There's more to folk than Fairport

Just a short squeak on my practice chanter this evening as I was late back from work and then it's band night. The fan helped me with learning the second part of the Whistle. My main problem is that the high A sounds awful on the chanter - something not quite right with the reed - and it's very off-putting.

Anyway, I’m finally getting around to the promised post on my increased interest in traditional music. I suppose the general thrust of the first post was that this is nothing new: traditional music, in one form or another, has always been part of my life. Music has always been part of my life – both listening and playing. The general thrust of this post is about why traditional music bears exploration and re-listening, and also the change – or maybe just an addition to – the ways in which I listen to music.

Traditional music, like a lot of labels for things in the arts, is a very generic term covering a very large range. Such generic labels are often used by those who aren’t familiar with the genre and give rise to comments such as “I’m not interested in classical music” or “I don’t like modern art”. The term “classical music” isn’t actually very helpful. It covers everything from short, light, tinkly bits of piano (you can keep Chopin, as far as I am concerned) to endless hours of Wagnerian opera. Even if you narrow down to just opera there’s a world of difference between a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and Wagner, or between Mozart and Verdi. Even within the single composer of opera it’s possible to love every second of La Traviata and yet to feel that it would be perfectly possible to live a full and happy life without ever hearing another note of Nabucco. And that’s before you even start on different singers, performances, conductors...

My family generally refer to traditional music as “hey nonny-nonny” or “plinky-plunk” music. I know what they mean and there are definitely bits that could be characterised in one way or another. To the casual listener – as to the casual listener for any genre – it may well “all sound the same”. The more I’ve listened to traditional music the more I have come to understand that it’s a very broad church. The simplest split is between Irish and Scots although plenty of tunes move between the two traditions (I’m ignoring English folk here, because I don’t generally listen to it). There’s the dance music end (Teada), right through to a more orchestral (Duncan Chisholm) or even chamber music (Ian Mcinnes, Deadly Buzz, Martin Hayes) sound, with a single instrument or a handful of carefully chosen instruments. As with the orchestral tradition there is a roughly defined group of instruments that are likely to be involved (pipes of various kinds, fiddles, various stringed instruments, boxes of all sorts, whistles) and instruments that you don’t expect, but which somehow work very well (harpsichord, harmonium, horns). Then there is all the crossover of traditions – Irish and Swedish, Irish and Galician, or folk rock or electric folk. Even a single instrument can be used in lots of different ways.

Traditional music, on other words, is not just River Dance or the Morris or the highland fling. It is a whole world of music and if you spent your whole life listening only to that you wouldn't lack musical variety. And as with any music the more you listen the more you hear the nuances, the differences.

 

Hm. So I think this was part two - "there's a lot more to folk music than Fairport". Part three, when I get round to it, will cover how I am learning to listen to music differently.

 

Rereading the blog recently I spotted my pledge to play every day in February, which I had totally forgotten! February starts soon, and I must try to record as often as I can. I will keep blogging to a minimum so that spare time goes on piping.

Whistle down the wind

I meant to start earlier today, but couldn't quite tear myself away from Peter May's The Blackhouse. Unusual crime story - the usual copper-with-complicated-private-life, pain in the neck superior officer and comic sidekick, but lots of very evocative writing about the Isle of Lewis, and really the mystery is all in the protagonist's past, hidden on the island, and the murder that sets everything in motion is almost a red herring.

I played the King, mostly. I've been trying to stick in all the gracenotes, which slows it down, but does make it sound richer and more as it should. So long since I played a half F doubling that I had to stop and work out what it was. The doubling on B is good - I'm pleased with it - just a chirrup. The double E is...well, a disgrace. Not so much a chirrup as a fat man with his foot stuck in a bucket tripping up a step. It's along time since I went through any of the exercise books I have, and I think I should revisit them, probably on the practice chanter. Still a long way from playing the darned thing dotless though, and I don't know why. I have played phrases over and over until you'd think they were burned in my brain, and two seconds later I can't play a single note of them.

The recording is the Eagle's Whistle. I had lost the tune, and asked the fan to remind me. He hummed the first couple of bars and there I was, playing it again. Need to listen to the various versions I have to get gracenotes. It's also still only the A part. The fan suggests it would sit nicely on the end of the Rowan Tree. I recorded twice. The first time I was distracted by reading the story of Andy's Australian defeat and the second by the thought that I needed to skip out and put petrol in my car before dark. This is the version I'm adding here.



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Not Bad

I think the last post was really just meant to say that I'm not new to folk music, but I also wanted to post about how I listen to music differently these days. However, it's not something I'm in the mood to write about today.

Not played much recently - we've had a visitor staying, The fan says I put obstacles in my way, but I'm aware that pipes aren't to everyone's taste, and somehow pipe playing is not what you'd want from the modern hostess. Morag came out briefly to demonstrate alleged progress I have made since the last time I saw the visitor, and I've tootled on the practice chanter briefly a couple of times when I've been home alone.

Today I've had the Eagle's Whistle in my head. The fan recommended I play it. The last time I tried I had the dots up on my laptop, and hadn't printed them, so I tried to pick it out. The fan identified the opening note and I managed to get the A part, sans much in the way of grace notes, but it's OK, and quite satisfying to play. Like the King it has a really rhythmic rocking beat to it.

The King is still defeating me. Other tunes I tussle with, but mostly manage. The Tree I manage twice through non-stop, with just one error. Not bad, I feel, not bad at all.

My life in folk tunes

The fan mentioned over dinner the other evening that he was curious as to why I am now so very much into traditional music. I've always been aware of traditional music, I think. I'm old enough to have done "music and movement" in school, which involved English folk dance, which I assume we did to English folk tunes, although I don't remember the music. My grandfather - who rather enjoyed teasing other people - had a record of Scottish pipe bands, which he mostly played to annoy. My father is fond of light opera and the tenor voice, and often listened to records as he was cooking Sunday lunch. This is where I first came across John McCormack and Robert White singing polite drawing-room version of Irish traditional songs: The Wearing of the Green, She Moved Through The Fair, The Mountains of Mourne, The Rose of Tralee, Danny Boy...

We had penny whistles for a while, and they all came with Irish tunes - the Minstrel Boy I remember the most. Then I bought (why?) a set of English, Scottish and Irish tune books for my recorder and had those for years. At University I did some musical exploration. Nothing a fan of real traditional music would accept, I think, but I lurked around the edges in many ways: Bob Dylan, the Furies (which I think I came to via the recommendation of a folk-loving aunt), the soundtrack to Cal (the book was on my reading list) which was probably my first introduction to  Irish pipes. Eventually I found the Pogues.

When I met the fan he handed me a pile of vinyl and I listened to the Bothy Band (I liked the songs best), De Dannan (The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba in Galway one of my all time favourites), some Ossian (which I didn't entirely take to).

And then we were busy setting up home and the fan sang in a choral society and I listened to a lot of opera and baroque, and we both occasionally twanged on the mandolin and sometimes went to the local folk club, but folk music wasn't a big part of our lives. I think it came back when the fan found a fellow mandolin player busking in our village. That chance encounter has led to going to various sessions, signing up to the Session and Trad Connect, meeting people, visits to Scotland and Ireland, discovering Foot Stompin, All Celtic Records, Coda Music, Custys', and a rapidly growing CD collection. It has also led to the spare room being home to the mandolin, a mandola, a bouzouki, two guitars, two bodhrans, a couple of whistles and Morag. It has led to the Monkey, and this blog. It's been a musical journey, with many side roads, diversions and breakdowns, but we feel - the fan and I - as though we're going in the right direction now.

Which is all background, really, and doesn't explain my current enthusiasm, which I'll cover in another post.

Winter warmer

I got home this morning and I was cold. I've been cold all day, but at least when I get home I expect to be warm. So I thought - I could throw on another layer, but as I'm wearing three already that seemed a bit much. I could turn up the heating, but high ceilings and large windows being what they are that may or may not make a difference. Then I thought about Morag...

I didn't play for long, but I did remember and play through my entire play list (except the Highlanders, which I didn't fancy today). I had to fight my fingers a bit as they were keen to keep on playing Teribus. The fan considered that I played the Rocks at a good speed. It was fun, but it was all over so fast. Still not getting anywhere with the King, either.

Water, water everywhere

Seems like weeks since I last played. Our dishwasher died on Saturday and they can't send an engineer until next Tuesday. Our new bathroom sprang a leak and we've had water just about everywhere and are still drying out. I've thought about some blog posts. The fan wondered on Friday at why I'd got so into traditional music, which I wanted to talk about here. The other things I've currently forgotten... The King has stopped going round my head and has been replaced by the Banks of Allen. I've just started on my second mitten. Work is taking up too much time. Work, scraping ice off my car and washing up - they've all eaten into piping time. Tomorrow, maybe.

Memory and desire

I've been trying to think how I remember all the pointless, facts, rhymes, poetry and quotation that my brain is full of. Much of it is quite short and just seeped into my brain through repeated reading. Some of it I know I memorised on purpose – large chunks of Shakespeare, for example, so that I could quote from it in exams. This second category I'm more likely to have difficulty remembering now. The rhymes (A Russian stood on Nevski bridge, chewing his beard for lack of food. It’s tough, this stuff, he said, to eat, but a darn sight better than  Shredded Wheat) I've known all my life and when I stopped reading the books they were in I used to recite them – I will still recite them from time to time. So simple repetition over time worked there, although the remembering was accidental: it was never particularly my intention to learn these things.  

The Shakespeare I read with the intention of memorising, and would have read it over and over, testing myself by trying to write it out, but this was done in short bursts before exams, and, not being much used since, has fallen away. I suppose this isn't surprising: we all know that we have short-term and long-term memory, and intensive exam cramming clearly goes in the short-term memory box. Things like the periodic table, never used since school days, vanished, but the Shakespeare occasionally seems apposite, and I will dredge it up, so it has clearly moved into long term memory. I chucked chemistry at A level, but spent three  more years on literature, so I spent more time reading Shakespeare than the periodic table.

With the King, I'm using the dots to play over and over – which is akin to the purposeful memorising of exam cramming. I am listening to the CD often, but I can’t listen to the one track over and over, and I don’t want to hear the CD every  single day, much as I like it. I am hoping this is more akin to reading those rhymes from time to time. The process of memorising might take longer, but when it finally sinks in it will be to long-term memory.

What I don’t know is whether stuff moves from short-term to long-term – so whether learning both ways reinforces memory – or whether actually if something is going in to long-term memory all efforts to stick it in to short-term are redundant. Does the short-term memory augment long-term, or block it, or do they not interact at all?

Either way, I am starting to remember the King. I've had the first stage, when I think I have heard the tune as I slept, but couldn't recall it in the day. I've been trying to hum it on purpose this week, but can only recall the opening and closing bars. This morning, walking from the car park to my desk, I realised that I was humming the whole thing. As soon as I stopped to listen to myself humming the tune got all shy and vanished. But clearly it is in some compartment of my memory, and now I just need to be patient and wait for it to move to the section of memory that is linked to my fingers so that I can play it.

Tune is Teribus, again. Dotless, complete with fluffs while I struggle to remember where the tune goes next. Shutting my eyes helps me avoid some distractions. Others (connector tube popping out, drones sounding irritating, although the fan says they are fine, tense shoulder) not so easily avoided.

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