dots vs ears

[Gordon]

I'm glad no one has taken anything personally -- I have no desire to offend. I also wasn't trying to have it both ways, but apparently people heard what they wanted to in what I said, and ignored my point, and the point of our disagreement.

We were discussing notation having an influence on folk tradition.

No one - least of all, me - has argued that cross-cultural pollination does/did not occur. Of course it did. What I said was that it did not happen via notation, which was James' (and several others') apparent contention. Influences occurred aurally -- John Kerr's original point, and the one I defended. No one - least of all me - said that folk does not evolve. I said that tradition is stubborn; it adapts new rhythms/instruments slowly, absorbing into it's overall sound over time. It does this aurally, player to player, parent to child, not via book and teacher.

If anyone can give a concrete example of ITM (or any folk tradition) that changed in any significant way due to the advent of notation, I'd like to hear about it. Otherwise, the straw man lives, annoyed, but happy.

Best,
Gordon

[peeplj]

I'm not actually arguing for cross-pollination via notation.

My point is that far back in history, way much further back than you are thinking, all Western music was influenced by the evolution of notation.

There was doubtless folk dance music at that time, but whatever it was, it is completely lost to us now.

What it wasn't is anything resembling any modern music. Irish trad tunes are built around chord progressions and melodic structures that simply hadn't been invented yet.

--James

[Wormdiet]

If anyone can give a concrete example of ITM (or any folk tradition) that changed in any significant way due to the advent of notation, I'd like to hear about it. Otherwise, the straw man lives, annoyed, but happy.

Best,
Gordon

Good to hear eveybody's on the same page about the level of discourse. ..

On the specific influence of notation. . .
If you accept highland pipe music as "trad".. . than I would submit that it's been fairly heavily influenced by the advent of notation, at least in the late 19th/20th centuries. Why? Because, to play in complete unison, everyone in a military band used the same, notated version of the tune. The notations are fairly critical for preserving the "canonical" version of a tune. This was/is true in the regimental bands, but it's even true in civilian, solo competitions. The idea of a canonical standard version of a tune is a lot more prevalent for highland pipers. (One of the reasons I got so sick of the competition scene. . .)

Are highland competitions really "traditional?" Probably not, but they do exert a fair amount of influence in other realms of "trad" music. One could point to some tunes composed by extremely literate, military pipers that have crossed over. GS McLennan springs to mind. He composed, for instance, "Mrs. McPherson of Inveran." A neat thing about this tune is that the even and odd parts harmonize when played together. Did he do this intentionally? Hard to say. Could a background in music theory have shaped this composition? I bet it's likely.

In a general sense, I think a background in theory, grounded in notation, has almost certainly brought some ideas to "traditional" players that they otherwise would not have arrived at.

[Wormdiet]

I could also go into Pibroch and canntaireachd notation but am running behind on my professional duties

[Gordon]

If Highland piping uses notation, and that is its form of tradition, then that's a good example of notation in a traditional music. But its not a folk tradition. Military fifing, too, uses notation, and fifing certainly is a tradition, but not a folk one. Monks certainly create music within a tradition, but not a folk tradition. I was really only responding to comments about ITM, and other folk traditions using standardized, notated text by which the tunes are learned. And I say they weren't, traditionally speaking. Me, I'm free to read O'Neills if I want to.

Have we beaten this topic to death yet?

Gordon

[Dana]

Would anyone like to clarify the difference between folk music and traditional music?

[Gordon]

They can be used interchangeably, if you are talking about certain music (traditional Irish music, or traditional Delta blues, etc.). But, some music is traditional, but not folk music, such as fifing, or madrigals, etc. The latter, which IS notated, usually, is also more fixed, perhaps because of the rigidity of notation.
Other than this, further exploration will lead into a semantic quagmire we'll never get out of. But I really don't think I'm splitting hairs -- just can't think of a better term to split the difference(s).

Gordon

[Denny]

Would anyone like to clarify the difference between folk music and traditional music?

Ah...no...Dana

I just wanted to point out that all dots are not in conflict with ears...

[Dana]

Hey, I see dots and ears both!!!

[colomon]

If anyone can give a concrete example of ITM (or any folk tradition) that changed in any significant way due to the advent of notation, I'd like to hear about it.

I think this quote sums up the key point you are not getting here. Notation didn't wander along after ITM. Notation came along hundreds of years before the vast bulk of what we consider ITM did. (At least for dance music.)

ITM may have been transmitted aurally, but the European musical culture it was born out of was shaped in part by notation. The bulk of ITM dance music is solidly post-notation historically, even if its players did not use notation themselves (for the most part). That's all James and I have been trying to say.

[peeplj]

If anyone can give a concrete example of ITM (or any folk tradition) that changed in any significant way due to the advent of notation, I'd like to hear about it.

I think this quote sums up the key point you are not getting here. Notation didn't wander along after ITM. Notation came along hundreds of years before the vast bulk of what we consider ITM did. (At least for dance music.)

ITM may have been transmitted aurally, but the European musical culture it was born out of was shaped in part by notation. The bulk of ITM dance music is solidly post-notation historically, even if its players did not use notation themselves (for the most part). That's all James and I have been trying to say.

Yep, that's it.

--James

[Denny]

Hey, I see dots and ears both!!!

Yep, that's it.

Sorry, James...

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

A few historical examples of notation being used are to be found in Francis O'Neill's Irish Musicians and Minstrels. O'Neill himself wrote of a farmer, Timothy Downing, in Cork where O'Neill came from, who had a trunk full of manuscripts. O'Neill was born in the 1850s I think.
British publications were for a moneyed audience but American publishers such as Elias Howe had a less elite audience in mind and sold their books in great volume. The famous Donegal piper Turlough McSweeney had a copy of O'Farrell's Pocket Companion for the pipes, which is about the only reference I've come across to a published collection being used by a true traditional musician in Ireland in those times. O'Neill spent huge amounts of money in collecting books and printed many of these tunes in his own collection. Paul de Grae is working on an analysis of tunes O'Neill cut and pasted out of Ryan's Mammoth Collection (which Howe published). O'Neill assmebled the Dance Music of Ireland for musicians who wanted a more affordable book than his earlier Music of Ireland, obviously he had customers lined up or the publishers likely wouldn't have given the goahead for the project.
It helps to remember what it would have been like in the days before radio, recordings, inexpensive publications, and other means of transmitting music and its attendant information. Even as recently as the 60s Paddy Glackin (I think) said that "if you had even a page out of O'Neill's it was like gold." Seamus Connolly's father bicycled 20 miles in the rain to buy a Paddy O'Brien 78, two reels, the Spike Island Lassies and the Sally Gardens. With music being that hard to come by of course musicians wouldn't balk at learning to read the notes. Danny Meehan was so isolated when growing up in Donegal he "never thought of highlands or strathspeys as being anything other than Irish music."
Another indicator of influence of publications on tradition is the lack of diversity in tune titles. If you look at the appendixes of Breathnach's Ceol Rince books (which are available online) you'll see the wide range of titles used in publications of the past. Do you play the Merry Bits of Timber, Cheese It!, Rolling in the Ryegrass? No, not that Rolling in the RG. But perhaps you know this tune by its accepted modern title, Corney is Coming - the title from O'Neill's.

[jim stone]

A wonderful thread, from which I've learned lots.
Lovely having all of this musical erudition rt here
in SnortandSuckle. Thanks!

As is often the case, we seem not to be disagreeing, really.
On the one side are those who point out that ITM was
influenced heavily by classical music, which is 'dotty.'
So dots changed ITM, at least indirectly, because
without the dots the music that influenced ITM
wouldn't have existed or would have been substantially
different.

On the otherside are those who maintain that, except
for help in learning tunes, dots haven't directly
changed ITM. It isn't as though the style, ambience,
feel of ITM has been affected much by musicians
reading music and learning the stuff that often
goes with it--harmony, theory, etc. The tradition
is folk, its aural, and various formalisms haven't
been directly involved in how it's gone.

All seem right, at least to my wonderous eyes.
Thanks. Please keep it up.

[GaryKelly]

About the invention of the alphabet, Socrates made the following observation:

"This discovery will create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory but to recollection, and gives only a semblance of truth; they will hear much and learn nothing; they will appear to know much and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, for they will seem wise without being wise."

Of course, the same comment applies equally to the notation of music, that traditions become immutable, that the memories of performers weaken, that improvisation is discouraged. However, at the time when our modern notational system was developing, there were practical reasons for wanting to notate certain aspects of a musical lines accurately. These included the systemisation of the performance of religious music in a centrally organised Roman Catholic church, and, later, a desire to fix an intrinsically plastic medium, the better to apply to it the reflections of philosophers and critics. As Richard Restall writes, in his The Notation of Western Music (2nd ed. 1998, Leeds University Press), "the story of musical notation in Western Europe is one of innovations, changes and disappearances."

I like the Socrates quote.

Which came first, the music, or the dots? The music, obviously.

(Quote taken from an interesting article to be found at: http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory2.htm )