What to listen for...

Trad Irish Music
1

When I was studying music in college, Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music was widely used. It’s a great book, as I remember it: simple language and clear thoughts. As I recall he poses two main questions, along the lines of “Are you hearing all there is to hear?” and “Are you responsive to it?” I know that his book helped shape the way I listen to classical music.

I’m sure that the same questions can be asked about ITM, though what there is to hear and how we respond to it would have a different substance. Over the last year, thanks to some good guidance, I’m aware that I have shifted my listening somewhat from its classical training when I listen to ITM. But I’m a relative newcomer, and I thought it would be very interesting to hear how people with ITM in their bloodstreams would identify the things there are to hear melodically, rhythmically, harmonically, and in any other way. And the second question, about responsiveness, has always intrigued me. Why does that flatted note Tommy Peoples plays near the end of The Rambling Pitchfork pierce me so? What might I not yet be hearing that could move or delight me as much? As a starter, I guess I’d say that one of the things I’ve been listening more for lately is melodic and rhythmic variation from repetition to repetition, something I have not been able to add spontaneously, at least not with any inventiveness, to my own playing yet.

Thanks for any comments. I recognize that the old “if you have to ask you’ll never know” concern may be at work here; on the other hand, I learned so much from the commentary in A Dossan of Heather that I thought it might be fair game to ask.

Carol

2

Good questions, Carol. For me these things are hard to pin down in print. I could say one might listen for ornamentation or spareness, drive or lilt, rawness or elegance, wildness or sweetness, and so on. These juxtapositions might be interchangeable in some cases; I just tossed 'em together as they work for me at the moment, and I tend to listen along lines like this, using terms that define certain elements of character in the music. They may not be universal, but the terms have been bandied about before and elswhere. Also, I don’t see these juxtapositions necessarily as opposites. A tune can be wild and sweet at the same time, for instance.

Other than just passively listening to as much trad as possible, trying to define what you’re hearing helps if you’re being goal-oriented in your trad musicianship, IMHO. That’s why I think you brought up good questions.

Anyway, Carol, here’s hoping that my $.02USD of garbledygook has something to do with what you had in mind. I’m sure that better and more experienced minds could give a clearer picture.

Best,
N

3

Interesting question Carol, one that I would probably do well to treat in what I’ve been told is Inuit fashion - if you’re not sure what to answer go away and think about and come back in a day, a month, a year when you know what you want to say.

But… My instinct is to just listen and listen and let yourself be grabbed by whatever wants to grab you. Things come to you in time. I had recordings of Tommy Peoples that I wore out listening to in the early stages, thinking I knew them off by heart. I re-acquired them 10 years later and was amazed at what I hadn’t heard the first time around…

I’ve found that absolutely the best kind of listening for me (I take it we are talking about recorded music here) is 1) solo unaccompanied recordings by any good traditional musician, usually the older the better and 2) to listen when I’m doing some kind of work that doesn’t require much concentration. Washing dishes, ironing… Painting a room is ideal! That way you can let the music wash over and over you. By the time you get to the end of the record you’re totally in the player’s groove and mindset and all you want to do is put it on again.

Listening to it this way I can let my subconscious or at least non-thinking mind pay attention. The power of this part of the mind is amazing when the intellect isn’t trying to direct it and codify the input.

I’m also a little wary of “knowing” what to listen for in the sense of being told what to listen for. Perhaps the result of too much hanging around with highly trained classical musicians who can name exactly the device the composer just used… it always seemed to me that this kind of knowledge can get in the way of listening.

I have a classically trained student at the moment. As an exercise we were trying to copy exactly the way a traditional player played a simple tune with every little twist and grace. She kept asking me what things were called. Most of the time I don’t know and I don’t care, I don’t think you can name everything, and if you could it would be very tedious. Just listen and do it!

How important is it to know why Tommy Peoples’ flatted whatever pierces you? The thing is, it does, isn’t it wonderful? Go ye and do likewise… What do you think?

4

Great points from Steve.

The more you listen, the more subtlety you hear. I’ll second what Steve said about listening to individual players. Bands are a good introduction to Irish music but they only skim the surface of this deep, deep pool.

One good way to develop your ear is to listen to different interpretations of the same tune. Among my CDs and cassettes I’ve got probably 20 recordings of someone playing the reel “The Maid of Mt. Kisco.” Every one of them is different, and those individual touches and little strokes of genius are a big part of what makes traditional Irish music so rich and rewarding to the listener.

I tend to be drawn most to music that’s played with a blend of heart and head. The passion and personality are there, but there’s also evidence that the musician has spent time living with the tune and thinking about how to play it. When I was young I was impressed by a remark I read in an interview–I think it was with the traditional American singer and songwriter Bob Coltman–where he said that it’s more important to know a few tunes or songs really well than to have a huge repertoire. I’ve tried to take that approach in my own playing: I spend more time exploring the tunes I already “know” than learning new ones. It’s a shame that there’s so much pressure on Irish musicians to develop a big repertoire for playing in sessions, because it encourages people to only half-learn tunes.

5

Good question, and good comments all 'round. My two pennies (probably worth closer to $0.01 or less, in comparison to N’s, StevieJ’s, and Brad’s comments):

I think most of the time I listen as Steve suggests, without too closely analyzing the tunes, letting them soak in, trying later to play them, if not in precisely the same way, in a way that evokes what they made me feel when I heard them.

But I do sometimes sit and analyze the tune in the way we associate with classical music analysis. Part of this may be because I was trained as a classical musician and played orchestral brass until my mid-twenties. Part of it may be because my academic background is in science, as is my 9-to-5 life, where analysis is the order of the day.

I think, too, that part of the reason I do this sort of analysis is precisely because I didn’t grow up in the tradition, and came to it relatively late. I can imagine that for someone born into the music, surrounded by it growing up, steeped in it and actively learning it at the feet of others proficient in it, would make the sort of learning-by-osmosis Steve may be advocating as easy as breathing. But coming to this music later, I feel a bit like I’m breathing foreign air, and that I’m missing nuances that require me to pay a bit more “technical” attention to what I’m hearing.

I suppose that this may mean I sometimes miss the forest for the trees. But I’m afraid that if I don’t sometimes delve this way, I might think I’m seeing the forest when all I’m really looking at is a trompe l’oeil, and I’m getting fooled without getting in there amongst the trees a bit.

Steve’s wondering whether an analytic hearing of classical music somehow interferes with listening is interesting to me, too. I don’t know that it’s really a problem: when I listen that way (which isn’t always) it seems to mix the visceral joy of the music with an intellectual engagement I also really dig. The biologist Richard Dawkins wrote that someone once told him that scientists are missing out because they don’t just look at a flower and see and enjoy the flower for itself. His reply was that he believed he felt that same joy and wonder at beholding the flower, but that he also was engaged in all sorts of questions that made the universe seem incredibly interesting: why is it red? To attract a certain bee? Do bees see in color? Why are they attracted to red? What about the smell? How did that evolve? And so on; the joy of beholding the flower leads him to a broader engagement with the flower beyond just the joy of gazing.

I do both. I happen to grow orchids, and sometimes I just stare at the incredible flowers they produce, captivated. But I’m also drawn into deep interest and enjoyment from the biology of the thing, the evolutionary design and function of all that gorgeous engineering, and it doesn’t feel disconnected or detached, to me. And it informs my gazing later, too, because I start to see details of flowers I never saw before I analyzed other components; tiny structures that are a delight just to see but which I wouldn’t have known to look for if I’d only gazed in wonder.

That’s just me. And all of this is a way of saying, too, that I don’t know whether what I listen for, when I listen this way, is the same as what Carol listens for, or is what I should be listening for. I think with the help of folks like Steve (who’s tune transcriptions and commentary on his website and in Dossan of Heather have been very valuable for me), that I have some idea of what to hear. And just engaging in the “conversation” in places like this board, or amongst experienced musicians, really helps. I listen for ornamentation, sure, and dynamics and (this is still a problem for me) where to breathe, and how the rhythm is emphasized, and such. I’d say I listen like this maybe 25% of the time. The other 75% is “just” listening, enjoying, humming along. I think both help me.

Best,

Aaron

6

This is one of the best questions ever Carol!

And I agree with what was said above by everybody else. But my experience comes from the visuals arts, on what to look for and what to see, but it is the same aprroach.

By having to look at tons of art over and over, then having to pick an artist in your second year of art school and climb inside their head, and reproduce a work(s) by them until you see how they did it. Mentally and physically painting their work. Living every line, every colour, every shape and every nuance of their thinking.

It was only then did I see how he/she did it and why it was a great work of art. That same method I have applied to ITM and my first love the bodhran. I spent hours just listening to as much music that had bodhran tracks on it and listened to the relationship of the bodhran to the music being played. Only when I could start/feel, hear, did I start learning the bodhran. Then it was just constant practice and listening.

But recently it has been the flute that has brought me back to whistle playing. Having no teacher, I taught myself through this board and other sites of reading posts, and the troubles and pitfalls others were having with this instrument. I have been playing the whistle for eight years but until the flute was just playing it without paying to much attention to the vairations and sublties of whistle playing as I did the bodhran.

Having struggled with the flute I had to forget about ornamentation and such just to play a simple tune. It was that, what appeared as a backward step actually turned out to be the best thing that I did for myself because it made me listen to the tune over and over until I crawled inside it.

I listen to a tune until it almost hurts to listen to it. Then I put it away for days at a time or even weeks, until that one day walking to work I start whistling it (lip whistling,) it is only a matter of picking up the whistle and working on that tune.

There’s my variation on theme on your question. I don’t know if helps in understanding but that’s the way I experienced your question.

MarkB

7

Listening alone to a recording, rather than hearing a live performance, puts in place a disconnect in human sharing, as enjoyable as recordings are. To compensate, I use my mind’s ear to imagine I am eavesdropping on the recording session. I remind myself they are real people, making choices in every second-- breathing, moving, tapping. Whether the players are living or dead, their vitality has been captured at that moment. I imagine that moment still exists, even if it took place decades ago. Choosing the kinds of recordings that Steve talked about makes this easier.

I also remind myself that hearing and loving another player at his most committed and heartfelt is his own territory, his own place, and not one I can lay claim to by playing the same notes at the same speed, etc. But listening to and becoming a one-sided friend with a musical personality somehow allows me to disover my own personality. I listen to the discourse of other players, and eventually it becomes easier to hear a tune with my own set of guidelines, formed before I take the first breath.

Cara

8

Hi Brad, how many tunes had you learned when you started spending more time exploring the ones you knew than learning new ones?

I know about 50 tunes right now, many of which I should probably spend more time exploring, but I feel like I might need to get up around 100 tunes before I start devoting most of my time to “exploring.” Does that sound like a reasonable number?

It takes me longer than many people I know to really learn a tune so I won’t forget it…a couple of weeks in most cases.

Thanks for any thoughts…

-Brett

9

I think I took that approach right from the start – I’ve been playing Irish music since 1976 and I only play a couple hundred tunes at most. That works out to an average of about 7 new tunes a year. There are more tunes that I can play along with at sessions, but I don’t count them as being in my repertoire since I haven’t sat down with them and really learned them properly.

Of course I haven’t learned just 7 tunes a year per year for the past 27 years – there have been periods when I was learning a tune or two a week. But in general I’m more inclined to work on the tunes I know than to acquire a lot of new ones: in most cases I learn a new tune because I love it, so it makes sense that I would want to spend time playing it and developing my own version of it.

I took a week-long class with Jack Coen once, and he said that learning any more than 2 new tunes a week is too much. I’m an extreme case. I suppose it mostly comes down to laziness: I inherited my mother’s creativity and my father’s lack of initiative, a deadly combination. But anyway, I do feel that you aren’t really “learning” a tune if you just get the notes down well enough to play in a session and then move on to the next new tune.

Getting back to Carol’s original topic of “what to listen for”: when you learn a new tune, it’s a great idea to spend some time listening to how other people play it, either in a session or on a recording. When you know a tune yourself, you’re more apt to be able to hear the differences between versions, the variations, and the individual touches brought to the tune by other players.

10

Each of these wonderful replies has so much in it to respond to. I guess I’m taking the Inuit approach, trying to absorb what everyone has written and collect my thoughts a bit before writing more, but I wanted to thank everyone who has responded so far for giving me–and everyone else reading this thread–so many thoughts to collect.

quviasuktunga tamaaniinnama :slight_smile:
(“I’m happy to be here.”)

Carol

11

quviasuktunga tamaaniinnama

…that’s easy for you to say. :stuck_out_tongue:

12

I don’t think there’s much I should try to add to this (or maybe am even qualified to), but I do have one thought, more of just relating a personal experience:

In college I was taught to pick music to pieces both on paper and in my head.

Some of that remains. Sometimes I get so hung up in trying to hear the techniques and ornaments and variations and all the rest of the mechanics of a tune that the tune itself almost slips by unnoticed.

Sometimes when listening I have to make myself just silence my mind and enjoy the tune.

And this is a really good way to learn a tune for me: if I can just sit back and enjoy it and hear it often enough, it gets “in my head.” I have found memory will help catch the feel of a tune much quicker than spending hours transcribing every cut and roll.

It’s an ongoing thing…I’m not where I want to be yet, and I don’t think anybody ever really gets there. You gotta enjoy the journey…because just maybe the journey is the only real destination.

–James

13

I like your thoughts also Jim about letting the music just flood the senses, much like the huge colour field paintings in American modern art. Huge canvases of just one colour or a variation of such. If you sat at the right distance where the colour filled your whole field of perception, after a while you would feel the effect of being inudated or enveloped by that colour. I was told that it is a Zen experience.

And about your journey, today is today, yesterday isn’t here, and tomorrow will be tomorrow when I wake up and that is all that I have ever been given.

MarkB

14

I’ve been asking that question to myself for over 20yrs and piecing together bits of answers a grain at a time. Recently, I was asked to teach a free 1 hr whistle workshop at a free music festival, which is coming up in San Francisco this summer. I have no qualifications in terms of schooling or studying under anyone, I’ve just been teaching myself longer than a lot of people around here. I agreed to do the class (figuring no one can demand a refund) and if anyone grumps during the class, I have witty retorts in store, ie, ‘you get what you pay for,’ etc.

I’ve been listening carefully to the rhythmic variances in the music and trying to sort out what it is about the good pros (even the mediocre pros)that separates their music from mine. Besides the basics, like good rhythm, breath control, etc, I’ve realized a bit about the phrasing and lately testing my theories by listening. I’m going to assert the following at the workshop:

Listen for symmetry in a tune. It’s like the rhyming words and cadences in a poem. There are numbers of syllables, sounds of the rhyming words, and placement. Sometimes two lines, one after the other end in a rhyming word, sometimes the one after a skipped line. The lines also have different lengths as do phrases in a tune. So…you might hear a phrase introduced with a particular type of ornament, then, the next phrase or next measure beginning with the same ornament (or something that suggests similarity). If the rhythm shifts to 4123 4123 before returning to 1234 in a reel, listen for it to repeat at some point like a cadence or rhyme in a poem. You’ll hear, say, in a jig, 3 staccato notes followed by 3 gliding notes followed by 3 staccato and 3 gliding. These groups may be next to each other or at the beginning of two different measures. There may be a short phrase, then a long one; it will show up again, either soon in part A, or later in part B. If you’re listening for these symmetries, you’ll start noticing them more and more. Listen for phrase length, ornament, triplet, staccato notes, you name it. They work subtly because they show up in different melody figures. To get a better sense, focus on the rhythm, rather than the melody. Tap your fingers on the table and see how it shows up.

The better sense you get of this, the more sense it makes for where to apply ornaments, tonguing, pauses for breath, etc. (If one person understands what the he** I’m trying to say, it will have been worth it.) :slight_smile:
Tony

15

Hey Tony, you tapping your fingers to get the feel of the rhythm sent me back to the bodhran while I played and listened to Mary Bergin.

Your observation is interesting to me at least because my first ITM instrument is the bodhran, with the whistle second and now the flute. But I do play a good bodhran and learn my skill playing for Irish dancers every Friday night for ten years but is was your tapping fingers that gave me the insight to my own whistle playing and how I play it.

The main musician on Friday nights was an accordian player originally from Donegal who used a drum machine to keep time for the dance class and ceili. Not that he needed it, Brian is now retired but raised three children into Irish dance and played for more Feis(es) than he wants to remember. The drum machine was just there for everyone else - dancers and musicians. So you slowly learn the tempos of the dances – night after night after night.

I play my whistles to the rhythms that I play on the bodhran to the various genres of Irish dance music. I thought my interpretation off or just weird from the other whistle players in our group and area on how I approached playing a tune.

So I recorded myself first on the bodhran while I listened in my ear to a recording of a Friday night dance session which I can hear myself playing the bodhran. Then played over that with the whistle. Weird! My emphasis is timed to the dance and the predominant beat of each major dance step with simple ornamentation to fill rather than drive the tune. And if it is reels – forget about ornamentation you really haven’t got time to be cute. But even my simple ornamentation is following what I am doing on the bodhran and how I intrepret the rhythm.

Does this make sense?

MarkB

PS: I also responded to Tony to bump Carol’s great question to the top also.

16

Hard to keep my thoughts organized and coherent on this subject. I was wondering, after 5 days of no response, if I had made any sense at all…

I’ve always enjoyed the rhythms of step dancers and tap dancers, not to mention good drumming, even marching drums. In all of these instances, there are intricate rhythms between the rhythms, and I believe there are universal rules that apply here, to music in general, not to mention painting, poetry, and sculpture. The Japanese have codifided this concept in something that translates to ‘assymetric symmetry,’ and can be seen in guides for designing gardens and bonsai plantings (which are almost always planted in uneven numbers).

Mark, to be sure we’re on the same page, tapping my fingers (or foot) to a tune helps me focus on the more intricate rhythms, putting them in the context of the basic 4/4 or 3/4 time. I’m talking about hearing things like a heavy, sustained first beat or last beat in a measure that returns in some connected context, or with a flourish that fits the theme, but changes (ie a sustained note that repeats one time, becomes a roll next time around), but either way, you feel a certain sense of beginning and end of a phrase that repeats rhythmically.

I’d say the music is designed to support these rhythmic themes. Note the repeating melody lines with variations at the end. When I transcribe a tune, I write it out with 4 bars to a line. Done this way, you can see the repetitions in the melody and where it varies and sets up for the next part. It also gives some tips for where the rhythms interact with the melody. (It also makes it a lot easier to memorize a new tune when you can visually note how the melody repeats line up.)

So, blah, blah, blah…

If you think I’m crazy (I don’t have a problem with that), listen to recorded tunes and hear for yourself. I like the idea of coming back to a recording after learning the tune. After you get really familiar with it, you hear things you didn’t notice before, and it’s interesting to hear where you’ve diverged w/ practice.
Tony

17

Tony, I suspect I speak for a lot of others (this thread has been viewed 507 times, so lots of us are interested!) when I say thanks for taking the time to put your ideas into words and share them. It did make sense to me. I LOVE this discussion. I’m just at the point where I’m learning to listen more for subtleties (as opposed to the bones of the melody and rythmn), so the posts in this thread are a big help to me. I don’t feel I have any wisdom to share on this topic, but I do appreciate being able to listen in on the conversation. Thanks, all of you!

Sarah

18

Sorry, Tony. I didn’t think you were full of it; in fact, it was hard to add anything to it. We all come from various sides of the whole, and with luck we see more and more of it with time. My post, for instance, shows my take on the issue, and I think it has its valid points. However, it’s not the be-all and end-all, and the other posts here have been contributing to a fuller set of understandings. Conceptual, emotive, mathematical and stylistic considerations are all eventually going to have to be adderessed to some degree, and I think this has been a good thread for me because other angles give me the opportunity for more “Aha!” revelations.

Especially helpful is the ability of people here to deliver their ideas with clarity. Most helpful!

Best,
N

19

Not at all. I think I know what you mean, and it is very difficult to explain at all, so I have enjoyed your explanations and nodded to me all the time, with not much to add.

But one thing - it reminds me of poetry, where the fixed rhyme and meter have to be followed, but are only some kind of base skeleton or canvas, on which the actual art happens. Like playing with the sound of words, alliteration, carrying over sentences over the end of a line into the next, slight deviation from the rhythmical pattern.

It is possible to have the rhythm of a Shakespearean Sonnett in my head, without remembering the words. The difference between the pattern dictated by the form (“Sonnett”) and the natural language, sentences, laid over that pattern, can induce some sort of trance, as can Jazz with the contrast between steady laid-back rhythm and free-flowing improvisation.

And the same thing, by other means, happens within tunes played by the masters of Irish Traditional Music - patterns, symmetry, deviation from the pattern, surprise, return to the expected pattern, variation again.

Do we mean the same thing?

20

And while I’m being carried away anyway, I think this is the essence of music (to me) - to have more things happen at once than I can conciously point out and rationally explain. If I could, I’d just tell the story with words.