yes, (hahaha, very clever! 
)…but only other musicians would get the distinction between ‘version’ & “variation”…
Even with a non musician that has an appreciative “musical” ear, …the FIRST way they encounter a piece will always be the ‘right’ way, the way its ‘supposed’ to sound to them, the way they recognize it.
A friend of mine recently learned Bonnie Kate from Kevin Burke. She was talking about how happy it was to play the tune with some variety in it, making things a bit less humdrum; I need to ask her tomorrow if she knows about the whole spontaneous variations aspect of Irish music in the first place. Seriously, where do you learn about that if you don’t do a bit of digging? I got it first from the Clancy book, but no fiddler’s going to buy that - they likely all think Willie’s the guy who got the School started originally…and also, a lot of people just want to have some tunes with friends and all this variation business is just something they likely don’t have time for.
I mean to write an article about this for the Pipers’ Review - show 20 different ways of playing the first two bars of the Donnybrook Jig.
“I Buried My Wife” etc is another version of the Breeches, notice. The Collier’s/Do You Want Any More are close cousins. No end of different versions of all of these. Willie’s various Breeches are fascinating. In the original printing of the book I think I Buried was listed as one of them, IIRC.
Ennis said that he learned tunes out of O’Neill’s but many of his settings are are anything but bookish, the Flannel (=Peeler’s) Jacket is the one I always think of, with that roll on C natural in the first bar of the 2nd part. Maybe this was a setting from his Da, some other musician, or his own spin on a printed version - we’ll never know.
I’ve always gotten settings from old recordings, which will lead you precisely nowhere when you venture out into public, of course. Figuring out what the “correct” (=mob 
) setting is makes for a fresh challenge though. And where did those come from? Some are definitely from Michael Coleman’s old records. This would make for a nice doctoral thesis from the U of L, if it hasn’t been done already of course.
I’ll tell you what gets me about this whole subject, and makes Irish music endlessly fascinating: this variations/versions business - not only do different people have different versions/settings, but they change markedly over time. Fashion is a big driver in this. So tunes that were played one way this year may not be played the same way, even by the same musicians, the following year. Sometimes - mostly - it’s a slow process - but sometimes it isn’t.
Still, I think it’s worth distinguishing between different settings of tunes that are essentially ‘the same’ but played a bit differently, from different versions of tunes which recognisably share the same root, but which have become, in effect, like different tunes. I may not have chosen the right words here (“settings” and “versions”), so please substitute your own.
I didn’t think you had to dig that deeply to find out about the “whole spontaneous variations aspect.” There was me thinking it was common knowledge amongst Irish trad players. It certainly appeared that way when I was learning how to play. While it certainly seemed unattainable from my perspective at that time, it was the norm amongst the musicians I knew who were actually good. No digging was required. I picked up knowledge and awareness of it because it was simply there, amongst the musicians I was hanging out with at the time – same way I picked up a lot of other aspects of the music and session etiquette. And we are talking Colorado here. Not deepest darkest Clare.
When I listen to someone playing, I am always tuned into their variations and how they play with the tune. That whole playfulness with the melody is a key aspect separating the mediocre players from good ones. I don’t think of it as so-and-so’s “version,” though – just and so-and-so felt like playing it in that one moment.
I remember Mr. Spear and I were trying to learn a tune and could not agree with one another on a tricky phrase in the B part. We went to trusty iTunes and found about half a dozen recordings of the tune and half a dozen totally different ways of playing the B part. We looked at each other and said, “Oh, F-- it. It obviously doesn’t matter anyway!”
I agree with Ben that there is another meaning to “versions” which can be interchanged with “settings.” If two tunes by the same name have vague melodic similarities but if I played one and you played the other, it would be a total trainwreck… well, that’s not variation. That’s another version/setting that makes it into a different tune!
I like that. 
When I teach, I try to pare down the tune to a “base” version. This “base” version could be thought of as the structural base of a tune or the bones of the tune, or whatever. Often people when varying tunes still have a skeleton that is never played on its own, but is the root of the variations or the base of the tune… all of these analogies are not exact, I hope you’re catching. The concept of a “skeleton” isn’t super helpful, because for tunes the skeleton is fuzzy and fluid.
Sometimes people have different skeletons of tunes. Sometimes these are different enough that you can’t play them together. Sometimes it’s obvious the skeleton is that of a cow, when everyone else is playing with horse skeletons… ie it’s still the same basic shape, but something’s a bit off. Most of the time when someone recognizes that you’re playing a certain tune, but your version is different, it likely has something to do with this skeleton. Not that anyone ever pares the tune down like that in a session, and talking about what the skeleton is isn’t even necessarily fruitful. I may have a “base” version one day and another a different day. Or it may be a matter of bigger differences.
I also wrote elsewhere recently the following:
I think of tunes in three categories of relatedness (and there’s obviously a spectrum along these lines so it’s pretty hard to draw hard lines between them):
- Minor variations (pretty much identical, but maybe with some small turns, ornaments, or notes a little different.) Ex: Doody’s version of the Glen Cottage Polka #1 vs the Murhpy’s
- Variants (still the same tune, but you couldn’t play them together) Ex: Doody’s two part Box the Monkey vs the regular three part Behind the Haystack (vs the four part Box the Monkey from the Goodman collection). Another example might be the Frieze Britches 5 vs 6 vs 7 part (session vs Willie Clancy vs Leo Rowsome).
- Related (and here I’d never worry about the mechanism of how they were related, but I’d lump all of Alan’s mechanisms in here) Ex: I buried my wife vs Frieze Britches. Or all of the tunes in the Lark in Morning family (the yellow haired boy, lark in the morning, lark’s march, galway tom, etc etc).
Another way to think of it is that the first category you can play together, the second you can’t, but you wouldn’t really be able to play them one after the other and have it sound or feel like two tunes, and the third you could play them in the same set and it’d be two distinct tunes. For example: Willie Clancy’s #57 and Tom Busby’s; Winnie Hayes and the Cordal; I buried my wife and the frieze britches (this is the hardest for me). Why are they all jigs?
Oh, reels get confusing too. Played a few with Joey Arbata after he and his crew did a house concert the other night, we played the Kildare Fancy hornpipe and then Joey went into a whole string of reels that just pedaled around the A, Beauty Spot, Merry Harriers, the Gauger or Gouger or Dan McCarthy’s or whatever it’s called, and I forget what else. When we were done I complimented him on the confusing selection. 
Another pet project of mine would be to do a podcast with just that, multiple takes of some given tune. Helps that I have all this rot on my computer, all labeled, all I have to do is enter some title and every instance of it shows up in the results; also I can remember all the different titles of tunes. Know another title for the Silver Spear, for instance? 
Martin Wynne called it either “Ennis’s Fancy” or “Carney’s Fancy,” forget which, but hey, give me a break.
I made big MP3s of these tunes once for demonstration purposes but that was way too much work; I could cue things up one after another and save the whole mess as a big audio file though. That wouldn’t be much of a chore.
It’s wonderful to wake up on this Antipodean morning to find the thread has carried on over night with all these great contributions.
I was fortunate in my early days of piping to have access to the Willie Clancy book and also the other writing by Pat Mitchell as found on theSRS journals (before there was this internet full of easy to access downloads), so I too always just assumed the whole idea of playing a tune was to add variations on the fly, either by skillfully making something up (based on certain conventions some of which Pat Mitchell outlines) and hoping it doesn’t send your fingers completely off the rails, or by adding in a ‘riff’ that was picked up from another player.
Listening to Willie Clancy play Rakish Paddy (Track 10, CD 2, ‘The Gold Ring’) is a prime example where he plays the thing some 4 or 5 times over and each time he varies it remarkably. Listen to Felix Doran’s playing of Rakish Paddy, you can see where Clancy got some of his ideas, but I like to think there’s a lot in there that Clancy just made up on the fly too.
Had Pat Mitchell been able to record and notate every instance that Clancy played Rakish Paddy, lets say there were 235 instances, I imagine that each of those 235 annotations would have something different about them whilst all still being the same verison of the tune.
Interesting stuff Nico. I’ve just reminded myself of the tune Lord McDonald. Commonly played as three part tune, but where the parts, as far as I can remember are ordered: A/B/A/C and so on. Now I listen to Leo Rowsome on ‘King of the Pipers’ and he plays what amounts to the commonly-heard tune, ie the melody is recognisably that which one hears in sessions or sees in tune boooks, but with the major exception being his order of the parts goes C/B/A/C/B/A.
To me that would be the ‘common version’, but played with a different ‘setting’ but I guess falling into your category #2 (plus of course a few of Rowsomes additional #1s within the tune). Oi vey!
Well, yeah. I meant “why are all my examples jigs?” Of course there was a polka example, so the joke was a little facetious.
@Ausdag:
I guess my point was that the fuzzy skeleton may be different enough (perhaps due to one or two accent notes in a different, odd, or unusual place) to warrant the questioning of where the version came from.
There’s plenty of talk of versions to be found online, in sessions, and among good musicians, for example “Mike Rafferty’s version”, “The east clare version” and so on, so I’m sure you can find out more information.
Here’s an interesting article:
http://www.irishworldacademy.ie/inbhear/volume-1/n-keegan/pdf/Inbhear-V1-I1-Keegan.pdf
“The melodic shape of the tune plays a roll in the shape of phrases in performances…The creative interplay of artist and melody (which are often characterised within the tradition as things in themselves) is very apparent in the structuring of phrases in performance which combines with processes of variation to create new and individual versions or settings of tunes.” (p76 - emphasese mine)
In other words, if Niall Keegan, University of Limerick, is to be believed, then there is no wrong way of playing a tune, what ‘version’ you are playing is entirely legitimate right down to the individual one-time performance. "What version is that you’re playing? - “My own”.
I don’t agree with that - in fact I strongly disagree - and I don’t think that’s at all what Niall Keegan is saying. There are many wrong ways of playing a tune. But he’s talking about the many different ways a player steeped in the tradition might play a tune - sometimes called “tradition-bearers”. I think it’s a given in that article that it’s not a free-for-all where anybody can play anything. Also, the article is not attempting to examine the use of variation in Irish music. It’s an attempt to define the elements of style present in Irish music. But it seems only concerned with players at the very highest standard within the tradition. And that’s how it should be for an article of this sort.
I have never implied a ‘free-for-all’.
OK. But it depends on who the “you”, in your previous post, is, doesn’t it? And it still isn’t true that there’s no wrong way to play a tune. There are some hideous atrocities meted out to poor, innocent tunes by injudicious, disrespectful, or simply incompetent, players. I don’t think those people are what Keegan means when he refers throughout his article to “musicians”, in his general, and, to me, somewhat offhand way. I do think it would have been useful if he had defined more clearly what he meant, but I suppose by referring only to universally acknowledged great players throughout his article, he is, in a way, defining what aspects of the tradition he is attempting to analyse.
And I certainly don’t read Keegan’s article as implying that any way that any player might choose to play a tune is “entirely legitimate” and that there is “no wrong way of playing a tune”. If I bother to go out to a session, I can hear wrong ways of playing tunes every week.
BTW, good read, that article. Thanks. 
Absolutely agree. One indeed needs to have a solid grounding in being able to play the instrument well for a start, and rhythm and structure of the type of tune being played. In that case it’s also a question of, is it rather that the instrument and the style is poorly handled rather than the tune being wrong? I hear every week very competent players stumbling over a tune they’re not so familiar with, even when they are the ones to introduce the set. It goes down as all part of the craic, with humour and no derision, no accusations of playing the tune wrong.
But Keegan, to me, seems to be saying that a verison of a tune does not have to be limited to whether it is the Clare version or the Donegal version, but that it goes right down to the level of the individual. It’s then up to the audience/session members to accept it or not.
I suppose to listen to Keegan’s music is to hear how he feels about form, variation, tune shape and traditional aesthetic in general.
You may want to look into other reading material, Cowdery’s ‘Melodic Tradition of Ireland’, possibly still to be had through Amazon. Or Elliot Grasso’s thesis, which is downloadable from the page I linked. Other stuff as well, Mitchell deals with some means of variation in Rhtyhm & Structure part two.
I’m glad it wasn’t just me who had that thought.
Bryan Duggan’s PhD thesis also deals with variation.
I think there can be Clare or Donegal (or wherever) versions, but I would argue that something can be called “a Donegal version” when it is melodically distinct from other versions, so much so that it would be a trainwreck if played together, and commonly played that way by people in that geographical area. Not someone playing more or less the same tune as you would hear anywhere else, just in a Donegal style. I can’t think of any specific examples off hand.
Nico – plenty of reels sound like other reels. Mrs. Crehan’s-Galway Rambler; Pigeon on the Gate-Drunken Landlady; all the tunes that sound like Rolling in the Barrel (don’t ask me which one is which); Lucy Campbell-The Bucks or Oranmore; all the tunes that sound like Duke of Leinster; all the tunes that sound like the College Groves… ad infinitum.
OR we cold just say,
“Is there a wrong way to play Giant Steps?” Yep.
"Is there a wrong way to take a solo in Giant Steps? " Nope.
hmmmm
If you’re into the academic attempts to talk about it, there’s Philippe Varlet’s stuff, and Mr. Hutchinson had a chapter on The Making of a Setting in his diss. about Chris Langan.
Question: If you are one to make up your own ‘versions’ of tunes, do you openly declare them as your own? I have “my” versions of some old classics, and although the skeletal structure is retained, often the musculature and connective tissue may diverge markedly. Or sometimes it is little more than the tune in a key other than the original. If pressed I confess (sheepishly) that they are my settings [sic] of tunes. There are usually no further questions at that point and people wander off to go find the beer.
I often feel it is the kiss of death to admit that you dare to tinker with tradition.