Mandolin world vs fiddle world

[luthier88]

JeffD, not much improvisation in old time music? Find a fiddler who plays a tune the same way twice through. Jeff Todd Titon describes a fiddle tune as an unfurnished room. The doors and windows are already there, but you get to re-arrange the furniture as you please!

It's all played on the same instrument. Some of it involves sitting quietly and listening, some of it talking and dancing, but old-time music is not captured very well with the "spots", nor is Irish.

[DougC]

"old-time music is not captured very well with the "spots", nor is Irish.

Text has the same problem. Speech is much more expressive...

[CBFrench]

All this violin talk isn't helping my curiosity in maybe sorta wanting to check one out. Home player now so constantly practicing guitar and mandolin. I own several Eastman instruments so I've looked at some of their violin models and read reviews and and and could I, should I, would I...

[JeffD]

Luthier88 I think it is a matter of degree. The excursions from the melody entirely that characterize many a bluegrass break are not typical of old time music.

Re your second point, I would say it differently. I think I know what you are getting at. The dots are not the music. You can take the sheet music and roll it up and stick it in your ear and it does not make a pleasing tone.

But the dots do capture as much as can be captured on paper. Nobody (I hope) thinks that is the tune. But if one is reasonably familiar with the genre, be it old time or traditional Irish or whatever, being able to read provides a huge help in developing and retaining repertory. Playing the tune with others is of course the point of the whole thing, and for which there is no substitution. But I, for example, found it very valuable to write out a tune in standard notation after I had learned it, to glue it to my brain, and provide something to which I could refer when practicing on my own. And I have a considerable space on my book shelf dedicated to notebooks full of my scribbling attempts at learning the tunes.

Further, and again assuming one is familiar with the genre as a whole, a tune book is a great great way to expand one's repertory. Of course, (and nobody will deny this) you have to take what you learned off the page and play it out to really "get" the tune. I would hate to be limited, however, to only the tunes I have heard others play.

[maxr]

As noted by JeffD's comment: the improvising in an Irish, Scottish, Québécois, Cape Breton, etc. session occurs on where the player inserts ornaments and that is usually rarely exactly the same with each iteration of the tune.

Yes, that's true - quite a few players will make a point of playing the ornaments differently every time through. It makes for variety, especially when that person has played some tunes to death over the years.

[maxr]

...the dots do capture as much as can be captured on paper...

It's interesting that if you go to 'classical' music, you find that improvisational skills of the kind that folk musicians often do are being reinvented. Back in the high days of the viol and harpsichord, musicians were expected to read the basic tune off the page and add ornaments and interpretations of marked decoration as they thought best, and that was part of the skill set of a musician (plus higher level stuff like with being presented with a theme and constructing a fugue on the spot). JS Bach, unusually for his day, attempted to write out exactly what he wanted us to play in some compositions (e.g. some of the Solo Violin Suites). The result is sometimes a blizzard of black ink that does give some idea of his intentions. However, even he couldn't find tools to write it down in a way that prevented later learned argument about e.g. whether he really expected a violinist to play 3 notes simultaneously - there are a lot of entertaining attempts to do so, including slack hair bows.

[DougC]

It's interesting that if you go to 'classical' music, you find that improvisational skills of the kind that folk musicians often do are being reinvented. Back in the high days of the viol and harpsichord, musicians were expected to read the basic tune off the page and add ornaments and interpretations of marked decoration as they thought best, and that was part of the skill set of a musician (plus higher level stuff like with being presented with a theme and constructing a fugue on the spot). JS Bach, unusually for his day, attempted to write out exactly what he wanted us to play in some compositions (e.g. some of the Solo Violin Suites). The result is sometimes a blizzard of black ink that does give some idea of his intentions. However, even he couldn't find tools to write it down in a way that prevented later learned argument about e.g. whether he really expected a violinist to play 3 notes simultaneously - there are a lot of entertaining attempts to do so, including slack hair bows.

So, what is the point here? In My Very Humble Opinion this is nonsense. Music requires expression with written notes or without notes. My wife has a great joke about her fellow Baroque orchestra members having a discussion and one says to the other, "I spoke to Haydn last night and he says....".

[Bob Gnann]

I'm firmly in the pro notation camp, with a caveat. First the caveat. I'm talking fiddle music here OK? Listening to, better yet hearing it live, or even better yet playing it live with friends is what I think should be this fiddlers goal. When I play with friends no sheet music around. Too busy listening, playing, enjoying!
Now about reading notation. First of all it's not that difficult to learn. I took piano lessons about 25 years ago and the biggest take away was learning to read notation. Treble clef (20 some odd notes), 3 - 4 time signatures are the basics (for fiddling) and with a little patience can be learned in a few weeks. Sure there's much more but the basics aren't that hard. It will lead to so much more.
NFI in any of the sources I'm about to mention. The Fiddler's Fakebook 275 plus tunes, O'Neill's Irish Music 1000 plus tunes and my current favorite The New England Fiddlers Repertoire 125 plus tunes. That's a whole lotta music at your disposal. Tough to find all that on recording.
Probably half (or more) of the tunes I've learned in this pandemic shut in have been from the books without having heard the first. My favorite example Reel de Montreal. Just saw it in NEFR and figured I'd give a try. Now one of my daily plays! Lots more examples where that came from.

Lastly the other day I thought I'd brush up Lost Indian. I couldn't get it right so out came the book and lo and behold I found out I really wasn't playing it the way I thought I'd been hearing it all these years. There's a lot to be learned in them there books!

[JeffD]

It's interesting that if you go to 'classical' music, you find that improvisational skills of the kind that folk musicians often do are being reinvented. Back in the high days of the viol and harpsichord, musicians were expected to read the basic tune off the page and add ornaments and interpretations of marked decoration as they thought best, and that was part of the skill set of a musician.

I read somewhere years ago, maybe even a "young adult" book about classical music, that this ended with Beethoven, who got torqued that nobody could improvise the way he wanted or what he wanted, and so he wrote out what he wanted played. Something like that.

[JeffD]

I'm firmly in the pro notation camp,

I have espoused this idea of the Complete Musician. The musician that does all that needs doing. And none of us, of course, are that musician. Even excelling at one of these skills, if you do not have the other, there is room for improvement.

The complete musician can read music and learn and play by ear and improvise. And the skills are not mutually exclusive. The reason one may be weak at playing by ear is not because they learned to read music, it is because they are not working on playing by ear. Learning to read music will not decrease your ability to improvise. Only neglecting practicing your improvisation will do that.

I agree that we have limited time and conflicting priorities. My idea is only that we get on a track of constant improvement by a mental attitude that says that what ever we can do does not justify ignoring what cannot (yet) do, and to the extent we have more to learn we are not (yet) complete.

[catmandu2]

The problem, Jeff, with so much stereotyping is that it is ethnocentric.

The model "complete musician" implies that musical traditions and cultural forms that are oral/aural and eschew notation (trad Norsk, Flamenco, Asian, etc) are "incomplete."

What's needed is to include proviso that your model of "complete musician" is a modern, Western conception.

There's a world full of musicians who are fully "complete" (doesn't mean they are not still learning) and have nothing to do with any notation at all.

[JeffD]

The problem, Jeff, with so much stereotyping is that it is ethnocentric.

What's needed is to include proviso that your model of "complete musician" is a modern, Western conception.

No I don't. I don't agree with the premise and I don't agree with the prescription. We can talk off line about it. Or not.

But I am not going to discuss it here. Its a different discussion for a different thread. It only gets in the way of what here has been a fascinating, and perhaps useful thread.

I'm out.

[catmandu2]

No I don't. I don't agree with the premise and I don't agree with the prescription. We can talk off line about it. Or not.

But I am not going to discuss it here. Its a different discussion for a different thread. It only gets in the way of what here has been a fascinating, and perhaps useful thread.

I'm out.

Well, that's a typical response when these issues are confronted. Unfortunately, it's necessary to call attention to this - even on a musical forum.

Perhaps you're not interested, but I would suggest altering your label to something like "modern all-around" or "modern multi-genre" player. Perhaps the term "complete musician" has been used in instructional books or something, but it does convey more than it perhaps intends.

[Ranald]

I have nothing against reading music. It's a useful skill. Still, as with reading print, reading music must change one's perception. Furthermore, as with any skill, learning to read music is easy for some and impossible for others, with many gradations in between. It isn't just a matter of not working hard enough -- there is such a thing as "musical dyslexia."
Here's Calvin Vollrath (with Gordon Stobbe on mandolin), who knows hundreds of tunes, traditional, commercial, and otherwise. He has created a few hundred more, including "Cool Cat Clifford", dedicated to his pet cat. I'm unclear on how reading music would make Calvin a better musician. You can substitute Calvin with Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, Robert Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Graham Townsend, Ashley MacIsaac, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Doc Watson, Jeff Healey, Nobuyuki Tsujii, Jose Feliciano, Ledbelly, Django Rheinhardt, Dave Brubeck, Les Paul, Buffy Ste-Marie, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Blind" anybody, (music written in braille exists, but, from what I can gather, the musician learns a couple of lines, memorizes them, then learns the next couple, etc.; she doesn't read as she plays)... There could be an error or two in my list, but you get the idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSHx...CalvinVollrath

[catmandu2]

Well these "dots vs ear" threads seem to occur as often as the seasons change - as I mentioned there's one concurrently on the Session, and probably elsewhere. Personally I rarely partake. I grew up doing both (dots and ear) and of course understand each their value.

Not only those you mention above Ranald, but roughly half or more the world goes without notation. So what do we say about that? That they are "incomplete" players and musicians? That they can be "improved" by using notational systems? Of course such is not the case at all (if we are to assume that non-western cultures and traditions are "legitimate," that heterogeneity exists, and that the goal of every arts culture is not "Westernization"). This is often challenging for folks culture-bound and accustomed to operating with ethnocentric bias, as most of us have been taught to do.

[Ranald]

Not only those you mention above Ranald, but roughly half or more the world goes without notation. So what do we say about that? That they are "incomplete" players and musicians? That they can be "improved" by using notational systems? Of course such is not the case at all (if we are to assume that non-western cultures and traditions are "legitimate," that heterogeneity exists, and that the goal of every arts culture is not "Westernization"). This is often challenging for folks culture-bound and accustomed to operating with ethnocentric bias, as most of us have been taught to do.

This is also true of many folk subcultures within the West. Many outsiders have such ingrained ideas of how music should sound that if they go to a community in which everyone plays the "A" a bit sharp sometimes, they assume that everyone except themselves is off pitch. The so-called standards of Western music -- e.g., near-perfect pitch and clear intonation -- don't even apply to a large part of western traditional music, e.g, blues, Cape Breton and many fiddling styles, Cajun music. Sadly, there is a feedback mechanism where as you say would say, folk music here too is becoming "Westernized," in that it's absorbing the standards of Western elite music. Many of us initially turned to these folk genres because they sounded different from the popular and elite music of our cultures.

[Doug Brock]

I’m sorry this thread has become an argument over notation... BUT, I do have a few comments, lol (and fiddle is actually mentioned).

First, in my experience with casual musicians in the folk and country genres, those who can’t read well (in my limited experience, most of them, sadly) have been a major obstacle in achieving any kind of polished performances. Yes, I’ve heard about all the great musicians who can’t read, or can’t read very well, but with the regular guys I play with who CAN’T read well, introduction of any new song or tune is a major teaching effort. So frustrating and a huge waste of time for everybody involved. Instead of being able to quickly play through ten or twenty new tunes to see what we might like, we spend a month trying to teach them one tune. With my current group, I gave up on fiddle tunes. They need songs with words. (And they do play those songs well enough and have a good time doing it.)

Second, in watching some fiddle tutorials, I’ve been overwhelmed by the complexity of some of the work and was left wondering HOW IN THE WORLD could you begin to adequately notate the things the fiddler did? Even a general notation to get the gist of the playing would likely be far from replicating the actual performance. Thank goodness for YouTube or one-on-one instruction! (It was seeing a few of these videos that renewed my interest in fiddling. I’ve played fiddle tunes on guitar and mandolin for years, but wasn’t paying enough attention to what fiddlers were doing with their left hand and with their bow. Even the underlying rhythmic pulsing that is common with the fiddle bow would be difficult to adequately notate.)

Third, I do read well (piano background), but, outside of classical music, I use the notation as a framework or guide. I love fake books for that reason. They show me the basic outline of the melody and words with the suggested chords, but then I can play the music on various instrument in many different ways. I still improvise continuously, but the notation is an important tool that lets me easily play many more songs or tunes than I could ever hope to memorize.

So, in conclusion, notation can be very useful, but notation is not a final solution.

(I haven’t played out in a year now, but hopefully will return soon. One of my goals is to put together another group of folks who CAN read notation well, lol.)

[catmandu2]

That's right. "Westernization" is usually synonymous with modernization, industrial/technological society, standardization (our standards), etc.

One of the DJs at our local university, who is Chinese, runs a radio program on "Chinese music." Of course, there is very, very little if any traditional Chinese music played - it's all some form of modern pop arrangements with perhaps colors and vestiges of trad instruments appearing briefly. I talked with her about finding other TCM players in her social network, as I'm into TCM, and she knew of no one.

[Nick Gellie]

Well I use learning both ear and notation in fiddle and mandolin playing. One of the useful things in reading and hearing at the same time is one gets the feel of what the book is saying through the music being played. It is not one or the other although I do enjoy picking up a tune or song by ear because I remember it better.

I have always loved the violin as I do the mandolin. To me they go hand in ✋. I find getting back into mandolin after playing violin refreshing and wets my appetite for either instrument. I seem to have past a hurdle playing violin just in the last week. My bowing and articulation has improved so much so that my tone has improved as well. It is fun being in both worlds.

[Bob Gnann]

A couple quick comments. While I promote using notation I should mention that while I can read notation I can't sight read. I have to work through a tune measure by measure but eventually I get it. I view notation as just another tool in the tool box. More than one way to cut a board!
Ranald, thanks for the Calvin Vollrath clip. One of my favorite fiddlers one of many great Canadian fiddlers. I've been fortunate to play with a few Canadian friends (not Calvin though) and I'd urge others to give these good folks a listen!

[Bob Gnann]

And one more thing!
Happy St. Patty's Day!
Robert (Doyle) Gnann.

[maxr]

Being able to read notation can be useful for even the best 'ear' players, because after a while you get to be able to read a tune and hear it in your head as you go. Say you're playing with some kind of dance band, and you're looking for a tune to fit in a new dance set. Unless one comes to you pretty quick from memory or you're really good at writing good new tunes, the fastest way to find one is to scan through some tune books without playing the tunes, until you find some possibilities.

Re. learning tunes by ear, it's an interesting skill. I used to go to a well known yearly fiddle camp in Scotland. The camp leader taught by ear, usually on the basis of 'I play two bars fairly slowly, you try to repeat it'. After a few years, we had 20 or so fiddlers in a room, in the 'quickest learning by ear' group. The leader played two bars of quite a complex but little known Strathspey tune, and even he appeared mildly shocked when it was played straight back at him fairly accurately. The skill appears to stick with you and build the longer you do it, rather than falling off if you don't for a while.

[DougC]

This is a mandolin forum. So here is my 'tangent' towards a 'dark and scary' place. It does involve mandolin/fiddle players however...

I call it the "wide open playing field' or the 'one standard' approach. It comes from the interest in understanding other genre's of music. From the classical violin world it was called 'Alternative String Music' or 'world music' or whatever. From the mandolin world, (in this thread) or folk world, there developed an interest in other musical genre's. The jazz folks were 'way ahead' on this idea. But my question is, "Should there be just one criterion or standard?"

To answer my own question, I think there is a sort of 'double standard' meaning that within a 'genre' there are the best and most talented. And then there is 'one standard approach' inviting the question "compared to what?"

[catmandu2]

Doug, I'm not entirely clear on question, but I'll offer.. sociological observations of interactions in cultural dynamics (trad/progress) are always interesting. I guess this plays out here in that there is tremendous interest in trad music. I often cite what Caohimin O' Raghallaigh said about regional styles in Irish trad - that it's impossible to remain ('pure') uninfluenced by outside/other styles (such as in the past before modern technology).

It's the condition of humanity - the relationship between 'trad and progress.' One anecdotal response I can give is, the longer traditional forms remain accessible, the better for us (as players). That they will constantly be vulnerable to forces exerting pressures for change is inevitable.

[maxr]

My guess is that pre Internet, 'traditional' forms of music mostly constantly changed and diversified unless someone set them in concrete (e.g. when the British Army standardised the marching forms of Highland piping). However, IMO any form with a greatly increased degree of geographical visibility due to the Internet may now display reduced diversity as a result. I was talking to a Swedish nyckelharpa player about this a while back. He said that regional rhythmic diversity in style of playing 'polskas' was such when he was younger that he could play a tune in the style of his town in another Swedish town 50km away, and the dancers might have trouble dancing to it as they were accustomed to slightly different rhythms. However now the younger players pick up their tunes and styles from websites, so regional diversity within the country is reducing - but it means there is more interchangeability, and you can travel and play with others easier.