Because you play 'em the same way you learned 'em, no?
The phrase “committed to memory” doesn’t seem quite right. When you have achieved learning of a tune - by ear, of course, and from another tradition bearer or surrogate - the tune is in your memory. The learning and memory are one and the same. And that’s only the first step to incubating the tune and making it your own with the kinds of personal variation allowed and suggested by the tradition.
The process of learning and playing art music from written notation couldn’t be more different in many ways; where the ideal goal is note-perfect reproduction of the learned piece from performance to performance, within very narrow bounds of variable expression and personalization.
Thinking about it, it’s mostly just classical, orchestral performances where you see music on stage (at a professional level). Even a classical string quartet or some such smaller group often have their pieces committed to memory. Classical pianists usually have memorized. And bands - from rock to country to r & b to jazz - I’ve never seen one of them on stage with music stands, unless it’s to hold a set list and a beverage and maybe some cigarettes. (And in my high school band, we had to memorize our marching band pieces. Our memorization of them was part of our grade).
So, orchestral pieces would be the odd duck out, really, and that I think is just the nature of the beast. When you have that many people all playing together, you really need to be sure you are all on the same page. And no improvising.
Folk music comes from the “folk” or person, and orchestral music comes from the page. Granted the conductor and players put some spin on it, but the piece started with the notation no? Folk has only recently been written down, and so many times you’ll hear people say that you can’t capture the music in notation. Especially ITM. There’s no notation that I’m aware of that could capture it.
The dots help me remember how a tune that I’ve not played for a long time goes, but I only need a measure or two. Also, what is written is most times not what is played. It’s just the bones. The rest comes from the player.
The simple answer is that they are aural traditions. Many tunes were written down after-the-fact by collectors but that process was neither the nature nor the tradition of the music.
Don’t forget about the sessions… sessions are a big part of irish music, and in a good session people will play sets and will switch tunes on the fly sometimes randomly, sometimes not, but imagine if you had to have all musicians in the sessions open their book and tell people in advance what they were going to play so that people can have the pages ready on time… yerk, that would kill the fun part of sessions, and keep the chemistry at the lowest level.
Unfortunately that scenario is a reality in some parts 'round here. Makes for a boring and craic-less session IMO. You can’t talk me into going to those sessions if you tried.
You’d need to bring me there at gun point… or that ‘session’ would need to host a darn attractive, hot, single woman! (Can’t say smart, she’d be playing from sheet music from frak sake!!)
It is certainly an unfortunate trend that has emerged as of late; luckily there is only one session birthed out of it so far (though one session too many!). We seemed to get a swell of classical players who could sight read and who got themselves tune books. They call out page numbers and pass around set lists and that’s how they “session.” For some reason they don’t seem to want to learn the tunes by ear but they constantly solicit the other session players (who play trad) to join them. I guess they have fun and that’s all that matters to them.
I don’t play ITM and I don’t go to sessions, so I don’t know about that stuff.
What I do know is church music. We use sheet music. We don’t play songs often enough to have them memorized. And even the songs we play at every Mass, well, we still use the sheet music. Once a sheet music user, always a sheet music user.
Although a lot of folk music is aural tradition, I’ve been on camping trips and family picnics. I keep a binder of songs, that way, if someone is there to join us, they know what we’re doing. When someone is there who didn’t bring sheet music to share and they’re playing songs that I can’t join, then I get the pleasure of listening.
If that is your mindset then it may be true for you but I’ve witnessed otherwise (difficult as it may have been for the individual). Though sheet music may be a rigid crutch for many who stumble into the tradition from elsewhere, remembering the tunes, listening to the music, and learning by ear are skills to be learned if you have any real respect for the traditional music or if you ever intend to do it any justice.
That, IMO is one of the biggest errors that folks make when stepping into this music. They assume that they can just take everything they knew about other music practices and translate it (or fake it) to Irish Trad. This is most definitely not the case. The group of musicians I spoke of before are mostly new to the music or were bluegrass players who thought Irish music was close enough that they could play by sheet music without really learning it. These folks started out coming by our sessions and didn’t last long because they never learned any of the tunes (and the tunes in their books didn’t always mesh with ours). They wanted to sing pub songs, play the slow Carolan tunes and the same five hornpipes and polkas they’ve known forever so they started their own session. As I said, if that makes 'em happy then more power to them but they claim to be an “Irish session” which is misleading to someone wanting to find a place to hear or play trad music… and annoying when they show up at parties where the musicians came to play Irish music.
Music is different things for different people. I think there is room for everyone, especially if folks are in different places. Singing pub songs were they?
LOL I can just imagine the silence and raised eyebrows if someone was to walk into a pub in Ireland and sit down to join a session with sheet music. It’s not that difficult to memorize a tune, after you’ve played it 2 or 3 times it should be in memory. If it’s not even in memory then you don’t know the tune, if you’re playing it from the sheet all you are doing is playing a series of notes which will sound dull and never fit in with a real Irish trad session. This might be ok for church music or an orchestra that might have a ton of material to learn in a short space of time, but for ITM it will not work. Imagine a rock band like U2 getting on stage with sheet music, what would everyone think? That they’ve never played the tune before and never bothered to practice it, well that’s exactly what trad musicians would think if you sat down beside them with sheet music. I can’t think of anything that annoys them more than people joining in on tunes they don’t even know.
…although joining in (quietly) is also one of the ways you’re most likely to learn a session tune in the aural tradition. I keep a ‘quiet’ whistle with me at a session, as well as the loud one and the flute, for just that purpose.
Musicians in a classical orchestra must be able to play competently a completely unknown piece of music at sight at any given time. In any style whatsoever, even one that they never encountered before. A folk musician plays always in the same style. To say nothing of a rock musician. Same style means you are familiar with the piece even if you never actually played that particular one. I mean, a four-bar blues is a four-bar blues, no matter how you spin it out. But a Gabrieli ricercar is a very different kettle of fish from a Wagner overture. Not to mention a Ligeti morceau. And yet a classical musician can be called upon to play all of them in a single day. Or even in a single concert.
In my opinion, there are a number of interrelated reasons:
The tradition is an aural one, and traditional players did not normally (and still do not normally) know how to read music. Traditional players did not, and do not, regard this as an unfortunate incapacity but rather as an advantage, indeed a necessity. They feel, as do I, that the music cannot be correctly conveyed by the means of staff notation.
What makes the music difficult to confine to a page is its very plasticity. One does not rigidly play his tunes a fixed way at a session, but rather adapts to the way the tune is being played at the session. When a tune is first being played everyone (perhaps unconsciously) takes note of the version that’s being played at adapts to it immediately. And nobody every plays the tune the same way twice anyway, but puts the tune through all sorts of twists and turns as they progress through the various playings of it.
Which brings up the fact that Irish tunes are not a fixed string of notes, but rather an arc, a notion, which can be expressed in an almost infinite number of ways. Any attempt at notation is doomed to fail, because even if you faithfully notate a particular player’s performance of a tune, with all the variations in the various repetitions of it, so that you have (for example) the three repetitions of a certain reel all written out in an unbroken string covering a couple pages of sheet music, all you’ve accomplished is notating that particular performance. The next time that same player plays that same tune it is certain to be different anyhow.
The perfect analogy is the “notional-functional” approach to describing/learning a language. Let’s say that the notion is to invite the group of friends you’re with to go out shopping. An almost infinte number of sentences can be generated by any English speaker which will serve this notion equally well- in fact, faced with the same situation several thousand times in a row you might word it differently every time.
So say you show up with sheet music to a session. The version on the page is almost certain to clash with the way that particular session is going to play that tune, unless you’ve notated the tune FROM that particular session. But from week to week that same session might play that same tune differently, due to differing personnel each week.
And the session repertoire is so vast- even if you had every session tune in a big binder (thousands of tunes would be required) how could you find them quickly enough? Because people don’t announce what they’re going to play, in fact they usually don’t know the names of many of the tunes anyhow, at least not at that moment (they might recall the name if they thought about it a while). There’s a flow to a session, where one tune jogs the memory of someone who then launches into another tune thought somehow suitable etc.
The human brain is much better at this sort of information storage and retrieval than sheet music: you don’t have to know the name of the tune, you just jump and and start playing along when the tune gets going.
Are you seriously saying that a “good” classical musician will be able to sit down and play an irish tune he’s never heard, having never heard irish music before? He’s going to play it the right way, make it bounce, swing, lift, etc? You gotta be kidding.
But at the same time, what you’re saying explains why there’s always a classical musician showing up from time to time, thinking he/she can play anything without studying the actual genre, and ends up sounding like a midi file generator. I wonder why.
PS: By re-reading your post, it seems you might be saying that a classical musician can play any style within the classical music scope. It would make more sense.
That’s a nice sounding, harmonious statement but exactly the kind of thing that gets my goat. There is not room for everyone. If someone is trying to learn the flute and stops by a session and can’t play for beans I’m fine with that so long as they are truly trying to get the music. Heck, I’ll go out of my way to encourage them to come back and keep learning. If someone is a classical violin player just looking for another “jam session” to fill the week and has no interest in truly learning the music then they won’t be well liked and won’t likely be welcomed into the community. There are those of us who have a passion for the music and, though we have a lot of fun with it, take it very seriously. It’s not that I have this accomplished musician’s ego, far from it actually. What I do have is a respect for the tradition, and a desire to get it right.
Think about if you were a serious basketball player and you only got to play with your buds once a week. You take your workout seriously and are intent on honing your game. A couple of people show up who, though they like basketball, are just goofing off on the court and being silly. They are making it very difficult for you to play any sort of serious, competitive game and are wasting your playing time with their shenannigans. They show up every week and never seem to show any sign of having practiced or learned anything new about the game. Someone else walks up and says “ah, surely there’s room for everyone.” I don’t think so.
