Five years ago, I happened to attend the Catskills Irish Arts Week in New York. I heard a lady there singing a song in Irish. It struck me as beautiful, even though I didn’t know any Irish. I decided to learn a song in Irish. I had no intention of learning the language.
I tried to learn a song phonetically, just listening to the recording. At first, I couldn’t do it. I had the words written down, but Irish spelling is all crazy (like English isn’t...!). I got on the Internet and found a quick spelling and pronunciation guide, and within a day or so, I was pronouncing Irish without too much trouble, albeit without understanding any of it. I learned a song. I loved it. I sang it for people in my little town and they loved it. I learned another one. Then another.
I tried to learn a fourth song, and it all fell apart on me. It turns out, your brain has a limit of just so many nonsense syllables it’ll let you remember, and that’s it. I thought to myself, no problem. I can just get a cheap Irish/English dictionary and learn some nouns and verbs - that’ll give me enough of an anchor to remember more. It worked a little. Then I though, well, I’ll just get one of those cheesy “Learn Irish in a nutshell” courses and get some grammar basics down. That helped even more. I kept learning new songs, and it was like a drug - those songs just mesmerize me for some reason. The more I understood about them, the more I wanted to learn.
So I thought, well, I’ll just pop over to Ireland and take a couple of weeks of Irish lessons at one of those summer learning schools. (Jesus, sometimes it’s hell being so obsessive...) That was a big help. All of a sudden, while I was there, I realized I was actually learning Irish. This came as a surprise to me, since it hadn’t been my intention at all. But there I was. And for some reason I can’t quite explain, the language itself, like the songs, seemed to just pull me in further and further. Whenever anyone asks me now why I started studying Irish, I tell them honestly, “I don’t know - it was just an accident.”
Now, a few more years down the road, I’ve made learning Irish a part of my daily life. What I’ve found is that I’ve learned much more than a new language. This is, of course, only my subjective, biased, completely unscientific opinion, but I feel very strongly that learning and understanding the Irish language has helped me to better play Irish tunes on the fiddle. I believe there is a great deal of culture embedded in a language.
So there’s my story. I have no interest in getting involved in the war that broke out after the two recent posts in Irish, but I will say this: if there were random posts here in Irish every so often, I’m pretty sure at some point the same thing that happened to me would happen to someone else. Their interest would be just enough piqued to slowly drag them into the world of Irish. They might then find, as I did, that it is an excellent complement to trying to play Irish music more authentically. Seems like that would be a good enough reason for everyone to calm down and not get so upset when seeing something here posted in Irish. I was looking forward to following the threads and contributing to the extent that I could, but it just got hopeless with what happened.
That's a fun story. I tried to learn some Irish at one point - the orthography got me. I think I'd have to go back and do it all by ear ((how appropriate!) if I wanted it to stick.
I've heard it said that of all the evils visited on the Irish by the English, the spelling of the language is the worst of the lot.
Thanks for sharing. I now need to get my ass in gear with my own pet language learning projects (unfortunately I can learn songs and their meanings quite easily - obviously I'm at the "take a 2 week intensive course" stage... frightening)
I'm not at all surprised by your lovely story: I have learned more about the language than I ever expected just by osmosis, while learning tunes on the fiddle and the pipes. And I always seek out a singer's version if I can when I am learning an air.
Hello Patricia, RE: your comment "understanding the Irish language has helped me to better play Irish tunes on the fiddle."
While I would say that hearing someone singing a song does indeed help me to get a better handle on the actual air of a song, I believe that has absolutely nothing to do with the language itself, because I am in fact only listening to the tune, not the words.
So it is not the language at all that is helping me to better phrase the air, but simply the repetitive hearing of the air being reproduced accurately.
That being the case, I could get the same help from a recording of an expert playing the air ... with no words attached.
As for the dance tunes, I really don't believe any exposure to the Irish language has helped me to play my Jigs & Reels.
So I can honestly say that as far as I can see, the Irish language hasn't influenced my playing of Irish Music.
Perhaps I'm missing something here though & as your experiences may have been very different to my own, I would be curious to hear how a knowledge of the Irish Language has helped you to play music on your Fiddle?
Tommy Peoples opines that you must learn Irish to play even the reels and jigs properly. Maybe something in the rhythm of the language? Anyway, he said it.
Dick, the problem with learning airs without knowing the words is that you either (1) risk breaking notes and phrases in places a native speaker would never break, or (2) you are wholly reliant on some alleged "expert" player to get it right so you can learn off that. Either way, understanding the language would be a better frame of reference for phrasing airs.
I dont care if Tommy Peoples said Irish helps jigs and reels playing. Doesn't add up. 98 % of the greatest players had no Irish. Ok thats a complete guess!Slow airs of Irish language songs.. almost a requirement to at least understand the pathos and as Will says,the phrases sung initially by the singer.
Makes me wonder about just how many great players there have been, down through the years, who haven't had any Irish at all & yet have somehow managed to help shape the music.
Mind you, thinking of airs, do you ever actually hear any two players ever playing them exactly the same way anyway?
That being the case, one could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that there is no one definitive way to play any of them anyway & that it all comes down, in the end, to personal interpretation.
As for what Tommy Peoples is reported to have said Farr, I would love to hear how a knowledge of the language can possibly influence the way you approach playing dance tunes?
It is because no two players play airs the same that I try to find sung versions. If the words are there, I have a better grasp of the foundation (if that's not a mixed metaphor) of the melody, rather than working with somebody's version of something they heard someone else playing.
As far as dance music goes, I could sort of see a link between the rhythm of the language and that of the music, so I wouldn't altogether discount the notion that learning the language could change the way you play, or at least the way you try to express yourself through music.
I think you make valid points, although it doesn't cause me to question what I've experienced. Hoping I don't start to sound like Shirley MacLaine, I'll try to explain further. I don't think learning Irish made me a better fiddle player (and I'm sure I could find some of my friends to agree with me on that point). I think it made me start playing Irish tunes with more of a feeling for the nuances that make them peculiarly Irish. Perhaps one of the reasons there are many great Irish players with no Irish language is that they grew up steeped in all of the traditions and culture of Ireland, while I had to make do with what was handed down to me by my great-grandparents, all of whom immigrated to America between 1850 and 1904. I don't have the advantage of all of the culture that's just "in the air," for lack of a better term. I feel that learning Irish has allowed me to reclaim some of what was lost in my family through immigration, and that that has helped me understand the rhythyms and pulses of the music better. When I have had the lucky opportunity to listen to native speakers speak, and even just on my own, studying the fascinating grammatical structure of Irish, I feel I'm learning something about the way the music should be played.
As for the slow airs, I do think that learning them from a singer could give you new interpretations of a song, and allow you to hear the song in new ways without your having any Irish at all. I think that's why I was so struck with how beautiful the songs were that I heard before I knew a word of Irish. When I listen to many (not all, but many) singers singing unaccompanied in Irish, I hear a lot of things conveyed that someone with no language could pick up on.
As I stated in my original post, just my own subjective, biased, and completely unscientific opinion!
I suspiciously doubt it was Tommy Peoples that said "you must learn Irish to play even the reels and jigs properly". That just doesn't sound like something he would say. Tommy Peoples, in my memory, isn't the pontificating sort.
I have certainly heard that line from Tony MacMahon, on the other hand...
Rigorously speaking, it's absolute nonsense to try to claim a correlation between learning Irish and improved facility with music or dance. The skepticism expressed above is well-founded.
However, I think it's completely plausible to suppose that there's a connection, but not the simplistic "Irish culture is embedded in the language" connection that's proposed around here recently. That's purely nonsense. Whorfian linguistic determinism ("language shapes thought") and linguistic essentialism ("language encapsulates culture/culture emanates from language") are, in Niels Bohr's lovely phrase, "so bad, they're not even wrong".
However, in practical terms, we know that it's easier to learn a complex collection of relations than a simple one. That is, you can remember a story more easily than you can remember a list of random words, because the story is a complex collection of ideas. So when Patricia threw herself into studying the Irish language, she also apparently started learning lots of songs and presumably other bits of Irish written and oral culture. Suddenly, she's not just learning tunes, she's getting a lot of pieces of the culture. Tunes usually have stories attached - now her stories are attached to other stories. She's learning songs, which means she's learning melodies, which are attached to words and stories - again, she's got a lot more associations to tie everything together, meaning she's gone from learning tunes to learning tunes-and-songs-and-language-plus, which means she's got a much more complex body of material, all of which is reinforcing itself.
I think that's got to help.
That being said, there's a much more important effect: someone who dives in to the Irish language enough to go to Ireland to study it is presumably someone with a tremendously high motivation to learn the language, and we can assume that this motivation might also be expressed with regards to music. In other words, our sample is a highly skewed one.
(As an aside, with regard to modes of learning, there's a new book by a fellow who learned to memorize great scads of stuff really fast - I'm dreading the eager-beaver types who'll read that and be turning up here suggesting that we apply his mnemonic techniques to tunes, which is exactly the wrong way to learn a tune, as a sequence of note-objects that happen to fall in this particular order. They will come, and they will be just as wrong as the Gladwellians with their "10,000 hours" mantra)
Why is it a nonsense? Both music and speech, in fact all incoming auditory signals, are first processed by Heschl's gyrus, in the superior temporal gyrus. Learning Irish might not actually HELP ones fiddle playing, except by increasing connectivity between already existing neurons, but it could be posited that pkerns already possessed a well developed STG (+ an obsessive personality type!)
I'm a little skeptical. I don't feel that a language can have so much of an effect on how someone plays an instrument. I'm american, and i know english, but i can't say that the more english i knew, the more meoldies, harmonies, rhythyms i understood. Now with Poetry, thats a completely different story. I can see how it would affect how you played "Airs" since they come from songs. But i'm with everyone else when it comes down to the fact that its all dance music, where words are not involved at All.
What is music if not a language? To say that words are not involved at all may be technically correct, but in artistic terms I would disagree. Of course your technique would not be affected by learning a language, but your approach might -- how you feel, or try to express what you feel. As Rudall so eloquently ( ) says: the same bits of blancmange are at work.
I can see how learning a language by ear could help train you to listen more closely to volume, pitch and stress patterns. This kind of ear training could make your ear more sensitive to volume, pitch and emphasis on certain parts of a musical phrase. But then that would go for learning any language, not just Irish. I don't buy the idea that the cultural link between language and music could help in anything other than motivation. Songs and airs maybe, but not jigs and reels.
Learning the lyrics of those jigs and slip jigs that have lyrics like the frost is all over/kitty lie over might help you remember a melody but it won't necessarily help you play the fiddle any more proficiently.
Maybe I should finish what I had alluded to then. pkerns with her assumed well-developed STG and obsessive personality type (she said that about herself, so I'm not maligning her) has made it more straightforward for her to learn both fiddle and Irish language. We can't assume that one helps the other other than, as I said above, it potentiates existing neuronal circuitry, which I would have thought it does.
But I don't believe there is much link between the phrasing of fast tunes like reels and the phrasing of the language.
Nice story, but I have a totally different experience; my musical ear helps me learn (or feign the knowledge of) foreign languages, but it doesn't work the other way round, especially for dance tunes - sadly, as my attempt at Hungarian didn't make me a proficient csardas player.
In fact, in many cases learning a new language has a side effect of disenchantment with songs that you loved when you listened to them without understanding the lyrics, which more often than not are rubbish, mediocre or naive. (As de Beamarchais put it back in the 18th century, "Today what isn't worth saying, is sung" - still valid).
I speak a couple of languages to varying degrees, and find that changing from one to another involves a kind of mental switch: for example before speaking French, my mental shoulders rise, and the mental lips are pursed, whereas before speaking Arabic the imagined neck stretches forward and the internal hand clenches. These are purely subjective feelings, of course, and probably wouldn't apply to anyone else. But the point is that the same sort of thing happens if I play, say, jazz, or blues. It is similar to changing key -- a kind of mental pattern-shifting -- but not the same. It is like a mind-set, a mood.
I don't speak Irish, but I could easily imagine that if I did it would have an effect on the way I played, in the same way that before playing a French tune I go into French-speaking mode. It has nothing to do with phrasing or technique or memory or anything else -- it is to do with the feeling you are trying to project, and that comes out through the music. It may be quantifiable and it may not; but for me, anyway, it seems to have an effect on the end result.
If you eat loads of garlic, does it make you play French tunes better? Maybe if I start taking a shepherd's crook along with me to sessions, it might change my attitude and mindset and my playing of reels will improve.
There are many things in life that are not quantifiable. But if you find something that isn't quantifiable but you think it has an effect, the trick is to examine whether it indeed does or does not have an effect. i.e. question whether it really is quantifiable or not.
If you find it is, then perceiver. And if you find it isn't, then ditch the hippy mumbo jumbo crap.
I find the whole concept of placebos fascinating and it's a shame that it's very difficult to carry out reasonable studies on the phenomena because of the widespread belief in crap
I'm certain that there is a link between knowledge of a language and ability to interpret traditional music. Indeed Allan MacDonald of the three great Glenuig piping brothers has done some fascinating research in this area. I'm not sure how much of this is available online, but here's a link which may help anyone interested who would like to find out more:
Dr Dow, what you said is indeed a load of codswallop.
Llig, whether it is or isn't quantifiable is neither here nor there. It would be impossible to determine whether it had an effect anyway, as it is purely subjective. All I am saying is that the part of my brain that I use for music seems to be related to the part I use for language, and that it can be modified by hearing and speaking a specific language as well as by playing or listening to music. If that seems like mumbo jumbo to you, it doesn't to me.
Garlic contains allicins and antioxidants which aid your immune system, which will include microglia which are the nervous system's immune cells. So if you if you eat lots of garlic your neuro-immune response will be better so you will be sharper and better able to pick up French or any other type of tunes. So yes, if you eat loads of garlic, it will make you play French tunes better
Sorry Mark, I couldn't resist that.
I don't know - maybe a cognitive offshoot of the processing skills evolved for language use, repurposed as a signifier of highly developed skills in abstract processing (ie, "dig me, I'm smart and have good genes, let's make offspring")? Certainly not a language per se, however. It uses some of the same mental machinery, but the brain is a great recycler, and evolution is an even better one. There's not much about music that resembles language - no syntax, no morphemes, no phonology.
I don't know, some, if not most of the best player of S & I TM I know, don't speak any gaelic. Some do, but I don't think a lack of gaelic is any barrier.
Having said that, there are tunes that occur in both the instrumental & gaelic singing traditions of both scotland & ireland, and there's no easier way of learning a tune then by learning to sing it. In this I think gaelic as a lyrical medium has, IMO, english or any other language trumped;
"In this I think gaelic as a lyrical medium has, IMO, english or any other language trumped;"
I agree that (to me) Irish seems more lyrical than English - don't know if I would generalize further, since I am only familiar with a small number of languages. Its possible that I only think Irish is very lyrical because it is, by definition, exotic to me, but I don't think so. I like listening to languages I don't understand whenever I get the chance, and many of them don't sound the least bit lyrical to me.
On the subject of the mouth music (and those were two lovely examples): I am always wondering if these sounds actually came from real language way back. It's an interesting question. And if not, is there something about certain languages where this tradition is stronger that makes people more prone to just like the sound of certain syllables repeated over and over?
I noted above a few obvious linguists responding to my original post with the highly specialized language of linguistics, something I bet most people here aren't familiar with. Interesting that this didn't cause a series of xenophoic rants the way the two recent posts in Irish did. As for me, I appreciated the comments, looked up the terms I didn't understand, and consider myself enriched.
"However, in practical terms, we know that it's easier to learn a complex collection of relations than a simple one. That is, you can remember a story more easily than you can remember a list of random words, because the story is a complex collection of ideas. So when Patricia threw herself into studying the Irish language, she also apparently started learning lots of songs and presumably other bits of Irish written and oral culture. Suddenly, she's not just learning tunes, she's getting a lot of pieces of the culture. Tunes usually have stories attached - now her stories are attached to other stories. She's learning songs, which means she's learning melodies, which are attached to words and stories - again, she's got a lot more associations to tie everything together, meaning she's gone from learning tunes to learning tunes-and-songs-and-language-plus, which means she's got a much more complex body of material, all of which is reinforcing itself.
I think that's got to help. "
This sound like a completely reasonable explanation of the experience I described (i.e., learning Irish helping me to play the nuances of Irish music better). I never meant to suggest that there absolutely a scientific correlation between learning Irish and learning how to play Irish tunes. I merely was explaining that for me, the two had somehow become related. My purpose wasn't to suggest that everyone start learning Irish in order to improve their playing. It was to suggest that maybe it would be nice to allow people to post in Irish once in awhile here, without being suspicious of their motives or feeling left out. It would help those of us using the total immersion (+ high STG + obsession) method of learning.
I don't doubt for a minute that my perception that learning Irish helped my Irish fiddling could be mistaken. But that would be a silly reason not to bring it up ever in discussion. I really have enjoyed reading all of the comments by others on the subject.
I've only just begun reading this. I've heard it before from someone who grew up in Scotland's western highlands, always hearing her mother sing. I assumed she was equating the rhythm of her mothers' singing with a similar rhythm in her speaking. Apparently, it is more nuanced.
I don't think it would be a surprise to hear there are good Irish players who do not speak Irish anymore than there are speakers of Irish who are poor players. That's back to assume some direct correlation. And if it is about nuances in language & music ~ that is back to listening.
There are vowel sounds and 'articulations' from consonants in that mouth music that many of us are not very familiar with but which a native speaker's 'ear' must be very attuned to. Is it the language or the vocalisations required to utter it that may help ?
"I don't think it would be a surprise to hear there are good Irish players who do not speak Irish anymore than there are speakers of Irish who are poor players. That's back to assume some direct correlation. And if it is about nuances in language & music ~ that is back to listening."
A few people have made this obviously valid point. On the other hand, I have noticed that whenever I'm around Irish musicians from Ireland, there is someone speaking Irish. I developed the impression that there are a higher number of Irish speakers among traditional musicians than in the Irish population in general. Now, I don't have any way to test that as a theory, but I have mentioned it to several Irish speaking musicians I've met. They told me that it wasn't just an impression, it was true. Obviously, even if it's true, it doesn't prove that there is any correlation. But it raises the possiblity that there is, IMHO.
pkerns, speaking Irish outside the Gaeltacht (and some would argue to great extend within it as well at this point). There is a correlation, but not one that has anything to do with ability, the correlation is that in a group of people interested in one aspect of culture, there will be a good contingency also interested in other aspects of the culture.
(It's one of those "emotional truths," I guess. Even though It hasn't a prayer against rational thought, it's a notion I cling to anyway. So, I guess we share this in comon, OP; I can't help you defend the belief, other than by emotional blather.) Nah, better to look for more down to earth reasons for learning Irish.
Hey,
I know I'm jumpiong in here pretty late and this probably won't get read, but I though i'd give my two cents.
I first thought that the idea speaking Irish helping playing tunes was fanciful and foolish. However, if you consider that the language was still very inmportant in Irish life when some of the best known tunes were written and maybe it had an Influence.
We always hear of people talking of styles of different playing from Donegal, Wast Clare, Connamara etc. Perhaps it's not a coincidence taht these distinctive styles come from Gaeltacht regions? And the way that a scottish reel is distinguishable from an irish one, yet also has similarities, just like Irish and Scotts Gaelic?
Just something to consider.
Is mise le meas,
Cian
Maybe if I spoke English with a broad Mayo accent my Irish fiddle playing would be more authentic? More authentic that if I spoke English with a broad Dublin accent?
And I'm not very good at scottish music so maybe I'll try speaking my English with a nice soft west highland accent and see if it stops me putting slow rolls in my strathspeys.
llig. If you learned to do those vocal things flawlesly without concious effort you would have built up a lot of different connections in you brain related to how the spectrum and volume of sounds change in time.
Those speaking against the OP are tending to make me less skeptical.
I've always found a Mayo accent easy. I particularly like the days of the week and can often be heard reciting them as I walk down the street. Cork is one I struggle with though. The only things I can say in a convincing Cork accent is County Cork and Motor Car.
To play Bluegrass we must speak with a kentucky accent, bad luck Earl Scruggs, you were born in North Carolina, bad luck Carter Stanley you were born in Virginia.
To play Norwegian hardanger fiddle music we must learn Norwegian, to play Swedish tunes we must learn Swedish.
Northumbrian pipes can only be played authentically if we speak Northumbrian dialect.
those Irish reels that are Scottish in origin[Miss Mcleods, The Musical Priest] can only be played authentically if the player learns Scottish Gaelic as well as Irish.
That's what I mean. Taking the stance that there is no link between a Northumbrian accent and the style of piping is like taking the stance that dogs can't count. Fine as a hypothesis to test but unproductive as a simple assumption.
That argument reminds me of the creationist who says that just because no human remains have ever been found in or below the strata that contain dinosaur fossils, doesn't rule out that we may find some yet.
I am confident from my own observations that some dogs can tell that one of a group is missing. For a wolf there would be an advantage in knowing when 5 prey animals had gone behind a bush but only 4 had come out. The mistake would be assuming that dogs *can* count.
The dog may be aware that the kid with the yellow hat and the biscuit in its pocket (and, of course, the distinctive smell) was not around and discover that it had gone behind a bush for a pee. The wolf may have noticed that the deer with the limp was not longer in the group.
So fine for an experiment to have a null hypothesis that dogs can't count. But bad to assume that they either can or cannot.
So if the hypothesis is that there is a link between being good at playing Irish diddley music and be able to speak Irish, then we can start to gather data on the null hypothesis that there is no link.
Given that lots of the skeptics are mentioning other languages why not start with a tonal language and the music of that culture. Could do a bit of background research. Maybe start by Googling "tonal language" with "pitch perception".
If I had to bet on the strongest effect it would be the one Prof P suggests. But I still think Northumbrian pipes talk like Kathryn Tickell and Scottish tunes are full of Julie Fowlis' vowels.
There is some evidence that speakers of tonal languages have an advantage in pitch perception, but of course this would not be any help to the specific claim that language L speakers have an advantage in learning some music associated with language L. Even if language L is a tonal lanugage (which Irish is not), that would serve as a general benefit to music perception and performance in any genre.
It's noteworthy that experiments in this area typically center on Chinese speakers and Western classical music.
The effect Prof. P mentions (which, I might point out, is the effect I discussed originally) is the only one that has a hope of standing up - the hypothesis that learning Irish aids in learning Irish music in some direct fashion is simply incoherent. Or has nobody noticed that many of the top performers of Western classical music - the music of Bach, Beethoven, Bizet, and Vivaldi, as well as Tchaikowski and Sibelius and Britten and that Dane whose name has gone out of my head - are coming from places like China?
Would anyone seriously suggest that Lang Lang would be a better interpreter of, say, Chopin, if he spoke Polish?
It seems to me that this proposition only associates with "ethnic" music. That seems to me a sure sign that we're dealing with a superstition, and not a reasonable hypothesis.
Tut tut, one "seems" along the route to a conclusion is risky. Two are distinctly dodgy. Or so it seems to me . If there was a link wouldn't it be stronger in a music with less influence from other cultures ?
Are people disgreeing with the proposition that how a melody is used for a *song* is influenced by the language.
Okay, I'll stop inserting politely deferential language and shave my assertions bald:
This proposition as put forth in this discussion is only associated with "ethnic" music - Irish mostly, of course, but with some passing mention of jazz and blues and dismissive mention of French. This a clear sign that we're dealing with a superstition and not a sensible proposition.
Better? It's the same assertion in both cases, take your pick as to how it's expressed.
I haven't caught up yet. Are we discussing native speakers of Irish, who play Irish music, or anyone who learns gaelige will eventually notice it has a positive influence on their playing of Irish jigs etc. ?
Language is a form of music? Could you expand on that one? Sounds interesting - generally, I see the evolutionary path going from lanugage to music (music riding on the neural coattails of language). I'd like to see the case made the other way.
Llig.. music is most defenitely a language to me and noone ,not even the most intelligent professor here(And this place is swarming with them!) can deny me that.
Ah, I was working on a post using "the frost is all over".
If a lot of people within a language group learn a dance tune that has a set of words, like "the frost is all over" and associate the words with it to such an extent that variations which don't fit are not created or fall out of fashion. The tune can still go lots of ways but they are limited by what will fit with the words. That becomes the fashionable way of playing it which people regard as authentic.
Would a knowledge of english help a player to play it in a fashionable/authentic/culturally acceptable way ? They will want to put in variations within the scope allowed by the words.
I am only trying to drive the thinnest end of a wedge into Jon's proposed superstition.
Big_tab it might be considered a wee bit closed minded to not consider an opinion from the most intelligent here. Swarming, eh? I wonder what the draw could be. It's not honey, or anything sweet.
a lot of you blokes need to chill out...or possibly the opposite.
here I am in the antipodes, just kickin back at 4am after work, just a bit too hot to sleep or put a shirt on, chill out with a wine or whatever and listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong duets...paradise on earth.
Get's you well in the *groove*.. That's what it's about, gettin in the groove and come down a few notches...
the same as what gettin' familiar with some Irish language will do for your playing of *Irish* music.
Language communications and modifies people, so does music, as you well know. Irish language and Irish music is a brill combination.
Chill out folks. or possibly emigrate.
OK. If I wanted to learn the Highland pipes and play pibroch would learning gaelic help me if my teacher thought knowledge of canntaireachd essential ? Does it help to have accentless gaelic ?
I insert a quote from an article by pat Mitchell, without comment:
'By definition, Irish traditional dance music is music, which prompts the question – what is music?
Various definitions can be found, ranging from the mechanistic to the metaphysical. Variously:
• The sound produced and the art involved in organising a sequence of tones into a meaningful
whole. It differs from visual arts in that it is perceived in time rather than in space.
• The expression of emotion through sound.
The performance of music has, perforce, to encompass both ends of the spectrum. To produce
the notes the performer must go through some mechanical routine; in our case, pumping wind,
controlling pressure, lifting appropriate fingers for the correct duration to play notes and
ornaments. To my mind however, all this work should communicate subjective emotions and
feelings to the listener and fails as music if it fails to achieve this.
The notion that Irish music should communicate emotions has a long and respectable history.
Many of our oldest stories refer to the three divisions of music - goltraí, geantraí and suantraí.
These might be translated as music to induce, respectively, sorrow, happiness or sleep.'
So presumably there are subtle, or perhaps even specific differences between styles to be seen and acknowledged as achieving the intended outcomes. It isn't all uniform them, historically, presumably.
Was that "How so ?" to me about the neural coat-tails ? I think if you are going to accept some shared neural processes, even in the evolutionary past, then it is hard to dismiss a current practical link as superstition.
Not at all, David. Think about it for a minute. There are no neural processes for specific languages or specific genres of music. What you're suggesting would require you to believe that learning Mandarin would facilitate learning Hawaiian slack-key guitar and death metal.
That might be true, in fact. It's not out of the question that learning facilitates further learning, and that "exercising the language muscles" would facilitate further use of similar processes.
But it wouldn't for a minute support the superstitious claim that learning the Irish language would specifically assist in learning Irish music, and not Slavic brass band music. That claim is purely sympathetic magic.
@David
I think you might be using the term "neural process" in multiple senses, but no, I don't think there's a "neural process" for a particular tune. That almost sounds like a revival of the "grandmother neuron" idea to me.
A specific set of things going on in my head that happen for that tune. In the context I think particulary those to do with hearing and processing how the sound spectrum changes with time.
Patricia, lol ~
Agus dúirt an creatlach, "Áthas chun bualadh leat, D'imigh mo chraiceann."
Atahualpa, I'm walking distance from the Sierra Nevada. I think there maybe a discount, if you buy a case at the brew pub. I know my friend always goes there when he drives up from Sacramento & points beyond.
When you're talking about "shared neural processes" of music and language you're talking about a high-level capacity for processing generalized auditory input or for generalized pattern recognition. When you talk about "neural processes" for specific tunes, you're talking about a data input stream corresponding to, say, the Kesh, or perhaps about the storage of some set of impressions of that tune. Totally different things.
If you want to talk about the latter, then you're talking about something that's specific at the tune level. How do you tie that to learning the language? Are you suggesting there's some basic similarity between the two structures? If so, and you could back it up in a sensible fashion, you'd have an interdisciplinary Ph.D. theisis in music and linguistics.
If you want to talk about the former, you're talking about generalized structures - the auditory processing is the same sort of thing that's used in detecting and identifying a bird call and deciding whether it's good to eat, the pattern recognition is used in finding and recognizing edible berries, and determining where and when you're likely to come across them. Again, I don't see any way to tie those to the claim that learning Irish specifically facilitaties learning jigs and reels specifically.
John, did you ever have any run-ins with a certain Tom Standeven, the piping US customs agent on the Canadian border; he who never missed a chance to preach on the "absolute necessity" of learning to speak Irish in order to play Irish music? (Lessee now...how to disagree with the old guy's cause, while not appearing to dishonor his memory...tough one...BUT, there is something in his very emotional thinking which I get a kick out of.) If his point has any merrit at all, it's because he made it purely out of sentiment. (Big stumble there, I know) We aren't in a lab; nor are we exactly in a law court. Music and sentiment, for better or worse, are inextricably linked.
How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Five years ago, I happened to attend the Catskills Irish Arts Week in New York. I heard a lady there singing a song in Irish. It struck me as beautiful, even though I didn’t know any Irish. I decided to learn a song in Irish. I had no intention of learning the language.
I tried to learn a song phonetically, just listening to the recording. At first, I couldn’t do it. I had the words written down, but Irish spelling is all crazy (like English isn’t...!). I got on the Internet and found a quick spelling and pronunciation guide, and within a day or so, I was pronouncing Irish without too much trouble, albeit without understanding any of it. I learned a song. I loved it. I sang it for people in my little town and they loved it. I learned another one. Then another.
I tried to learn a fourth song, and it all fell apart on me. It turns out, your brain has a limit of just so many nonsense syllables it’ll let you remember, and that’s it. I thought to myself, no problem. I can just get a cheap Irish/English dictionary and learn some nouns and verbs - that’ll give me enough of an anchor to remember more. It worked a little. Then I though, well, I’ll just get one of those cheesy “Learn Irish in a nutshell” courses and get some grammar basics down. That helped even more. I kept learning new songs, and it was like a drug - those songs just mesmerize me for some reason. The more I understood about them, the more I wanted to learn.
So I thought, well, I’ll just pop over to Ireland and take a couple of weeks of Irish lessons at one of those summer learning schools. (Jesus, sometimes it’s hell being so obsessive...) That was a big help. All of a sudden, while I was there, I realized I was actually learning Irish. This came as a surprise to me, since it hadn’t been my intention at all. But there I was. And for some reason I can’t quite explain, the language itself, like the songs, seemed to just pull me in further and further. Whenever anyone asks me now why I started studying Irish, I tell them honestly, “I don’t know - it was just an accident.”
Now, a few more years down the road, I’ve made learning Irish a part of my daily life. What I’ve found is that I’ve learned much more than a new language. This is, of course, only my subjective, biased, completely unscientific opinion, but I feel very strongly that learning and understanding the Irish language has helped me to better play Irish tunes on the fiddle. I believe there is a great deal of culture embedded in a language.
So there’s my story. I have no interest in getting involved in the war that broke out after the two recent posts in Irish, but I will say this: if there were random posts here in Irish every so often, I’m pretty sure at some point the same thing that happened to me would happen to someone else. Their interest would be just enough piqued to slowly drag them into the world of Irish. They might then find, as I did, that it is an excellent complement to trying to play Irish music more authentically. Seems like that would be a good enough reason for everyone to calm down and not get so upset when seeing something here posted in Irish. I was looking forward to following the threads and contributing to the extent that I could, but it just got hopeless with what happened.
Patricia
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
That's a fun story. I tried to learn some Irish at one point - the orthography got me. I think I'd have to go back and do it all by ear ((how appropriate!) if I wanted it to stick.
I've heard it said that of all the evils visited on the Irish by the English, the spelling of the language is the worst of the lot.
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Good story.
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by Rudall the time
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Thanks for sharing. I now need to get my ass in gear with my own pet language learning projects (unfortunately I can learn songs and their meanings quite easily - obviously I'm at the "take a 2 week intensive course" stage... frightening)
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by Tirno
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I'm not at all surprised by your lovely story: I have learned more about the language than I ever expected just by osmosis, while learning tunes on the fiddle and the pipes. And I always seek out a singer's version if I can when I am learning an air.
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by gam
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Hello Patricia, RE: your comment "understanding the Irish language has helped me to better play Irish tunes on the fiddle."
While I would say that hearing someone singing a song does indeed help me to get a better handle on the actual air of a song, I believe that has absolutely nothing to do with the language itself, because I am in fact only listening to the tune, not the words.
So it is not the language at all that is helping me to better phrase the air, but simply the repetitive hearing of the air being reproduced accurately.
That being the case, I could get the same help from a recording of an expert playing the air ... with no words attached.
As for the dance tunes, I really don't believe any exposure to the Irish language has helped me to play my Jigs & Reels.
So I can honestly say that as far as I can see, the Irish language hasn't influenced my playing of Irish Music.
Perhaps I'm missing something here though & as your experiences may have been very different to my own, I would be curious to hear how a knowledge of the Irish Language has helped you to play music on your Fiddle?
Cheers
Dick
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by Ptarmigan
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Tommy Peoples opines that you must learn Irish to play even the reels and jigs properly. Maybe something in the rhythm of the language? Anyway, he said it.
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by Farr
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Dick, the problem with learning airs without knowing the words is that you either (1) risk breaking notes and phrases in places a native speaker would never break, or (2) you are wholly reliant on some alleged "expert" player to get it right so you can learn off that. Either way, understanding the language would be a better frame of reference for phrasing airs.
# Posted on March 9th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
ROFL.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Oeidipus
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I dont care if Tommy Peoples said Irish helps jigs and reels playing. Doesn't add up. 98 % of the greatest players had no Irish. Ok thats a complete guess!Slow airs of Irish language songs.. almost a requirement to at least understand the pathos and as Will says,the phrases sung initially by the singer.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by big_tab
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
By the way.. Patricia.. I loved your story.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by big_tab
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Makes me wonder about just how many great players there have been, down through the years, who haven't had any Irish at all & yet have somehow managed to help shape the music.
Mind you, thinking of airs, do you ever actually hear any two players ever playing them exactly the same way anyway?
That being the case, one could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that there is no one definitive way to play any of them anyway & that it all comes down, in the end, to personal interpretation.
As for what Tommy Peoples is reported to have said Farr, I would love to hear how a knowledge of the language can possibly influence the way you approach playing dance tunes?
Cheers
Dick
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Ptarmigan
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
It is because no two players play airs the same that I try to find sung versions. If the words are there, I have a better grasp of the foundation (if that's not a mixed metaphor) of the melody, rather than working with somebody's version of something they heard someone else playing.
As far as dance music goes, I could sort of see a link between the rhythm of the language and that of the music, so I wouldn't altogether discount the notion that learning the language could change the way you play, or at least the way you try to express yourself through music.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by gam
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
If learning to speak Irish helps in the playing of the dance tunes, then it follows that learning to speak Irish would make you a beter dancer.
Yeah, right
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Hello Cheers Dick et al,
I think you make valid points, although it doesn't cause me to question what I've experienced. Hoping I don't start to sound like Shirley MacLaine, I'll try to explain further. I don't think learning Irish made me a better fiddle player (and I'm sure I could find some of my friends to agree with me on that point). I think it made me start playing Irish tunes with more of a feeling for the nuances that make them peculiarly Irish. Perhaps one of the reasons there are many great Irish players with no Irish language is that they grew up steeped in all of the traditions and culture of Ireland, while I had to make do with what was handed down to me by my great-grandparents, all of whom immigrated to America between 1850 and 1904. I don't have the advantage of all of the culture that's just "in the air," for lack of a better term. I feel that learning Irish has allowed me to reclaim some of what was lost in my family through immigration, and that that has helped me understand the rhythyms and pulses of the music better. When I have had the lucky opportunity to listen to native speakers speak, and even just on my own, studying the fascinating grammatical structure of Irish, I feel I'm learning something about the way the music should be played.
As for the slow airs, I do think that learning them from a singer could give you new interpretations of a song, and allow you to hear the song in new ways without your having any Irish at all. I think that's why I was so struck with how beautiful the songs were that I heard before I knew a word of Irish. When I listen to many (not all, but many) singers singing unaccompanied in Irish, I hear a lot of things conveyed that someone with no language could pick up on.
As I stated in my original post, just my own subjective, biased, and completely unscientific opinion!
Patricia
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Hmm..
I suspiciously doubt it was Tommy Peoples that said "you must learn Irish to play even the reels and jigs properly". That just doesn't sound like something he would say. Tommy Peoples, in my memory, isn't the pontificating sort.
I have certainly heard that line from Tony MacMahon, on the other hand...
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Georgi
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Rigorously speaking, it's absolute nonsense to try to claim a correlation between learning Irish and improved facility with music or dance. The skepticism expressed above is well-founded.
However, I think it's completely plausible to suppose that there's a connection, but not the simplistic "Irish culture is embedded in the language" connection that's proposed around here recently. That's purely nonsense. Whorfian linguistic determinism ("language shapes thought") and linguistic essentialism ("language encapsulates culture/culture emanates from language") are, in Niels Bohr's lovely phrase, "so bad, they're not even wrong".
However, in practical terms, we know that it's easier to learn a complex collection of relations than a simple one. That is, you can remember a story more easily than you can remember a list of random words, because the story is a complex collection of ideas. So when Patricia threw herself into studying the Irish language, she also apparently started learning lots of songs and presumably other bits of Irish written and oral culture. Suddenly, she's not just learning tunes, she's getting a lot of pieces of the culture. Tunes usually have stories attached - now her stories are attached to other stories. She's learning songs, which means she's learning melodies, which are attached to words and stories - again, she's got a lot more associations to tie everything together, meaning she's gone from learning tunes to learning tunes-and-songs-and-language-plus, which means she's got a much more complex body of material, all of which is reinforcing itself.
I think that's got to help.
That being said, there's a much more important effect: someone who dives in to the Irish language enough to go to Ireland to study it is presumably someone with a tremendously high motivation to learn the language, and we can assume that this motivation might also be expressed with regards to music. In other words, our sample is a highly skewed one.
(As an aside, with regard to modes of learning, there's a new book by a fellow who learned to memorize great scads of stuff really fast - I'm dreading the eager-beaver types who'll read that and be turning up here suggesting that we apply his mnemonic techniques to tunes, which is exactly the wrong way to learn a tune, as a sequence of note-objects that happen to fall in this particular order. They will come, and they will be just as wrong as the Gladwellians with their "10,000 hours" mantra)
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Why is it a nonsense? Both music and speech, in fact all incoming auditory signals, are first processed by Heschl's gyrus, in the superior temporal gyrus. Learning Irish might not actually HELP ones fiddle playing, except by increasing connectivity between already existing neurons, but it could be posited that pkerns already possessed a well developed STG (+ an obsessive personality type!)
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Rudall the time
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I'm a little skeptical. I don't feel that a language can have so much of an effect on how someone plays an instrument. I'm american, and i know english, but i can't say that the more english i knew, the more meoldies, harmonies, rhythyms i understood. Now with Poetry, thats a completely different story. I can see how it would affect how you played "Airs" since they come from songs. But i'm with everyone else when it comes down to the fact that its all dance music, where words are not involved at All.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
What is music if not a language? To say that words are not involved at all may be technically correct, but in artistic terms I would disagree. Of course your technique would not be affected by learning a language, but your approach might -- how you feel, or try to express what you feel. As Rudall so eloquently (
) says: the same bits of blancmange are at work.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by gam
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I can see how learning a language by ear could help train you to listen more closely to volume, pitch and stress patterns. This kind of ear training could make your ear more sensitive to volume, pitch and emphasis on certain parts of a musical phrase. But then that would go for learning any language, not just Irish. I don't buy the idea that the cultural link between language and music could help in anything other than motivation. Songs and airs maybe, but not jigs and reels.
Learning the lyrics of those jigs and slip jigs that have lyrics like the frost is all over/kitty lie over might help you remember a melody but it won't necessarily help you play the fiddle any more proficiently.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Dr. Dow
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Maybe I should finish what I had alluded to then. pkerns with her assumed well-developed STG and obsessive personality type (she said that about herself, so I'm not maligning her) has made it more straightforward for her to learn both fiddle and Irish language. We can't assume that one helps the other other than, as I said above, it potentiates existing neuronal circuitry, which I would have thought it does.
But I don't believe there is much link between the phrasing of fast tunes like reels and the phrasing of the language.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Rudall the time
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Nice story, but I have a totally different experience; my musical ear helps me learn (or feign the knowledge of) foreign languages, but it doesn't work the other way round, especially for dance tunes - sadly, as my attempt at Hungarian didn't make me a proficient csardas player.
In fact, in many cases learning a new language has a side effect of disenchantment with songs that you loved when you listened to them without understanding the lyrics, which more often than not are rubbish, mediocre or naive. (As de Beamarchais put it back in the 18th century, "Today what isn't worth saying, is sung" - still valid).
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Janek
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I speak a couple of languages to varying degrees, and find that changing from one to another involves a kind of mental switch: for example before speaking French, my mental shoulders rise, and the mental lips are pursed, whereas before speaking Arabic the imagined neck stretches forward and the internal hand clenches. These are purely subjective feelings, of course, and probably wouldn't apply to anyone else. But the point is that the same sort of thing happens if I play, say, jazz, or blues. It is similar to changing key -- a kind of mental pattern-shifting -- but not the same. It is like a mind-set, a mood.
I don't speak Irish, but I could easily imagine that if I did it would have an effect on the way I played, in the same way that before playing a French tune I go into French-speaking mode. It has nothing to do with phrasing or technique or memory or anything else -- it is to do with the feeling you are trying to project, and that comes out through the music. It may be quantifiable and it may not; but for me, anyway, it seems to have an effect on the end result.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by gam
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
If you eat loads of garlic, does it make you play French tunes better? Maybe if I start taking a shepherd's crook along with me to sessions, it might change my attitude and mindset and my playing of reels will improve.
What a load of codswallop!
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Dr. Dow
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
There are many things in life that are not quantifiable. But if you find something that isn't quantifiable but you think it has an effect, the trick is to examine whether it indeed does or does not have an effect. i.e. question whether it really is quantifiable or not.
If you find it is, then perceiver. And if you find it isn't, then ditch the hippy mumbo jumbo crap.
I find the whole concept of placebos fascinating and it's a shame that it's very difficult to carry out reasonable studies on the phenomena because of the widespread belief in crap
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I'm certain that there is a link between knowledge of a language and ability to interpret traditional music. Indeed Allan MacDonald of the three great Glenuig piping brothers has done some fascinating research in this area. I'm not sure how much of this is available online, but here's a link which may help anyone interested who would like to find out more:
http://www.thepipingcentre.co.uk/tuition/tutors/allan-macdonald/
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by On Sabbatical
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Dr Dow, what you said is indeed a load of codswallop.
Llig, whether it is or isn't quantifiable is neither here nor there. It would be impossible to determine whether it had an effect anyway, as it is purely subjective. All I am saying is that the part of my brain that I use for music seems to be related to the part I use for language, and that it can be modified by hearing and speaking a specific language as well as by playing or listening to music. If that seems like mumbo jumbo to you, it doesn't to me.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by gam
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Garlic contains allicins and antioxidants which aid your immune system, which will include microglia which are the nervous system's immune cells. So if you if you eat lots of garlic your neuro-immune response will be better so you will be sharper and better able to pick up French or any other type of tunes. So yes, if you eat loads of garlic, it will make you play French tunes better
Sorry Mark, I couldn't resist that.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Rudall the time
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Rudall - I don't think you actually disagreed with me there.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
"What is music if not a language? "
I don't know - maybe a cognitive offshoot of the processing skills evolved for language use, repurposed as a signifier of highly developed skills in abstract processing (ie, "dig me, I'm smart and have good genes, let's make offspring")? Certainly not a language per se, however. It uses some of the same mental machinery, but the brain is a great recycler, and evolution is an even better one. There's not much about music that resembles language - no syntax, no morphemes, no phonology.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I don't know, some, if not most of the best player of S & I TM I know, don't speak any gaelic. Some do, but I don't think a lack of gaelic is any barrier.
Having said that, there are tunes that occur in both the instrumental & gaelic singing traditions of both scotland & ireland, and there's no easier way of learning a tune then by learning to sing it. In this I think gaelic as a lyrical medium has, IMO, english or any other language trumped;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axbcmzjEoYw&feature=related
As the wee man demonstrates wonderfully, don't you agree??
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Solidmahog
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Or these girls demonstrate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKk9tzasUCU
Even a couple of notes in there not achievable on a fretted instrument, just for the fiddlers......... Brought a tear to my eye :,,<)
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Solidmahog
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
"In this I think gaelic as a lyrical medium has, IMO, english or any other language trumped;"
I agree that (to me) Irish seems more lyrical than English - don't know if I would generalize further, since I am only familiar with a small number of languages. Its possible that I only think Irish is very lyrical because it is, by definition, exotic to me, but I don't think so. I like listening to languages I don't understand whenever I get the chance, and many of them don't sound the least bit lyrical to me.
On the subject of the mouth music (and those were two lovely examples): I am always wondering if these sounds actually came from real language way back. It's an interesting question. And if not, is there something about certain languages where this tradition is stronger that makes people more prone to just like the sound of certain syllables repeated over and over?
I noted above a few obvious linguists responding to my original post with the highly specialized language of linguistics, something I bet most people here aren't familiar with. Interesting that this didn't cause a series of xenophoic rants the way the two recent posts in Irish did. As for me, I appreciated the comments, looked up the terms I didn't understand, and consider myself enriched.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
"However, in practical terms, we know that it's easier to learn a complex collection of relations than a simple one. That is, you can remember a story more easily than you can remember a list of random words, because the story is a complex collection of ideas. So when Patricia threw herself into studying the Irish language, she also apparently started learning lots of songs and presumably other bits of Irish written and oral culture. Suddenly, she's not just learning tunes, she's getting a lot of pieces of the culture. Tunes usually have stories attached - now her stories are attached to other stories. She's learning songs, which means she's learning melodies, which are attached to words and stories - again, she's got a lot more associations to tie everything together, meaning she's gone from learning tunes to learning tunes-and-songs-and-language-plus, which means she's got a much more complex body of material, all of which is reinforcing itself.
I think that's got to help. "
This sound like a completely reasonable explanation of the experience I described (i.e., learning Irish helping me to play the nuances of Irish music better). I never meant to suggest that there absolutely a scientific correlation between learning Irish and learning how to play Irish tunes. I merely was explaining that for me, the two had somehow become related. My purpose wasn't to suggest that everyone start learning Irish in order to improve their playing. It was to suggest that maybe it would be nice to allow people to post in Irish once in awhile here, without being suspicious of their motives or feeling left out. It would help those of us using the total immersion (+ high STG + obsession) method of learning.
I don't doubt for a minute that my perception that learning Irish helped my Irish fiddling could be mistaken. But that would be a silly reason not to bring it up ever in discussion. I really have enjoyed reading all of the comments by others on the subject.
Patricia
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
...if there were random posts here in Irish every so often Their interest would be just enough piqued to slowly drag them into the world of Irish...
I thought that too, and I was right, it hapenned to Patricia!
I like the thought of other nationalities learning Irish. (see http://www.gaelminn.org/aboutgael.htm and http://www.anghaeltacht.ca/)
I have no idea if it helps in playing music though!
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by harmonic miner
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I've only just begun reading this. I've heard it before from someone who grew up in Scotland's western highlands, always hearing her mother sing. I assumed she was equating the rhythm of her mothers' singing with a similar rhythm in her speaking. Apparently, it is more nuanced.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I don't think it would be a surprise to hear there are good Irish players who do not speak Irish anymore than there are speakers of Irish who are poor players. That's back to assume some direct correlation. And if it is about nuances in language & music ~ that is back to listening.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
There are vowel sounds and 'articulations' from consonants in that mouth music that many of us are not very familiar with but which a native speaker's 'ear' must be very attuned to. Is it the language or the vocalisations required to utter it that may help ?
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I only hope it's not the modern written form. How do you say dots vs. ears, in gaelige?
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Ben Steen
...
On the other hand I enjoy writing hiragana & my small fraction of kanji.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
"I don't think it would be a surprise to hear there are good Irish players who do not speak Irish anymore than there are speakers of Irish who are poor players. That's back to assume some direct correlation. And if it is about nuances in language & music ~ that is back to listening."
A few people have made this obviously valid point. On the other hand, I have noticed that whenever I'm around Irish musicians from Ireland, there is someone speaking Irish. I developed the impression that there are a higher number of Irish speakers among traditional musicians than in the Irish population in general. Now, I don't have any way to test that as a theory, but I have mentioned it to several Irish speaking musicians I've met. They told me that it wasn't just an impression, it was true. Obviously, even if it's true, it doesn't prove that there is any correlation. But it raises the possiblity that there is, IMHO.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Learing English oght to improve one's playing of English music. Nope, sounds even sillier than the original proposition...
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
How about another joke thread, except the jokes are told in gaelige & we'll see who laughs.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Still, it's a lovely notion.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Cheers, Atahualpa Quigley!
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
pkerns, speaking Irish outside the Gaeltacht (and some would argue to great extend within it as well at this point). There is a correlation, but not one that has anything to do with ability, the correlation is that in a group of people interested in one aspect of culture, there will be a good contingency also interested in other aspects of the culture.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Prof. Prlwytzkofski
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
"How about another joke thread, except the jokes are told in gaelige & we'll see who laughs."
Well, I was walking down the street, and I met a skeleton. I introduced myself to him and said, "Nice to meet you. I'm Jimmy McCracken."
OK, it's only funny out loud, not in writing. It's supposed to be "D'imigh mo chraiceann."
Did you laugh?
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Sorry, I meant, "I introduced myself to him and HE said:...
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by big_tab
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
So how do you say "A skeleton walks into a bar and says 'Give me a beer - and a mop'." in Irish?
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
(It's one of those "emotional truths," I guess. Even though It hasn't a prayer against rational thought, it's a notion I cling to anyway. So, I guess we share this in comon, OP; I can't help you defend the belief, other than by emotional blather.) Nah, better to look for more down to earth reasons for learning Irish.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Now you've done it. I will obsess for weeks now about how that could possibly be funny, before giving up and realizing that you were just being silly.
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by pkerns
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Cheers, Ben! (Are you by any chance within aroma-wafting distance of the Sierra Nevada brewery; and do locals get discounts there?)
# Posted on March 10th 2011 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Hey,
I know I'm jumpiong in here pretty late and this probably won't get read, but I though i'd give my two cents.
I first thought that the idea speaking Irish helping playing tunes was fanciful and foolish. However, if you consider that the language was still very inmportant in Irish life when some of the best known tunes were written and maybe it had an Influence.
We always hear of people talking of styles of different playing from Donegal, Wast Clare, Connamara etc. Perhaps it's not a coincidence taht these distinctive styles come from Gaeltacht regions? And the way that a scottish reel is distinguishable from an irish one, yet also has similarities, just like Irish and Scotts Gaelic?
Just something to consider.
Is mise le meas,
Cian
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Cian O Gallchobhair
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Maybe if I spoke English with a broad Mayo accent my Irish fiddle playing would be more authentic? More authentic that if I spoke English with a broad Dublin accent?
And I'm not very good at scottish music so maybe I'll try speaking my English with a nice soft west highland accent and see if it stops me putting slow rolls in my strathspeys.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
llig. If you learned to do those vocal things flawlesly without concious effort you would have built up a lot of different connections in you brain related to how the spectrum and volume of sounds change in time.
Those speaking against the OP are tending to make me less skeptical.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
West Clare a Gaeltacht?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Prof. Prlwytzkofski
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I've always found a Mayo accent easy. I particularly like the days of the week and can often be heard reciting them as I walk down the street. Cork is one I struggle with though. The only things I can say in a convincing Cork accent is County Cork and Motor Car.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
To play Bluegrass we must speak with a kentucky accent, bad luck Earl Scruggs, you were born in North Carolina, bad luck Carter Stanley you were born in Virginia.
To play Norwegian hardanger fiddle music we must learn Norwegian, to play Swedish tunes we must learn Swedish.
Northumbrian pipes can only be played authentically if we speak Northumbrian dialect.
those Irish reels that are Scottish in origin[Miss Mcleods, The Musical Priest] can only be played authentically if the player learns Scottish Gaelic as well as Irish.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Joseph Tailyour
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I always thought that to play bluegrass your mother must also be your sister?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
That's what I mean. Taking the stance that there is no link between a Northumbrian accent and the style of piping is like taking the stance that dogs can't count. Fine as a hypothesis to test but unproductive as a simple assumption.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
go on then, find me a dog that can count
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
That argument reminds me of the creationist who says that just because no human remains have ever been found in or below the strata that contain dinosaur fossils, doesn't rule out that we may find some yet.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2619-lab-tricks-show-dogs-can-count.html
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
well ... pass me my fedora and the salt and pepper
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I am confident from my own observations that some dogs can tell that one of a group is missing. For a wolf there would be an advantage in knowing when 5 prey animals had gone behind a bush but only 4 had come out. The mistake would be assuming that dogs *can* count.
The dog may be aware that the kid with the yellow hat and the biscuit in its pocket (and, of course, the distinctive smell) was not around and discover that it had gone behind a bush for a pee. The wolf may have noticed that the deer with the limp was not longer in the group.
So fine for an experiment to have a null hypothesis that dogs can't count. But bad to assume that they either can or cannot.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
So if the hypothesis is that there is a link between being good at playing Irish diddley music and be able to speak Irish, then we can start to gather data on the null hypothesis that there is no link.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Given that lots of the skeptics are mentioning other languages why not start with a tonal language and the music of that culture. Could do a bit of background research. Maybe start by Googling "tonal language" with "pitch perception".
If I had to bet on the strongest effect it would be the one Prof P suggests. But I still think Northumbrian pipes talk like Kathryn Tickell and Scottish tunes are full of Julie Fowlis' vowels.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
There is some evidence that speakers of tonal languages have an advantage in pitch perception, but of course this would not be any help to the specific claim that language L speakers have an advantage in learning some music associated with language L. Even if language L is a tonal lanugage (which Irish is not), that would serve as a general benefit to music perception and performance in any genre.
It's noteworthy that experiments in this area typically center on Chinese speakers and Western classical music.
The effect Prof. P mentions (which, I might point out, is the effect I discussed originally) is the only one that has a hope of standing up - the hypothesis that learning Irish aids in learning Irish music in some direct fashion is simply incoherent. Or has nobody noticed that many of the top performers of Western classical music - the music of Bach, Beethoven, Bizet, and Vivaldi, as well as Tchaikowski and Sibelius and Britten and that Dane whose name has gone out of my head - are coming from places like China?
Would anyone seriously suggest that Lang Lang would be a better interpreter of, say, Chopin, if he spoke Polish?
It seems to me that this proposition only associates with "ethnic" music. That seems to me a sure sign that we're dealing with a superstition, and not a reasonable hypothesis.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Tut tut, one "seems" along the route to a conclusion is risky. Two are distinctly dodgy. Or so it seems to me
. If there was a link wouldn't it be stronger in a music with less influence from other cultures ?
Are people disgreeing with the proposition that how a melody is used for a *song* is influenced by the language.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Would learning how to speak Irish help you play "the frost is all over" on the fiddle?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Okay, I'll stop inserting politely deferential language and shave my assertions bald:
This proposition as put forth in this discussion is only associated with "ethnic" music - Irish mostly, of course, but with some passing mention of jazz and blues and dismissive mention of French. This a clear sign that we're dealing with a superstition and not a sensible proposition.
Better? It's the same assertion in both cases, take your pick as to how it's expressed.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I haven't caught up yet. Are we discussing native speakers of Irish, who play Irish music, or anyone who learns gaelige will eventually notice it has a positive influence on their playing of Irish jigs etc. ?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Music is a common language.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by big_tab
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Music is not a language
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I get it big tab. All we need to do is sit with one another & make music. What a wonderful world that would be.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
(though it has been argued that language is a form of music)
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by ...
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
There's the rub. Maybe it's metaphorical.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Any language?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Language is a form of music? Could you expand on that one? Sounds interesting - generally, I see the evolutionary path going from lanugage to music (music riding on the neural coattails of language). I'd like to see the case made the other way.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Llig.. music is most defenitely a language to me and noone ,not even the most intelligent professor here(And this place is swarming with them!) can deny me that.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by big_tab
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Ah, I was working on a post using "the frost is all over".
If a lot of people within a language group learn a dance tune that has a set of words, like "the frost is all over" and associate the words with it to such an extent that variations which don't fit are not created or fall out of fashion. The tune can still go lots of ways but they are limited by what will fit with the words. That becomes the fashionable way of playing it which people regard as authentic.
Would a knowledge of english help a player to play it in a fashionable/authentic/culturally acceptable way ? They will want to put in variations within the scope allowed by the words.
I am only trying to drive the thinnest end of a wedge into Jon's proposed superstition.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Crossed, despite rushing and screwing up the "If a lot of people.." sentence..
"What if a lot of people within ..."
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Big_tab it might be considered a wee bit closed minded to not consider an opinion from the most intelligent here. Swarming, eh? I wonder what the draw could be. It's not honey, or anything sweet.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
diddly dum de dum de deedly deedly dum dum dee deedly aye.
QED.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
But I think Jon drove his own, different, wedge with the "music riding on the neural coattails of language" bit.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Is that with a Clare accent, or a Cork accent, or a Dublin accent or...
QED
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
What does the "Glasgow Reel" say? Or is something mathematical? Common language ... universal language ...
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
How so?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Nice jig Jon.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by big_tab
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
a lot of you blokes need to chill out...or possibly the opposite.
here I am in the antipodes, just kickin back at 4am after work, just a bit too hot to sleep or put a shirt on, chill out with a wine or whatever and listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong duets...paradise on earth.
Get's you well in the *groove*.. That's what it's about, gettin in the groove and come down a few notches...
the same as what gettin' familiar with some Irish language will do for your playing of *Irish* music.
Language communications and modifies people, so does music, as you well know. Irish language and Irish music is a brill combination.
Chill out folks. or possibly emigrate.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Skull Duggeraigh Dubh
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
OK. If I wanted to learn the Highland pipes and play pibroch would learning gaelic help me if my teacher thought knowledge of canntaireachd essential ? Does it help to have accentless gaelic ?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
I insert a quote from an article by pat Mitchell, without comment:
'By definition, Irish traditional dance music is music, which prompts the question – what is music?
Various definitions can be found, ranging from the mechanistic to the metaphysical. Variously:
• The sound produced and the art involved in organising a sequence of tones into a meaningful
whole. It differs from visual arts in that it is perceived in time rather than in space.
• The expression of emotion through sound.
The performance of music has, perforce, to encompass both ends of the spectrum. To produce
the notes the performer must go through some mechanical routine; in our case, pumping wind,
controlling pressure, lifting appropriate fingers for the correct duration to play notes and
ornaments. To my mind however, all this work should communicate subjective emotions and
feelings to the listener and fails as music if it fails to achieve this.
The notion that Irish music should communicate emotions has a long and respectable history.
Many of our oldest stories refer to the three divisions of music - goltraí, geantraí and suantraí.
These might be translated as music to induce, respectively, sorrow, happiness or sleep.'
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Prof. Prlwytzkofski
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
So presumably there are subtle, or perhaps even specific differences between styles to be seen and acknowledged as achieving the intended outcomes. It isn't all uniform them, historically, presumably.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Skull Duggeraigh Dubh
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
...
‘You mean geantraí, goltraí and suantraí?’
http://journalofmusic.com/article/78
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Was that "How so ?" to me about the neural coat-tails ? I think if you are going to accept some shared neural processes, even in the evolutionary past, then it is hard to dismiss a current practical link as superstition.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Not at all, David. Think about it for a minute. There are no neural processes for specific languages or specific genres of music. What you're suggesting would require you to believe that learning Mandarin would facilitate learning Hawaiian slack-key guitar and death metal.
That might be true, in fact. It's not out of the question that learning facilitates further learning, and that "exercising the language muscles" would facilitate further use of similar processes.
But it wouldn't for a minute support the superstitious claim that learning the Irish language would specifically assist in learning Irish music, and not Slavic brass band music. That claim is purely sympathetic magic.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Surely there is a specific neural process for each tune ?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
@Jon Kiparsky.
go fuaimeanna cosúil leis an dearcadh domhan Angla-Shacsanach
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Skull Duggeraigh Dubh
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
@Skull
En. On suomalainen, ei anglosaksonen.
@David
I think you might be using the term "neural process" in multiple senses, but no, I don't think there's a "neural process" for a particular tune. That almost sounds like a revival of the "grandmother neuron" idea to me.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Kuulostaa olet muunnettu
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Skull Duggeraigh Dubh
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
A specific set of things going on in my head that happen for that tune. In the context I think particulary those to do with hearing and processing how the sound spectrum changes with time.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by David50
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Patricia, lol ~
Agus dúirt an creatlach, "Áthas chun bualadh leat, D'imigh mo chraiceann."
Atahualpa, I'm walking distance from the Sierra Nevada. I think there maybe a discount, if you buy a case at the brew pub. I know my friend always goes there when he drives up from Sacramento & points beyond.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
When you're talking about "shared neural processes" of music and language you're talking about a high-level capacity for processing generalized auditory input or for generalized pattern recognition. When you talk about "neural processes" for specific tunes, you're talking about a data input stream corresponding to, say, the Kesh, or perhaps about the storage of some set of impressions of that tune. Totally different things.
If you want to talk about the latter, then you're talking about something that's specific at the tune level. How do you tie that to learning the language? Are you suggesting there's some basic similarity between the two structures? If so, and you could back it up in a sensible fashion, you'd have an interdisciplinary Ph.D. theisis in music and linguistics.
If you want to talk about the former, you're talking about generalized structures - the auditory processing is the same sort of thing that's used in detecting and identifying a bird call and deciding whether it's good to eat, the pattern recognition is used in finding and recognizing edible berries, and determining where and when you're likely to come across them. Again, I don't see any way to tie those to the claim that learning Irish specifically facilitaties learning jigs and reels specifically.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
John, did you ever have any run-ins with a certain Tom Standeven, the piping US customs agent on the Canadian border; he who never missed a chance to preach on the "absolute necessity" of learning to speak Irish in order to play Irish music? (Lessee now...how to disagree with the old guy's cause, while not appearing to dishonor his memory...tough one...BUT, there is something in his very emotional thinking which I get a kick out of.) If his point has any merrit at all, it's because he made it purely out of sentiment. (Big stumble there, I know) We aren't in a lab; nor are we exactly in a law court. Music and sentiment, for better or worse, are inextricably linked.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Tom Standeven briefly visited my house once. He talked a lot about how he loved cooking Chinese food. I wonder ...
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Prof. Prlwytzkofski
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Playing Irish music & drinking Jameson's will cure your ails.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Ben Steen
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
How long did it take for your eyes to un-roll after his visit?
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Never did meet the guy. Sounds like a fun conversation, though.
"Music and sentiment, for better or worse, are inextricably linked"
Ha. I play music, I have no sentiments at all. So there.
# Posted on March 11th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: How learning Irish helped my fiddle playing
Peter Sellers ~ the music of languages ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz5BzXNH42c
# Posted on March 12th 2011 by Ben Steen