I think you can teach yourself as far as its possible to go.
Getting started might be the hardest bit, learning what it is we really want to sound like (a few lessons in physical technique will go a long way too), after that, it can all be switched over to autopilot as the desire to play better takes over. There's nobody better at teaching you and developing your own tecnique than yourself.
So long as you can play by ear you can teach yourself anything.
If you've no handy local sessions, the best thing to do is assemble a large and varied collection of ITM CD's which include players of your instrument. Listen to these as much as you can, pick out tunes you like and attempt to play the tune after hearing it. If you can't do this easily then check this site or search around on the web for the sheet music (only the most obscure or newly composed tunes are unlikely to be available). Use the sheet music in combination with listening to the recorded music to ensure that you capture the correct rhythm and nuances and ornamentation of the music.
Self-teaching material is a bit thin on the ground for ITM compared to something like classical music, blues or jazz. Again a search on say Google with e.g. "+fiddle +irish +tutorial" will give you a good idea of what's available.
Provided you have the will-power to practice exhaustively, until you master each tune you can get away without a tutor.
Having said this, if you can find a tutor they will be invaluable for one thing - they will make playing the instrument look easy which will encourage you to practice more. They will also provide you with a bunch of tunes ("friendly" for your instrument) and the all the necessary technical skills required to execute ornamentation and variations.
How do native Irish musicians learn? Are they self-taught, but surrounded by the culture and music, or do they start taking lessons early on? How was ITM originally passed on in the days before CD's? I think sometimes the most difficult part of self-teaching is the isolation.
So many people play instruments in Ireland, that even in the remotest village it's easy to find a friendly player who'll drop by and teach your kids from time to time.
It's popular at lots of house parties for everyone to "do a turn" i.e. play a tune (or three), sing, tell long-winded jokes etc. This is how people used to entertain themselves before TV, computers, mobile phones and all the other modern day "essentials". So, if you're a kid wanting to stay up late - you stand more chance of doing so if your parents want to show you off playing your latest tune.
The De Dannan fiddler Frankie Gavin was brought up in a pub - both his parents were musicians I seem to recall and he was immersed in music sessions most nights of the week.
All very handy for gaining a feel for the music and the encouragement to practice lots.
I don't think that many of today's great musicians had any formal training or were "tutored" as such - more encouraged and mentored by family friends or family members.
Listen to what you like and want to play on the instrument of your choice. Also, remember that bad habits can make making progress hard, so occasionally find someone who can check your technique over. For me it was bowing. Now I'm aware of the problems I can make allowances.
Dunno that I agree that today's great musicians weren't tutored, CP. Insofar as I know, a lot of them had lessons of one sort or another, even though many of *were* from family and friends. Paddy Keenan and the Glackins, for instance, both had fathers who were quite well known tutors of others -- John Keenan tutored Finbar Furey and Davey Spillane and Martin Nolan for a start, as well as others.
And when he was in town last, Frankie Gavin told a friend of mine that he (Gavin) likes to play a few Partitas to stretch himself, and you generally don't pick those up in pubs.
I don't say this because I want to join the tradition police (I don't). It's just that I'm on a quest recently to find out What Is Traditional Music Anyway? I hope that I never pretend to have all the answers, but I'm zeroing in on a few things.
I would like to suggest (perhaps controversially) that you CAN'T learn Irish (or any other) traditional music on your own; nor can you learn it from books, records, CDs, or the Web. They can help, but they don't give you a proper grounding in traditional music. That's because, in my view, traditional culture is aural--that is, it depends on the music being made and heard live--and requires a strongly personal element. It requires mentorship. (I will suggest that TheSession is probably as close as you'll get to the real thing on the Net; the worst problem here is that the current technology limits us to hearing dinky little MIDI piano renditions of the tunes, instead of hearing them in all of their richness as performed by a real live human being. But I would suggest there are some hints of a traditional culture here, mostly because of the conversations.)
I recently had a discussion with Chris McGrath, a fine fiddle player from Boston, who suggested that any kind of traditional culture (or cultural tradition, I suppose) requires three constituencies. He said you need to have people who are actively practising the tradition, teaching and learning the tunes, playing them (a lot, over and over and over), and chatting about them. You need an avant-garde, people who are stretching the boundaries by introducing new instruments like the guitar (as happened in the last 30 years or so) or the fiddle (as happened about 350 years ago). And finally, you need a group that is advocating that we have gone too far, and that we need to get back to the roots of the music as it used to be. It occurred to me immediately upon hearing Chris' description that these three groups represented the tensions between the past, present, and future of anything.
LaGrotte asked some questions up there: "How do native Irish musicians learn? Are they self-taught, but surrounded by the culture and music, or do they start taking lessons early on? How was ITM originally passed on in the days before CD's? I think sometimes the most difficult part of self-teaching is the isolation."
Native Irish musicians--any traditional musicians--learn by all of the methods suggested in the questions; they're surrounded by the culture and the music, they start taking lessons early on, and they are self-taught to the extent that they develop their own styles and nuances. But they do so within the context of the tradition. Thus the one thing you can't say is that "the most difficult part of self-teaching is the isolation". I contend the most difficult part of self-teaching is that it's _impossible_. You can't learn a tradition from nobody; it has to be passed. You have to be able to notice something that someone is doing, and ask them about it. They need to be able to show you or tell you how to do that little roll. I'd suggest that you have to see the expression on their faces and catch their eyes every now and again.
Note that, at any ITM concert, you won't merely here the name of the tune; you'll almost always here something like "...and the last tune in that set was 'The Flapping Underpants', which we got from the playing of Joe McShirtless." The tradition comes FROM somebody.
How was ITM passed on before CDs? Well, that's what made it traditional. In the old days, before CDs, the traditional music was passed from grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles and friends to kids and other friends, typically from older to younger. The relative isolation of communities helped to establish distinctive local subcultures, styles, and tunes. Occasional visitors (O'Carolan being the canonical example) would invent or spread music from elsewhere which would evolve in the context of a local tradition.
There's even a song about all this: go to http://www.haines-leighton/Albums/H2H/h2h.html. The title song describes the passing of the traditions from hand to hand... for which it won song of the year and its author songwriter of the year at the Prince Edward Island Music Awards, BTW. There is a brief snippet of the song on the site, but alas you'll have to read the words to get the whole thing. Or heck, order the album!
Anyway, I think the idea of learning without tutelage is inimical to the concept of traditional music. Thus I respectfully disagree with Concertina Player's assertion that you can get away without a tutor. You could do it without other people and still become a fabulous player, but it wouldn't be traditional--at least, not in the traditional sense. [smile]
Thanks for those interesting comments Zina and Michael.
My point that you can be self-taught to play ITM assumes one thing - that you can play by ear (which I foolishly neglected to mention).
I maintain that playing the music is not about watching the technical execution of rolls on the fiddle, or the rolling eyes of the fiddler (presumeably in response to someone lighting a cigarette - whoops - wrong thread). Playing the music in the traditional manner comes from listening, and repeating what you hear.
Initially it does no harm to copy the masters' versions of tunes down to every single ornament - this gives you a foundation from which to experiment and launch your own style - once you've mastered the rhythm and feel of the music. Incidentally there's a very handy piece of software called "Transcribe" which can be used to slow down tunes on CDs so that you can work out the ornamentation whilst keeping the same pitch, or to change the pitch - handy for listening to Dervish tracks as they tend to play stuff a semitone sharp.
For someone isolated from the music, is the CD not their tutor if they are learning to play by ear ?
There's a good chance that the players on the CD are steeped in the tradition - so if you can emulate their playing - isn't this the same as the music being handed down ? (admittedly a non-social, perhaps sterile furthering of the tradition - but a furthering nonetheless).
I know that Frankie Gavin likes his classical stuff, I'd be interested to find out whether he was formally taught these tunes by a classical tutor or whether he picked out the basic melodies by ear and added his own interpretation.
I would suggest that for the purposes of this discussion, a CD is a reference, not a performance nor a teacher, in the same way that a photo of a Picasso is not a painting nor a painting tutor. The CD doesn't comment on your performance or nod approvingly after you emulate it. It doesn't show you how to do the little tricks, and it doesn't tell you anything about where it learned the tune.
There are things that you can learn from the reference materials, but it's not the same experience as learning from The Tradition. To me, it remains to be seen whether this represents a genuine furthering of the tradition. My guess is that the avant garde will say that it is, that regular folks will just learn stuff from CDs along with their sessions and tutors, and the staunch traditionalists will deplore the practise. I don't make judgements particularly, other than to note that the learning process is not the same.
I use a piece of software (like Transcribe) called SlowGold. I found it very helpful.
I like the Picasso analogy Michael, and I can appreciate your observations.
I suggest that the painting/performance can be replaced by live recordings and that the tutor can be replaced (in part) by a tutorial such as those offered by MadforTrad or Scoiltrad.
The history behind the tune can be obtained with ease by a search on Google or by posting a message on this site.
I must agree though that for many people without an extremely critical ear of their own playing, the support of a tutor will be required.
A lot of people would argue that without a tutor bad habits would be acquired which could take years to undo - I maintain that if you are relaxed when playing and the sound is spot on, it doesn't matter if your not perceived to be doing things the "right" way. After all most tutors see the right way differently, as we're talking about traditional music, which has grown organically and has never had to suffer the same artificial restrictions that classical musicians endure.
Bear in mind that a lot of the tradition is "the pose", i.e. when someone comes up to you and says what's that last tune you played ? and you can say "Paddy Fahy made it up on a fine session we had in Kylebrack when we were all a bit worse for wear - we joked at the time that we should call it Paddy's No. 800.......etc.) rather than it's called Paddy Fahy's - I learned it from the latest Dervish/Altan/De Dannan etc. CD.
How do the "nerves" manifest? Is it your group as a whole, or individuals? Is it at sessions or at more public occasions?
Remember that it is entirely normal for people performing in public to feel "nerves"; in fact, you can say that if you don't feel a bit nervous then you won't performing at your peak. This applies to everyone, from beginners young and old right up to the international master musicians.
The problems arise when the "nerves" are such that they inhibit the performance. Memory glitches, tension and stiffness in the limbs which immediately cause technical difficulties are probably the two main problem areas. One way to tackle this is to play at sessions only those tunes that you absolutely 100% confident about in every respect - both memory and technique. It may well take several weeks of practice to get half a dozen tunes to this level of confidence, but the results are well worth it. It doesn't matter in the slightest if you play only a couple of tunes in the session and spend the rest of the time listening. Listening time is time well spent and is the fundamental basis for learning tunes.
And the key to successfully learning a tune, or any other physical technique, is sloooow practice.
self teaching
self teaching
how far can you teach yourself itm?
# Posted on January 29th 2003 by timo
Re: self teaching
Hey ed.
I asked a similar question not to long ago and got some good responses. You might want to check it out:
http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display.php/1304
Hope that helps!
Rob
# Posted on January 29th 2003 by RG
Re: self teaching
I think you can teach yourself as far as its possible to go.
Getting started might be the hardest bit, learning what it is we really want to sound like (a few lessons in physical technique will go a long way too), after that, it can all be switched over to autopilot as the desire to play better takes over. There's nobody better at teaching you and developing your own tecnique than yourself.
# Posted on January 30th 2003 by Kenn
Re: self teaching
That depends. How much about Irish traditional music do you know, in order to teach yourself? and how much do you want to know when you're done?
Zina
# Posted on January 30th 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: self teaching
So long as you can play by ear you can teach yourself anything.
If you've no handy local sessions, the best thing to do is assemble a large and varied collection of ITM CD's which include players of your instrument. Listen to these as much as you can, pick out tunes you like and attempt to play the tune after hearing it. If you can't do this easily then check this site or search around on the web for the sheet music (only the most obscure or newly composed tunes are unlikely to be available). Use the sheet music in combination with listening to the recorded music to ensure that you capture the correct rhythm and nuances and ornamentation of the music.
Self-teaching material is a bit thin on the ground for ITM compared to something like classical music, blues or jazz. Again a search on say Google with e.g. "+fiddle +irish +tutorial" will give you a good idea of what's available.
Provided you have the will-power to practice exhaustively, until you master each tune you can get away without a tutor.
Having said this, if you can find a tutor they will be invaluable for one thing - they will make playing the instrument look easy which will encourage you to practice more. They will also provide you with a bunch of tunes ("friendly" for your instrument) and the all the necessary technical skills required to execute ornamentation and variations.
# Posted on January 30th 2003 by Concertina Player
Re: self teaching
How do native Irish musicians learn? Are they self-taught, but surrounded by the culture and music, or do they start taking lessons early on? How was ITM originally passed on in the days before CD's? I think sometimes the most difficult part of self-teaching is the isolation.
# Posted on February 2nd 2003 by La_grotte
Re: self teaching
So many people play instruments in Ireland, that even in the remotest village it's easy to find a friendly player who'll drop by and teach your kids from time to time.
It's popular at lots of house parties for everyone to "do a turn" i.e. play a tune (or three), sing, tell long-winded jokes etc. This is how people used to entertain themselves before TV, computers, mobile phones and all the other modern day "essentials". So, if you're a kid wanting to stay up late - you stand more chance of doing so if your parents want to show you off playing your latest tune.
The De Dannan fiddler Frankie Gavin was brought up in a pub - both his parents were musicians I seem to recall and he was immersed in music sessions most nights of the week.
All very handy for gaining a feel for the music and the encouragement to practice lots.
I don't think that many of today's great musicians had any formal training or were "tutored" as such - more encouraged and mentored by family friends or family members.
# Posted on February 3rd 2003 by Concertina Player
Re: self teaching
Listen to what you like and want to play on the instrument of your choice. Also, remember that bad habits can make making progress hard, so occasionally find someone who can check your technique over. For me it was bowing. Now I'm aware of the problems I can make allowances.
Susie
# Posted on February 3rd 2003 by Susie-Lee
Re: self teaching
Dunno that I agree that today's great musicians weren't tutored, CP. Insofar as I know, a lot of them had lessons of one sort or another, even though many of *were* from family and friends. Paddy Keenan and the Glackins, for instance, both had fathers who were quite well known tutors of others -- John Keenan tutored Finbar Furey and Davey Spillane and Martin Nolan for a start, as well as others.
And when he was in town last, Frankie Gavin told a friend of mine that he (Gavin) likes to play a few Partitas to stretch himself, and you generally don't pick those up in pubs.
Zina
# Posted on February 3rd 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: self teaching
I don't say this because I want to join the tradition police (I don't). It's just that I'm on a quest recently to find out What Is Traditional Music Anyway? I hope that I never pretend to have all the answers, but I'm zeroing in on a few things.
I would like to suggest (perhaps controversially) that you CAN'T learn Irish (or any other) traditional music on your own; nor can you learn it from books, records, CDs, or the Web. They can help, but they don't give you a proper grounding in traditional music. That's because, in my view, traditional culture is aural--that is, it depends on the music being made and heard live--and requires a strongly personal element. It requires mentorship. (I will suggest that TheSession is probably as close as you'll get to the real thing on the Net; the worst problem here is that the current technology limits us to hearing dinky little MIDI piano renditions of the tunes, instead of hearing them in all of their richness as performed by a real live human being. But I would suggest there are some hints of a traditional culture here, mostly because of the conversations.)
I recently had a discussion with Chris McGrath, a fine fiddle player from Boston, who suggested that any kind of traditional culture (or cultural tradition, I suppose) requires three constituencies. He said you need to have people who are actively practising the tradition, teaching and learning the tunes, playing them (a lot, over and over and over), and chatting about them. You need an avant-garde, people who are stretching the boundaries by introducing new instruments like the guitar (as happened in the last 30 years or so) or the fiddle (as happened about 350 years ago). And finally, you need a group that is advocating that we have gone too far, and that we need to get back to the roots of the music as it used to be. It occurred to me immediately upon hearing Chris' description that these three groups represented the tensions between the past, present, and future of anything.
LaGrotte asked some questions up there: "How do native Irish musicians learn? Are they self-taught, but surrounded by the culture and music, or do they start taking lessons early on? How was ITM originally passed on in the days before CD's? I think sometimes the most difficult part of self-teaching is the isolation."
Native Irish musicians--any traditional musicians--learn by all of the methods suggested in the questions; they're surrounded by the culture and the music, they start taking lessons early on, and they are self-taught to the extent that they develop their own styles and nuances. But they do so within the context of the tradition. Thus the one thing you can't say is that "the most difficult part of self-teaching is the isolation". I contend the most difficult part of self-teaching is that it's _impossible_. You can't learn a tradition from nobody; it has to be passed. You have to be able to notice something that someone is doing, and ask them about it. They need to be able to show you or tell you how to do that little roll. I'd suggest that you have to see the expression on their faces and catch their eyes every now and again.
Note that, at any ITM concert, you won't merely here the name of the tune; you'll almost always here something like "...and the last tune in that set was 'The Flapping Underpants', which we got from the playing of Joe McShirtless." The tradition comes FROM somebody.
How was ITM passed on before CDs? Well, that's what made it traditional. In the old days, before CDs, the traditional music was passed from grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles and friends to kids and other friends, typically from older to younger. The relative isolation of communities helped to establish distinctive local subcultures, styles, and tunes. Occasional visitors (O'Carolan being the canonical example) would invent or spread music from elsewhere which would evolve in the context of a local tradition.
There's even a song about all this: go to http://www.haines-leighton/Albums/H2H/h2h.html. The title song describes the passing of the traditions from hand to hand... for which it won song of the year and its author songwriter of the year at the Prince Edward Island Music Awards, BTW. There is a brief snippet of the song on the site, but alas you'll have to read the words to get the whole thing. Or heck, order the album!
Anyway, I think the idea of learning without tutelage is inimical to the concept of traditional music. Thus I respectfully disagree with Concertina Player's assertion that you can get away without a tutor. You could do it without other people and still become a fabulous player, but it wouldn't be traditional--at least, not in the traditional sense. [smile]
---Michael B.
# Posted on February 3rd 2003 by MichaelBolton
Re: self teaching
Thanks for those interesting comments Zina and Michael.
My point that you can be self-taught to play ITM assumes one thing - that you can play by ear (which I foolishly neglected to mention).
I maintain that playing the music is not about watching the technical execution of rolls on the fiddle, or the rolling eyes of the fiddler (presumeably in response to someone lighting a cigarette - whoops - wrong thread). Playing the music in the traditional manner comes from listening, and repeating what you hear.
Initially it does no harm to copy the masters' versions of tunes down to every single ornament - this gives you a foundation from which to experiment and launch your own style - once you've mastered the rhythm and feel of the music. Incidentally there's a very handy piece of software called "Transcribe" which can be used to slow down tunes on CDs so that you can work out the ornamentation whilst keeping the same pitch, or to change the pitch - handy for listening to Dervish tracks as they tend to play stuff a semitone sharp.
For someone isolated from the music, is the CD not their tutor if they are learning to play by ear ?
There's a good chance that the players on the CD are steeped in the tradition - so if you can emulate their playing - isn't this the same as the music being handed down ? (admittedly a non-social, perhaps sterile furthering of the tradition - but a furthering nonetheless).
I know that Frankie Gavin likes his classical stuff, I'd be interested to find out whether he was formally taught these tunes by a classical tutor or whether he picked out the basic melodies by ear and added his own interpretation.
# Posted on February 4th 2003 by Concertina Player
Re: self teaching
I would suggest that for the purposes of this discussion, a CD is a reference, not a performance nor a teacher, in the same way that a photo of a Picasso is not a painting nor a painting tutor. The CD doesn't comment on your performance or nod approvingly after you emulate it. It doesn't show you how to do the little tricks, and it doesn't tell you anything about where it learned the tune.
There are things that you can learn from the reference materials, but it's not the same experience as learning from The Tradition. To me, it remains to be seen whether this represents a genuine furthering of the tradition. My guess is that the avant garde will say that it is, that regular folks will just learn stuff from CDs along with their sessions and tutors, and the staunch traditionalists will deplore the practise. I don't make judgements particularly, other than to note that the learning process is not the same.
I use a piece of software (like Transcribe) called SlowGold. I found it very helpful.
Cheers,
---Michael B.
# Posted on February 9th 2003 by MichaelBolton
Re: self teaching
I like the Picasso analogy Michael, and I can appreciate your observations.
I suggest that the painting/performance can be replaced by live recordings and that the tutor can be replaced (in part) by a tutorial such as those offered by MadforTrad or Scoiltrad.
The history behind the tune can be obtained with ease by a search on Google or by posting a message on this site.
I must agree though that for many people without an extremely critical ear of their own playing, the support of a tutor will be required.
A lot of people would argue that without a tutor bad habits would be acquired which could take years to undo - I maintain that if you are relaxed when playing and the sound is spot on, it doesn't matter if your not perceived to be doing things the "right" way. After all most tutors see the right way differently, as we're talking about traditional music, which has grown organically and has never had to suffer the same artificial restrictions that classical musicians endure.
Bear in mind that a lot of the tradition is "the pose", i.e. when someone comes up to you and says what's that last tune you played ? and you can say "Paddy Fahy made it up on a fine session we had in Kylebrack when we were all a bit worse for wear - we joked at the time that we should call it Paddy's No. 800.......etc.) rather than it's called Paddy Fahy's - I learned it from the latest Dervish/Altan/De Dannan etc. CD.
# Posted on February 9th 2003 by Concertina Player
Re: self teaching
Coping with nerves at sessions. Any ideas. HELP!!!!!!
# Posted on April 23rd 2003 by The Ryans
Re: self teaching
How do the "nerves" manifest? Is it your group as a whole, or individuals? Is it at sessions or at more public occasions?
Remember that it is entirely normal for people performing in public to feel "nerves"; in fact, you can say that if you don't feel a bit nervous then you won't performing at your peak. This applies to everyone, from beginners young and old right up to the international master musicians.
The problems arise when the "nerves" are such that they inhibit the performance. Memory glitches, tension and stiffness in the limbs which immediately cause technical difficulties are probably the two main problem areas. One way to tackle this is to play at sessions only those tunes that you absolutely 100% confident about in every respect - both memory and technique. It may well take several weeks of practice to get half a dozen tunes to this level of confidence, but the results are well worth it. It doesn't matter in the slightest if you play only a couple of tunes in the session and spend the rest of the time listening. Listening time is time well spent and is the fundamental basis for learning tunes.
And the key to successfully learning a tune, or any other physical technique, is sloooow practice.
Trevor
# Posted on April 23rd 2003 by lazyhound