The place of the individual in the session

Trad Irish Music
1

Hi all

I’m sure it has been brought up here and there but yet I’d like to try and have a more sort-of-academic approach on the issue; The place of the individual in the session. While it may seem to have many different aspects, I’d like to know what you think about the specific area of tune variations. Let me point out the stages that lead me to ask about this:

I was interested in the fact that music of the 17-18th centuries, not just Irish, introduces a variation of a melodic line or a melodic phrase if it is repeated. At first, my thought was that maybe this practice was only common in one musical domain and had somehow spread to others, like from folk music to ‘art music’ for example. It is well documented in treatises from that time, that variations are part of the music and given the freedom, it is upon the performer to incorporate variations as he sees right. Baroque treatises include notated examples of variations for a single plain melodic line, as to explain the idea of the practice. In Irish music, as I’m not sure I’ve seen any such treatises and of course it could be very helpful if there is one as such (let me know), being it un-notated musical tradition - variations have probably been developed to go along with the local style.
Then why would one musician vary on the repetition? It is quiet obvious to put it simply as the same way we speak to one another, we would probably not say something the same way twice exactly, but in a slightly different manner. (I don’t like comparing music to a language, but here it works well for a change). It is part of the musical expression and the development of the sentences that variations comes to be so essential if without them it would just be tasteless and sometimes meaningless.

So it is quiet obvious to us, traditional musicians and others alike, that for the sake of preserving a tasteful performance, variations would be applied only to the repeated melodic sentences. When associated to playing a reel for instance, I mean that we would add our own variations on the 2nd A or B parts but never the first ones. Variations that may appear as we improvise and also those that we practice when we play by ourselves.

Now let me concentrate on the session experience. While in contrast to Baroque music, where in sonatas for solo, two or three voices each voice plays a different melody - in an Irish session it would be one melody at once only. While the practice of variations is up to the individual and is distributed per the individual musician, it is quiet safe to say that there is probably no place for introducing variations on the 3rd round of the reel when 5 or more people are playing together. It would probably be best if the players together play the same melodic line than hearing each one playing different variations of it at the same time.
Then how would one incorporate variations in a session when playing all together? Should there be no individualism existent in the course of the session? I’m being a little extreme in my wonderings.

If one should start a set in a session, he should definitely play the first round of the tune by himself, if not accompanied by a bodhran or a harmonic backing. While we learn that first round of the tune should always be played as we learnt it from someone else without our own additions (This is also arguable because there are some melodic additions that we can spot as variations which were added along the way and we could purposely simplify them when playing a bare tune), how would one introduce variations? How would one individualize his interpretation in the session? It is safe to go back to the question if there is a place for the individual in the session at all? I can also point out the question about where do we draw the line about preserving tradition as opposed to changing it when concerned about Irish music?

Sorry for the long text. I hope it won’t be tedious.
Thanks,
Philip

PS,
If one of you has some ideas on the existence of variations in Irish traditional music since ever until now, I would be most grateful.

2

I don’t think the long-ish exposition is at all tedious, Phillip. Interesting stuff. Too intellectual for me tonight though - I’ll try in the morning.

3

In irish music most good musicians will always make subtle (or “micro”) variations on the melody, every time they repeat it. It could be a single note, or a small frase, or an ornamentation, or a change of octave etc. This either if they’re alone or in group.
For real variations you’ll need to be the only melodic instrument playing, or of course you can do it if you’re in a band and decided ahead to do something particular.

Hear how John Carty improvises when he plays alone, and still makes quite big variations when he plays along with Matt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtDJmVo7Xtk

4

Then it comes to the notion of thought that if one never plays in a band and only attends sessions, this individual will probably never experience appreciation of his personal addition to the music he creates when playing. Is it safe to claim that most of Irish traditional tunes are rendered in a session as part of a modern tradition rather than an old one? How about the question of session ethitcs that come into play in this situation? I might be asking obvious or hard questions but these need some reference; after all they are kind of existential and very relevant to us or the future of this music. Maybe it’s an ethnomusicological process that I’m trying to map to this date.

Should I compare this situation to the orchestra musician who plays second violin among other five with him?

Thank you for participating.

5

IMO? No, you shouldn’t compare any of it with the orchestra musician. Apples and kumquats.

6

Not true. A session being a social event (it is only a performance by default), I think appreciation is properly to be sought - if one must seek it - from within the group. At a session the other day, I did some kind of variation and got a smile and acknowledgement from the fellow sitting next to me as we played on. Couldn’t say if anyone else heard my “little gem”, but it hardly matters to me. These little appreciations in passing, often usually only from one person nearby, must be the norm in such a group setting when and if they happen. In a session setting, at one level I play for myself first, for my fellows a close second, for the music absolutely, and for the greater audience not at all. If the punters are appreciative, that’s nice, but I’m not there for them, actually.

By contrast, in an actual (usually paid :wink: ) performance I am totally there for the audience first, and audience appreciation will matter most in THAT situation. I am definitely not playing for myself then: I am intentionally trying to make people happy and forget their troubles for a little while, and with any luck impress them into the bargain. Any appreciation that I may get from my bandmates is great reinforcement, but it is not the primary goal.

I would say a modern development included in a greater living, continuing tradition. An overly fine point to some, perhaps, but a distinction that counts for me.

I’m afraid this is too generally put for me have a start on it. Session ethics - do you mean like not murdering the bleep who sits in with spoons he got from the next table over? :wink:

Crookedtune seems to agree with me. :slight_smile:

7

Nanohedron,
I enjoyed reading the answers :slight_smile:
You’ve raised another point that I should’ve accented in my earlier post: the question who do you target the music at while in the session? You gave an answer of course, but I want to note the question.

About paid performances, it is rather not the topic I’d mind in this specific post, as I want to dwell well into the session experience and its implications. I also believe that this music as today is not performed by as many as played at sessions. I think that even those who perform might attend less sessions.

8

I totally agree with Nano’s post.

9

I would like to share that I know of at least one person, personally, who stopped attending sessions and kept performing only just because he didn’t feel that he was artistically challenged or performance acknowledged. One might say he chose poorly, another would agree with how he felt - I’m interested in the variety of opinions.
(I could ask another big question about internet affects on the session behavior codes, but that’s for the next thesis :slight_smile:)

PS:
Anybody knows of any academic articles about the irish sessions? or non-academic but published?

10

I’d say he was in the wrong place then. If one attends a session to get his “performance acknowledged” (or as we call it, the “Hey! Everybody look at me!” -syndrome), he should just stay home. A session is, to me, about collective playing in a social manner, not a place for showing off. We do have a guy like that at our sessions around here (making sure to play that fiddle of his in E major or Bb major or something like that, to guarantee that none of us pesky flute players, whistlers or pipers butt in on his one man show), and that has, at times, just had me stand up and leave, because it gets very boring after a while, and doesn’t help the music one bit, which is all it’s really about. The music. Not this player or that player, but the music and the craic.

11

Jäger, should I gather then from your description of the issue is that the session of your preference is one that is less organic and more of a static nature where each two or three individuals will always know the tune that is being played? This will guarantee more or less the absence of the solo display.

Last night I was at a holiday reception at the ambassador’s home, Breifne O’Reilly (Israel has got a rather small Irish Music scene) where I had another conversation on the subject with few of my session mates. The first question about Irish Music as today, is if it is possible to claim (obviously without the numbers to support this claim) that this music is mostly rendered in a social gathering like the session? And everyone I asked this question replied yes, which means even if they are wrong, if one could actually calculate it all, it is still a common belief that people relate strongly to. This puts the session in the position of being the most important link in the chain of Irish Music rendition according to this common belief. Better should I say ‘common around our session members’. (That’s why I am interested in your beliefs also, I’m not going to start a poll).
As you see, it is very hard to have a solid base about most of these questions and claims are very loose in the air. But this is not formal either so…

How should one learn new tunes if not from others he plays with at sessions, one gentleman asks? These others will have to introduce new tunes or new interpretations in the midst of the session, simply put. If we consider the session as being a unified organism, which consists of a certain tune repertoire, when each session around the world is probably never the same as the other, repertoire compared, we have to look at how the session accumulated its repertoire. I would take the risk and define this term, session repertoire, as being the number of tunes that repeat at least once, over the course of a number of sessions, with most of the usual or regular members identify them and able to play them. It must be then the role of the individual to introduce a tune to the fellow sessionees, as if there is a hidden voting system that takes place, when if the suggested tune satisfies the organism it “learns” the new suggestion and adds it to the repertoire. Learning takes time which ensures that this individual will have to boldly have another one or few takes at his new suggestion. Maybe it is even a natural course of things, that eventually the tune will be played by others after I will play it enough times by myself in the session.

Going back to my original post, after many thoughts with myself about it, right now I feel that the answer would be that tune variations, which is a large part of the individual artistic expression in my opinion, do not have a real place in the session. Of course one can introduce variations, but I’m afraid they will remain to be not an integral part of the session, which will not grow into something as a result of that introduction, which will not contain more craic that it could contain. Maybe it also depends on the individual himself. This answer goes paradoxically against the belief that today, ITM is mostly performed at sessions around the world. Why against? Because it raises the issue of lack of newly varied content. In my opinion, variations should continue to pass on from person to person in some way, and this cannot be done when listening to a performance of an individual on stage. It can be done listening to a recording, but this leads to standardization of tunes more or less.
Sorry if this sounded like a complain, I’m not worried about the future of ITM, it will manage without my help.

Will “the session” suffice to all our artistic needs, if we have them?

cheers.

12

While we do have two or three playeres here that know “every tune in the book”, even in their abscence things are managable and fun, and “new” (as in tunes we haven’t heard before) tunes get flung about all the time. And don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with solo playing as such, if a player starts off a tune that turns out to be a tune no one else knows, he’ll run with it for two or three rounds of the tune before moving on to the next one, as a way of letting people get to know the tune, maybe pick up a few phrases or even the whole thing. And if it turns out that no one knows the next tune in the set or even the one after that, then that’s fine too.

This, in my book, is fine, as it isn’t intended as a show piece, but played in hopes that someone else knows it. It actually becomes a problem when a player is actively seeking out “solo-time”, by means of the examples listed above, such as playing tunes that are in keys not possible for 75% of us to play comfortably (boxes, concertinas, banjos), or for 50% of us (as I said, whistles, keyless flutes and pipes etc.) not playable at all. The fiddler in question is a man with a classical background who has also played a lot of Appalachian, Breton and Swedish music as well (something that has coloured his playing very much and he doesn’t sound or even try to sound “irish” in his phrasing, ornamentation, rhythm etc.), and claims that he has “gotten bored with playing in D or G”, which, to me, just means that you shouldn’t attend an irish session at all, as 90% or more of the repertoire is bound to be in either of those keys. And when he gets too bored with those keys, he’ll start playing Swedish or Appalachian tunes to be sure to get even more solo time.

Anyway, that should be the end of my little rant and I hope I got my views on the matter across. Not saying that my way is the only way or even the right way, but that’s how I look upon the matter with someone going to a session with the mindset of “now I’ll have everyone listen to ME and adore ME because I am the greatest”.

13

I don’t think anyone with a mindset like that, will be popular anywhere, not just the session.
But here you go with a few pointers that I can grasp from your words:

  • When one starts a tune, he initially hopes others will join him. Should manage it by playing known tunes, preferably in the keys of D or G.
  • One doesn’t want to show his unique style of playing, but will rather blend in with the others.
  • If one plays the tune alone, he is interested in “teaching” that tune for others to know. Is there a place for non-ITM tunes?

I might add that the sessionee’s creative process can be expressed in the tunes he picks as to maintain a certain flow with the key changes and certain beginnings and endings of tunes. This can better be showcased when the individual is to play a whole set of tunes, though it depends on the session’s specific mindset. At our session it will be considered quiet rude to play a whole set by yourself, meaning you only play one tune round-robin style to give the set a taste of everyone in the session. This way you concentrate on one particular tune rather than thinking about what goes next and it also gives more room for participation in tune picking.

14

I always have a problem with that rule of thumb as a stated norm no matter how statistically true it may turn out to be…unless you mean key signatures, in which case a fair amount of ground can be covered.

Yes, no, and maybe… at the session as I know it, it’s all about the tune, but while there’s a unity you definitely don’t have lockstep uniformity; you end up with what one Chiffer called “ragged unison”. Another used the term “shimmer”. Individual style and approach is just part of the larger result, a contributing element but not out of any sense of composition but rather by default, and generally due to personal force of habit more than anything else. There usually isn’t too much problem blending in in the larger sense, as the tune is the tune, pretty much. Any individual stuff, while it might be brilliant, is as a matter of practicalities more and more relegated to the peripheral, the larger a session gets.

Or he could be grandstanding. It depends. A key such as F might be a first clue.

They get adopted into the tradition from time to time, but this seems to be the exception. I personally don’t go to an ITM session to hear other traditions, if that’s any indicator. Likewise I wouldn’t go to a Finnish session with the hope of hearing Irish music. If I did hear it, I daresay I’d find the incongruity jarring.

If it’s an all-comers-welcome sort of deal, I would hesitate to call it an ITM session as such. And that’s fine; it’s just something else then, is all.

I like nothing better than putting together sets with just that in mind. :slight_smile:

15
  • When one starts a tune, he initially hopes others will join him. Should manage it by playing known tunes, preferably in the keys of D or G.

Basically right, yes. Although it doesn’t have to be tunes that everyone knows and are tired of playing all the time (Kesh Jig, Britches full of Stitches and Drowsy Maggie comes to mind), it is quite welcome to play a tune that isn’t played every session, and then answering possible questions of “what was that tune and where did you get it from”, if people liked it and want to learn it. The tunes being in D or G is simply because that is the keys that everyone can play in, and what the majority of the tunes are in.

  • One doesn’t want to show his unique style of playing, but will rather blend in with the others.

Not true, nor what I wrote. Quite the opposite is in fact true around here. People play lots of interesting variations and ornamentation in the tunes, and if you’re there to actually enjoy the music more than you are to play it, so to speak (meaning that you actually listen to what the others are doing and musically interacting with them, as opposed to just sitting there and playing your own thing, not minding the others save for when the tune changes), you will pick up these little nuances from each other and play off of each other, taking the music to a whole new level other than just playing reel A three times, reel B three times and reel C three times, then on to a set of jigs, doing the same thing, and actually let the music live and let the music play you, so to speak, you follow the tune instead of trying to bend the tune after your own will.

  • If one plays the tune alone, he is interested in “teaching” that tune for others to know. Is there a place for non-ITM tunes?

Partially true. For myself at sessions I will sometimes play a tune that a lot of people might not know, but I think happen to be really damn good and fun to play. First of all I hope that someone else has that tune as well and will join in, if not, I just play the tune because I think it’s great. If someone happens to like it and pick it up or ask the name of it, all the better. But that’s something I might do with one single tune during a session, two if it’s a really long session (4+ hours). Maybe. But not with fifteen tunes, as this guy does it, and he’s been playing the same exact tunes in the same exact way in the same exact sets for the last 2½ years now, and I’m not the only one getting sick of sitting about, listening to it again and again and politely clap afterwards (good time to pick up a pint or something), so he’s not even bringing anything new to the table.

This is turning out to be quite an interesting discussion, giving me a lot to think about, thank you for bringing it up!

16

Or he could be grandstanding. It depends. A key such as F might be a first clue.

So if I took my low F# whistle to a session and played something on it someone might accuse me of grandstanding?

F# ??? - Not sure but I think I clicked the F checkbox in my spreadsheet, forgetting that it was really meant F# and so ended up with dimensions for an F# whistle rather than an F.

17

I didn’t exactly say that, did I. Anyway, they might only think it and not care to waste their breath.

But I dunno…what kind of session did you have in mind? That could make all the difference. For the record, unless I specify otherwise, in my own case I’m always referring to an ITM session, of the sort where people play tunes that in general are held in common, played together, and usually in those keys that for the most part are easily playable on a D whistle: Dmaj/mix, Em, Gmaj, Am/maj/mix, Bm.

I see the bottom line this way: if one person sets it up so that no one else can play along, then at an ITM session, yes, I’d call that grandstanding. Not that such people necessarily care. OTOH of course it could be just for a bit of craic. You have to take into account patterns and who you’re dealing with, right?

18

I didn’t exactly say that, did I. Anyway, they might only think it and not care to waste their breath.

But I dunno…what kind of session did you have in mind?

None!
I would not dream of doing this unless specifically asked to play something - and then I would probably not play it on an F# whistle.
While it might be tempting in that it would be hard for anyone to play along and so you could play a slow air without unwanted accompaniment if someone did try to join in the possible cacophony resulting from them trying to figure out the key (6 sharps anyone?) would probably ruin it anyway.
I stick to a high D mostly, low G, A, and C are useful sometimes and I like Bb and Eb whistles but are not too common for ITM (or mainly ITM) sessions.

19

Unwanted accompaniment. I’m only quoting those words that suit my notion… :slight_smile:
So there is such a thing for some people after all!

20

For playing a slow air? Most certainly!