You're mucking about on your instrument leisurely, and suddenly you find yourself playing a riff that sounds, well, pretty damn nice, catchy even.
You play the riff some more, expand on it, and before you know it you've got the "A" part of a tune.
Well, of course, you _know_ you can't stop there. So you continue working, trying out some variations, and hey presto, now you've got the "B" part.
You play the A and B several times through, write it down and/or record it, so you have it set in your mind.
A day or so passes, you play the tune constantly, enough so that you've got it down pat.
"Oh boy," you thinks, "I've composed a tune! My very own tune!"
A little time passes. Then you're at a session, and you're just busting to premiere your tune. But you don't want to be too forward and make a big proclamation, so you wait for a lull in the proceedings, then just start playing your tune casually, as if you were just passing the time, keeping your fingers fresh, you know.
When you're done -- you've played it note-perfect -- and waiting to be asked as to the origin of this wonderful tune, someone nods thoughtfully and says:
"Hmm. I always thought that was one of Liz Carroll's/Ed Reavey's/O'Carolan's better compositions..."
I've never had that experience but I did hear Jay Ungar say on his radio show.....I think I wrote this tune, If I didn't someone let me know.........or something pretty close to those words.
C.G., sounds like the ITM equivalent of, "If you love something, set it free. If it comes back it's yours; if it doesn't, it never was."
My favorite anecdote along these lines has to do with the 1960s London folk scene, which was a very tight-knit community and subject to a lot of "cross-pollination." So it was that during a Pentangle gig, Bert Jansch introduced a song by saying, "I got a feeling we stole this."
(The joke was that their song was almost identical to a Davy Graham composition, "Angie")
Yes. We were doing a Catholic mass in honor of St. Patrick and we thought we would be slick and compose an original mass setting. My freinds did most of it and adapted 'County Down'. Everyone would be familiar with that and adapted well. Not too original.
I did the Gloria and struggled to come up with something original and thought I had this wonderful melody for the refrain. Everyone loved it.
Some one in the crowd came up afterward and complimented me saying how well ___ I can't remeber the name now... some very traditional tune adapted.
I always say there is nothing very original in music these days.
One of the great classical composers, Schumann or Schubert (I'm not sure which) was having a meal in restaurant and was rather taken by the music the in-house band was playing in the background. He jotted down some of the music and a few days later realised that they had been playing one of his own pieces, composed years earlier.
We're all in great company
The worst thing is to compose something absolutely stupendous in your sleep, as happened to me once, and then find every note has irretrievably evaporated when you awake
That happens to me a lot! It's not always stupendous, though *Some*times I can remember it if I start humming it before I even lift my head off the pillow...and I suppose if I recorded it right there and then, I'd have it for later.
The opposite happened to me a few months ago: I was at a session out of town, and heard a lovely, simple melody (which I finally broke down and requested - and which someone was kind enough to post - http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/6932), fragments of which stuck in my head. I tried and tried to reproduce it, but to no avail: I had a few bars, and couldn't for the life of me remember what followed or preceded them. But those bars just stuck in my head, and seemed to be pleading to be set in a tune, and so I wrote one. The A part of my tune was similar to, and obviously influenced by, the B part of Danse Breton I'd heard at the session, but the B part of mine veered way off. The result was a multicultural creation: it has the structure of an Irish tune, but with a French A part, a Middle Eastern B part, and a Canadian title. If anyone else has written my tune, I'll be blown away.
On the other side of things, I just fed the entire A part to a tune that I *think* I composed into Musipedia (http://musipedia.org/), and got *ten pages* of results. There is nothing new under the sun, argh.
So, I compose when I try to remember tunes, and my subconscious unearths existing tunes when I try to compose. Hmm.
I have had the experience of composing a tune, and then months later sitting in a session hearing a tune that was eerily similar . I am pretty sure that I had never heard the other tune before I composed mine, and they're different enough to support that fact. But they both get across the same general idea. To the point that people might think that they're related in some way.
Well, again we're in good company: there's a whole family of tunes that I mentally file under the category of Tunes That Sound an Awful Lot Like the Swallowtail Jig, Now That I Think About It.
I wrote a tune once, and sent it to a publisher in London. A few years later I heard it on the radio.
Travis were singing "Why does it always Rain on Me",
For Gods sake it just sounds like the tune I'd written ! But what can you do about it ?
Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean, you're dreaming this completely gorgeous melody and then wake up and hum it and whaddya know, it's not so fantastic after all! I hate when that happens...
I think a large number of tunes are spin-offs of other tunes. I definitely have come across tunes that are obviously so, but there's usually enough that's unique about them that they catch on. I know that I can trace just about every tune I've ever written to some tune that was adrift in my subconscious. Later when I learn the tune I'll realize what happened, but again, the tune I came up with is unique enough to stick around. If it’s too close then I’ll discard it. For me a good test is to trot it out anonymously at a session and see if anyone starts to play along. If they do I might say I can’t remember it too well and ask them to play it. Then I’ll find out if it’s the suspect tune or not. If it is – then I have to decide if what I came up with is unique enough to keep. If it’s too obvious – I toss it.
There are only 12 notes to choose from, so naturally some tunes will sound alike (well, if you count those lonesome in-between notes, maybe there are a few more, but you get the idea).
I wrote a tune in the car by penny-whistle once. It started with a bit of a B part from a jig I've always loved, and then goes off on a different tangent.
Years later I had totally forgotten that I'd stolen some notes from that particular jig.
When Mozart was still very young, he said that didn't know where his tunes came from..... he just heard them in his head.
> "There are only 12 notes to choose from, so naturally some tunes will sound alike"
Well, yes and no.... If you look at it mathematically, there are a mind-boggling amount of possible tunes.
If tunes were only one note long, you would have the possibility of 12 tunes. If tunes were two notes long, you would have the possibility of 144 tunes. But since your average reel is 128 notes long (not including repeats), there are theoretically about 1.37 x 10^138 possible reels alone, and that's only counting 4 notes per bar. If you take into account different length notes, 3 part tunes, different tune types, variations, etc., then that number is almost incalculable.
For comparison sake, there are only somewhere around 4 x 10^79 atoms in the entire universe. In other words, there are about an octodecillion (1000 quintillion) times as many POSSIBLE REELS as there are atoms in the universe. Heh.
So taking into account tunes that aren't in a musical key, tunes that are too similar to other tunes, tunes that are horrible, etc, let's say that discounts 99.99999999999% of the possible tunes. Well, we're still left with 1.37 x 10^126 GOOD reels. (Still more than there are atoms in the universe).
Mind boggling, really!
Sorry for geeking out, but I found it more interesting than working
No but.... sort of the reverse.... I play only by ear, and sometimes bad memory. I actually recorded a tune on my solo guitar CD, and remembered part B wrong. The funny thing is a few weeks after it was out I realized it, nearly died of shame and embarrassment, but much to my suprise someone said to me a few weeks later.... I love your setting of ...... I don't even want to mention which track!!!!.... and said "where did you get that setting? I am going to play it that way from now on". This is no joke..... I mumbled....um ... oh...er.... Andy McGann used to play it that way....then added JUST KIDDING!!!! I GOOFED! EARLY ALZHEIMERS! SHAME ON ME!!! Now I am more careful! The folk process some call it.
Haha I wish I could dream of original or almost original but at least good tunes! I was just talking to another musician about my only memorable tune dream... I was at a festival when my friend's alarm clock went off across the room. She didn't wake up and I didn't either...but the dang thing worked it's way into my dream and I got a half hour striaght of me despeartely trying to learn this tune that went BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP and I couldn't get it!
And then I woke up and threw something at my roomie until she turned off the alarm....
A friend of mine, the very lovely and talented Andrea Baldwin, wrote a song called 'The Folk Process'. The chorus changes through eight different parts, which makes it a b*gger to learn but great fun to sing. It's about how songs change over time due to people's poor memory and subsequent invention. I think of it every time I hear something like your accidental B part, or people singing songs they've learned from records where they obviously couldn't quite pick up the lyrics - yes, Mondegreens are alive and well and living in Brisbane...
Pete, that calculation of yours, even at its most ultra-conservative, is good news for this website - we're never going to run out of material for the Tunes section!
yes, i am definitely queasy about the george harrison "my sweet lord" scenario.......i think a good safety net is to trot it out anonymously in the presence of that type of player who knows everything to the point of being maddening.....but i have a jig that i'm still leery of trotting out at all....
Sure That's why I don't compose. Anything good I've written has been totally derivative. Good thing there are so many nice, old tunes out there for me to play.
I had a tune that came to me, wrote it all down, played it over, asked everyone I knew, eventually someone said they had heard it before somewhere, I think someone here pointed out it was "The Tar Road to Sligo". Hadn't played The Bothy Band album for 20 years or more, went back, and yes ! But by golly, how did I remember so much when they play it so damned fast, it just whizzes past your ears.....
Over Easter, I was ecstatic when I thought that I had written a new tune, which was in my humble opinion deadly. I played it throughout the whole Easter vacation (I called it the Easter reel) marvelling at it. Until, on the very last day of holidays I was trying to learn a tune called Diane's Happiness, and it turned out to be practically the same tune! On the bright side, it was one more tune I didn't think I knew before, but I now know.
Have you ever had this nightmare?
Have you ever had this nightmare?
You're mucking about on your instrument leisurely, and suddenly you find yourself playing a riff that sounds, well, pretty damn nice, catchy even.
You play the riff some more, expand on it, and before you know it you've got the "A" part of a tune.
Well, of course, you _know_ you can't stop there. So you continue working, trying out some variations, and hey presto, now you've got the "B" part.
You play the A and B several times through, write it down and/or record it, so you have it set in your mind.
A day or so passes, you play the tune constantly, enough so that you've got it down pat.
"Oh boy," you thinks, "I've composed a tune! My very own tune!"
A little time passes. Then you're at a session, and you're just busting to premiere your tune. But you don't want to be too forward and make a big proclamation, so you wait for a lull in the proceedings, then just start playing your tune casually, as if you were just passing the time, keeping your fingers fresh, you know.
When you're done -- you've played it note-perfect -- and waiting to be asked as to the origin of this wonderful tune, someone nods thoughtfully and says:
"Hmm. I always thought that was one of Liz Carroll's/Ed Reavey's/O'Carolan's better compositions..."
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by sts
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
I've never had that experience but I did hear Jay Ungar say on his radio show.....I think I wrote this tune, If I didn't someone let me know.........or something pretty close to those words.
Guess it happens more than we may think
Mary
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Antikhntr
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
A friend of mine said, when you think you've written a tune, play it around sessions for a few weeks. If no-one recognises it, you probably have.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by c.g.
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
C.G., sounds like the ITM equivalent of, "If you love something, set it free. If it comes back it's yours; if it doesn't, it never was."
My favorite anecdote along these lines has to do with the 1960s London folk scene, which was a very tight-knit community and subject to a lot of "cross-pollination." So it was that during a Pentangle gig, Bert Jansch introduced a song by saying, "I got a feeling we stole this."
(The joke was that their song was almost identical to a Davy Graham composition, "Angie")
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by sts
Ripping nightmares
i once came back home from the pub in a fair old state.
i 'wrote' a tune and it had 3 parts.
the next morning i realised it was 'rip the calico'.
so at least it did n't get to the session stage...
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by biggus dave
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Yes. We were doing a Catholic mass in honor of St. Patrick and we thought we would be slick and compose an original mass setting. My freinds did most of it and adapted 'County Down'. Everyone would be familiar with that and adapted well. Not too original.
I did the Gloria and struggled to come up with something original and thought I had this wonderful melody for the refrain. Everyone loved it.
Some one in the crowd came up afterward and complimented me saying how well ___ I can't remeber the name now... some very traditional tune adapted.
I always say there is nothing very original in music these days.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by zippydw
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
One of the great classical composers, Schumann or Schubert (I'm not sure which) was having a meal in restaurant and was rather taken by the music the in-house band was playing in the background. He jotted down some of the music and a few days later realised that they had been playing one of his own pieces, composed years earlier.
We're all in great company
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
The worst thing is to compose something absolutely stupendous in your sleep, as happened to me once, and then find every note has irretrievably evaporated when you awake
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
That happens to me a lot! It's not always stupendous, though
*Some*times I can remember it if I start humming it before I even lift my head off the pillow...and I suppose if I recorded it right there and then, I'd have it for later.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by kennedy
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Dave - you should have posted it here as Rip-off The Calico.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Rudall the time
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
The doubt often remains, as per my the title of, and comments on this "original" tune I submitted...
http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display.php/6233
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by drone
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
The opposite happened to me a few months ago: I was at a session out of town, and heard a lovely, simple melody (which I finally broke down and requested - and which someone was kind enough to post - http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/6932), fragments of which stuck in my head. I tried and tried to reproduce it, but to no avail: I had a few bars, and couldn't for the life of me remember what followed or preceded them. But those bars just stuck in my head, and seemed to be pleading to be set in a tune, and so I wrote one. The A part of my tune was similar to, and obviously influenced by, the B part of Danse Breton I'd heard at the session, but the B part of mine veered way off. The result was a multicultural creation: it has the structure of an Irish tune, but with a French A part, a Middle Eastern B part, and a Canadian title. If anyone else has written my tune, I'll be blown away.
On the other side of things, I just fed the entire A part to a tune that I *think* I composed into Musipedia (http://musipedia.org/), and got *ten pages* of results. There is nothing new under the sun, argh.
So, I compose when I try to remember tunes, and my subconscious unearths existing tunes when I try to compose. Hmm.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Tall, Dark, and Mysterious
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
I have had the experience of composing a tune, and then months later sitting in a session hearing a tune that was eerily similar . I am pretty sure that I had never heard the other tune before I composed mine, and they're different enough to support that fact. But they both get across the same general idea. To the point that people might think that they're related in some way.
Pete
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Reverend
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Well, again we're in good company: there's a whole family of tunes that I mentally file under the category of Tunes That Sound an Awful Lot Like the Swallowtail Jig, Now That I Think About It.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Tall, Dark, and Mysterious
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Right. To some extent, I take it as a compliment. Because it means that I was able to write a tune that sounds like... well... Irish Music.
If it didn't sound at least somewhat similar, it wouldn't sound Irish.
Pete
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Reverend
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
I wrote a tune once, and sent it to a publisher in London. A few years later I heard it on the radio.
Travis were singing "Why does it always Rain on Me",
For Gods sake it just sounds like the tune I'd written ! But what can you do about it ?
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Justintime
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Well, it seemed stupendous when I dreamt it ...
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean, you're dreaming this completely gorgeous melody and then wake up and hum it and whaddya know, it's not so fantastic after all! I hate when that happens...
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by kennedy
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
I think a large number of tunes are spin-offs of other tunes. I definitely have come across tunes that are obviously so, but there's usually enough that's unique about them that they catch on. I know that I can trace just about every tune I've ever written to some tune that was adrift in my subconscious. Later when I learn the tune I'll realize what happened, but again, the tune I came up with is unique enough to stick around. If it’s too close then I’ll discard it. For me a good test is to trot it out anonymously at a session and see if anyone starts to play along. If they do I might say I can’t remember it too well and ask them to play it. Then I’ll find out if it’s the suspect tune or not. If it is – then I have to decide if what I came up with is unique enough to keep. If it’s too obvious – I toss it.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Phantom Button
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
There are only 12 notes to choose from, so naturally some tunes will sound alike (well, if you count those lonesome in-between notes, maybe there are a few more, but you get the idea).
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by AlBrown
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
I wrote a tune in the car by penny-whistle once. It started with a bit of a B part from a jig I've always loved, and then goes off on a different tangent.
Years later I had totally forgotten that I'd stolen some notes from that particular jig.
When Mozart was still very young, he said that didn't know where his tunes came from..... he just heard them in his head.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by morning star
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
> "There are only 12 notes to choose from, so naturally some tunes will sound alike"
Well, yes and no.... If you look at it mathematically, there are a mind-boggling amount of possible tunes.
If tunes were only one note long, you would have the possibility of 12 tunes. If tunes were two notes long, you would have the possibility of 144 tunes. But since your average reel is 128 notes long (not including repeats), there are theoretically about 1.37 x 10^138 possible reels alone, and that's only counting 4 notes per bar. If you take into account different length notes, 3 part tunes, different tune types, variations, etc., then that number is almost incalculable.
For comparison sake, there are only somewhere around 4 x 10^79 atoms in the entire universe. In other words, there are about an octodecillion (1000 quintillion) times as many POSSIBLE REELS as there are atoms in the universe. Heh.
So taking into account tunes that aren't in a musical key, tunes that are too similar to other tunes, tunes that are horrible, etc, let's say that discounts 99.99999999999% of the possible tunes. Well, we're still left with 1.37 x 10^126 GOOD reels. (Still more than there are atoms in the universe).
Mind boggling, really!
Sorry for geeking out, but I found it more interesting than working
Pete
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by Reverend
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
No but.... sort of the reverse.... I play only by ear, and sometimes bad memory. I actually recorded a tune on my solo guitar CD, and remembered part B wrong. The funny thing is a few weeks after it was out I realized it, nearly died of shame and embarrassment, but much to my suprise someone said to me a few weeks later.... I love your setting of ...... I don't even want to mention which track!!!!.... and said "where did you get that setting? I am going to play it that way from now on". This is no joke..... I mumbled....um ... oh...er.... Andy McGann used to play it that way....then added JUST KIDDING!!!! I GOOFED! EARLY ALZHEIMERS! SHAME ON ME!!! Now I am more careful! The folk process some call it.
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by irisnevins
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Haha I wish I could dream of original or almost original but at least good tunes! I was just talking to another musician about my only memorable tune dream... I was at a festival when my friend's alarm clock went off across the room. She didn't wake up and I didn't either...but the dang thing worked it's way into my dream and I got a half hour striaght of me despeartely trying to learn this tune that went BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP and I couldn't get it!
And then I woke up and threw something at my roomie until she turned off the alarm....
# Posted on May 18th 2007 by possumawesome
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Iris,
A friend of mine, the very lovely and talented Andrea Baldwin, wrote a song called 'The Folk Process'. The chorus changes through eight different parts, which makes it a b*gger to learn but great fun to sing. It's about how songs change over time due to people's poor memory and subsequent invention. I think of it every time I hear something like your accidental B part, or people singing songs they've learned from records where they obviously couldn't quite pick up the lyrics - yes, Mondegreens are alive and well and living in Brisbane...
# Posted on May 19th 2007 by bc_box_player
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Pete, that calculation of yours, even at its most ultra-conservative, is good news for this website - we're never going to run out of material for the Tunes section!
# Posted on May 19th 2007 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
yes, i am definitely queasy about the george harrison "my sweet lord" scenario.......i think a good safety net is to trot it out anonymously in the presence of that type of player who knows everything to the point of being maddening.....but i have a jig that i'm still leery of trotting out at all....
# Posted on May 19th 2007 by ceemonster
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Sure That's why I don't compose. Anything good I've written has been totally derivative. Good thing there are so many nice, old tunes out there for me to play.
# Posted on May 19th 2007 by ElaineT
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
I had a tune that came to me, wrote it all down, played it over, asked everyone I knew, eventually someone said they had heard it before somewhere, I think someone here pointed out it was "The Tar Road to Sligo". Hadn't played The Bothy Band album for 20 years or more, went back, and yes ! But by golly, how did I remember so much when they play it so damned fast, it just whizzes past your ears.....
# Posted on May 19th 2007 by Guernsey Pete
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
I thought too for a few months that I'd written a good tune only to find out that it was cobbled together from half remembered fragments. See a post from January.
http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/12354/comments#comment251948
# Posted on May 19th 2007 by cabers
Re: Have you ever had this nightmare?
Over Easter, I was ecstatic when I thought that I had written a new tune, which was in my humble opinion deadly. I played it throughout the whole Easter vacation (I called it the Easter reel) marvelling at it. Until, on the very last day of holidays I was trying to learn a tune called Diane's Happiness, and it turned out to be practically the same tune! On the bright side, it was one more tune I didn't think I knew before, but I now know.
# Posted on May 19th 2007 by dannym