Methods for Learning Tunes

[alistair]

(19-01-2009 01:05 AM)Trish Santer Wrote:  < snip >
Nigel mentions playing in other keys: there is a fantastic fiddler who comes to a festival I go to, whose party trick is to play the same tune (usually a reel at breakneck speed) in keys successively going up the scale a semi-tone at a time (i.e. 12 different keys!) As you would expect, guitar capos run riot and most other players can't keep up!

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Thanks for this Trish: I agree we need a middle ground to accommodate people coming from both ends of the spectrum. Your example of the fiddler is impressive, although I guess there had been some practice done in private before the first public demonstration. What I find most interesting is what happens inside your head when you are asked spontaneously to play a familiar tune in a key in which you have never played it before? Come to think of it, that's not very different from playing a tune you know for the very first time. That kind of assumes that there are tunes that you "know" (e.g. to whistle or hum) but have never actually played before. This will be true of most people at least of my generation brought up in Scotland.

We learned lots of songs at school, mostly Scottish, but including English, Irish and Welsh, though most children did not learn to play an instrument at school. So we all "know" tunes, yet among friends and relations who have had a classical musical education,I know very few who can sit down and play a familiar tune like Annie Laurie or Bluebells of Scotland (to name but two) without the music. Indeed they often seem to regard the ability to do so as a rare and somehow threatening gift, which I am sure it isn't, or shouldn't be.

I guess what I am trying to get at is the idea of a tune as an abstraction, quite independent of the notation used to represent it. Tunes you know are stored in your memory, but, at least for those coming from the aural learning side, not as a transcript or eidetic memory of the written notation. Indeed, although I now have and can read the music for many of the tunes I can play, there are still a large number of tunes I can play for which I have never seen a written score. (Of course if I start to "forget" some of these tunes I may need to find the score to remind me how they go.)
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(19-01-2009 01:05 AM)Trish Santer Wrote:  It's not just facility with your instrument that helps, but knowing all your scales and therefore which sharps or flats you need in any key helps. My button box is a B/C so has all the notes in it (some melodeons in other tunings do not), and on a recent trip to France, I found they seemed to like playing in F, so I suddenly had to find the B flat, then I was asked to accompany someone in Emaj - not so familiar - 4 sharps! You can't capo a button box.

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Yes to map a tune onto your chosen instrument in a particular key you need to be familiar with that key, and practising scales and arpeggios in the key is an essential prerequisite. [I found recently on the web the original music and words for "The Lament of Flora MacDonald", arranged by Neil Gow Jnr, which is in a key with 4 flats: A flat I guess? I have never encountered A flat before:I am sure it's possible on the recorder, and I aim to master it some day, but meantime just play the tune in A, which is a lot easier.]
But when playing a tune I don't think "oh this is in A so that G must be a G#" (and of course in pipe tunes, often it isn't). Indeed I don't think about sharps and flats at all. Somehow you just know, from your "memory" of the tune, what sound is required, and you hope you will be able to recall quickly enough how to produce that sound on your instrument. And of course it's not just about individual notes, but phrases and sequences, which tend to recur in a range of different tunes, and so may not be entirely new. I practice every now and then playing a familiar tune in a new key, and sometime even find myself doing this be accident: it's only half way through I think: there's something strange about this …
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(19-01-2009 01:05 AM)Trish Santer Wrote:  Also the ability to read music means it opens doors as far as going into other tune books goes. I feel there is a place for both sight-reading and learning by ear: they are BOTH important skills, and should not be seen (as they are by some) as mutually exclusive: having struggled to learn by ear, I get a bit annoyed with the non-readers who just won't even try or listen when you try to explain some simple piece of music theory, in words of one syllable, to them: they do get awfu' crotchety, and dismiss you out of hand before you've had a chance to take it back to even more basic explanation! (This obviously does not include you Alistair, as you are making the effort, and Nigel's basic theory in mandolin classes I'm sure is very useful to those who are non-readers!)

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I have found Sarah Northcott's little book "Beginning to Read Music for Traditional Musicians" extremely helpful, and would recommend it to anyone in a similar position to me. (Being a book for beginners, it does not stretch to A flat though.)
When I was in Nigel's mixed instrument class he used to discourage me from looking at the music when learning a tune. He never explicitly said why, and I may be doing him an injustice, but I think perhaps he felt that for those who can pick up a tune by ear, focussing on the written music just gets in the way, and may over time diminish your ability to learn by ear. Certainly I do not find it as easy as I used to to pick up a new tune, but I put that down more to increasing age than to any change in the learning process.

In Oliver Sachs' book (Musicophilia) which I referred to earlier, he mentions a psychologist who believes that every child born with normal hearing also has perfect pitch, and but that in cultures whose language is not tonal most children lose this by the age of three, unless they are introduced to musical training at an early age. Be that as it may, it might also be the case that all children with normal hearing have the ability to learn tunes by ear, but that that ability may be lost or at least seriously disrupted by too early an introduction to formal musical notation. Certainly our oldest son could sing before he could speak (or understand the words he was singing). His favourite was "I'm a Rover, Seldom Sober" learned from a Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor LP, which was somehow quite prescient …
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