternoon and watch the fishing bobber to do something…like bob or something. So I guess you are right in that impatience has something to do with it but I think it is a pretty natural thing to want to play complete tunes and once you know them, no matter how you have learned them, you can always add things and improve the sound of them. It is funny though that I know that it is going to take a long time to learn to be good at this and I am not impatient in that way. I am really enjoying this whole thing.
Jim

20

Ah… the old standard - is sheet music shite or shine?

It makes a good tool, but a shakey foundation, and a lousy crutch. Listen, listen more, then listen again, and then some more.

If you learn the notes from the sheet music, you’ll be able to play the notes as written in that sheet music, but it won’t help you play the tune well in the genre, unless you also have the listening experience to know and recognize what isn’t in that sheet music - The lilt, the lift, the life of the tune.

I am still struggling with getting that. And I do use sheet music to help me figure out some things, especially that written by some of the really good players. But it still takes more. If I can hear the tune played, I get much more of it than seeing the dots.

I have finally gotten to the point where I can hear a lot of what I used to look for on paper. It’s rarely written as it is actually played. I have not, sadly, gotten to the point yet where I can actually turn around play it as I heard it, but by jinkies, I can hear it a lot better now, and that’s come from not using the sheet music.

That said, you have to do what works for you, but be advised, the best players do not play from sheet music, and many of them never did.