Write words to help learn tune?

[bellowbelle]

Just wondering how many other concertina players do this. I invent my own (good or not) quick lyrics to some tunes I'm trying to learn, solely for the purpose of memorizing the tune. Takes a little work sometimes but it does help the tune stick. 

 

[wunks]

I do something similar when I'm learning to play in a new key.  I think of a theme and a title and invent a melody and harmonies.  It lends a context to the process.

[Owen Anderson]

I think solfège can serve a similar purpose?

[bellowbelle]

15 hours ago, Owen Anderson said:

I think solfège can serve a similar purpose?

Hmm,  yes,  maybe I'll add that,  too. 

 

Actual words can help set a mood, though, in addition to learning the tune. 

 

I wanted a sad song recently, for company....so I searched "sad" and got Sad Is My Fate, which turns out to be a beautiful tune. I made up some sad lines, which I can't call great - they are almost more silly than sad, but they work! I soon felt better, in addition to adding a tune to my collection.

 

That tune may have some original words, but I didn't look for them so far. 

[Mikefule]

Interesting idea.

 

One definition of verse is "a device for remembering itself". A combination of sounds and rhythm, augmented by rhyme or alliteration can make a long piece of verse memorable. In the days before writing was widespread, this was how important information was remembered and passed on.

 

I am reminded of a Morris dance tune, "Step and Fetch Her." Those 4 words fit perfectly to the distinctive first 3 bars of the chorus. However, there is a suspiciously similar tune recorded by Scan Tester called "Pretty Little Thing," and those 3 words fit nicely to the end of the same phrase.

 

I have been known to make mental associations between tunes and irrelevant words.  There is an o'Carolan tune with a distinctive final phrase that starts with, "Izzy Wizzy let's get busy" but sadly I have never learned the proper title!

 

Using words may be a device for remembering the start of a tune, or the rhythm of a particularly tricky phrase. However,  a purist might argue that a sequence of letters and syllables is no better than a sequence of note values. It is just that for most of us, letters and words came long before note values in our education.

[Jolly Hamster]

Here are my lyrics to the English country dance tune "Shrewsbury Lasses":

 

Let's have a sandwich
A jolly, tasty sandwich
The tastiest sandwich you've ever, ever seen
(repeat)
Toast and Marmite
Beef and mustard
Egg and custard
Cheese and tomato
Ham and potato
Let's have some for our tea!
(repeat)

 

Sadly I still can't play it properly.

[David Barnert]

1 hour ago, Mikefule said:

I am reminded of a Morris dance tune, "Step and Fetch Her." Those 4 words fit perfectly to the distinctive first 3 bars of the chorus. However, there is a suspiciously similar tune recorded by Scan Tester called "Pretty Little Thing," and those 3 words fit nicely to the end of the same phrase.

 

Tony Parkes once pointed out to me that you could often tell whether a fiddle tune began life as a song by seeing if the title of the tune fits rhythmically into a prominent phrase of the music.

 

42 minutes ago, Jolly Hamster said:

Here are my lyrics to the English country dance tune "Shrewsbury Lasses":

 

Let's have a sandwich
A jolly, tasty sandwich
The tastiest sandwich you've ever, ever seen
(repeat)
Toast and Marmite
Beef and mustard
Egg and custard
Cheese and tomato
Ham and potato
Let's have some for our tea!
(repeat)

 

I’m having trouble reconciling the last six lines with the eight-bar phrase that is the B section of “Shrewsbury Lasses.” 

[Anglo-Irishman]

On 10/10/2022 at 9:19 PM, Owen Anderson said:

I think solfège can serve a similar purpose?

If by "solfège" you mean tonic sol-fa, I doubt whether that would help with the expression. When I was learning to sing, I had to take part in music festivals, where the singing was adjudicated. In the more advanced classes, sight reading was also tested, and competitors could choose whether to sing from staff notation or tonic sol-fa (this was in Ireland). Invariably, the sol-fa candidates sang the syllables (doh, mi, so, re ...), while the staff readers sang the words. The latter were more expressive, because they were affected by the joy or sadness or whatever in the lyric.

A friend of mine, a tenor-banjo player, attended some classes in the West of Ireland, and reported that some instructors told him to regard, say, a reel as a sort of dialogue between two people, e.g. "How're you doing? Lovely day! - "I'm fine now but it could rain later." The idea is that each phrase is played with a different "voice", now optimistic, now pessimistic, now cheery, now doleful. Keeps you from playing just one note after the other.

 

I've only tried this out on one tune_ Carolan's Eleanor Plunkett. I already had all the right notes in the right place, but the lyric helped me to phrase the melody better. Here are the words; as you said, @bellowbelle, not great poetry, but valuable nonetheless:

 

It's a lovely day today!                           (emotional statement)

Do you think so?                                    (called in question by another "voice")

Yes, I think so. It's a really lovely day.  (affirmative reply, with more emphatic repetition)

If it weren't such a lovely day, there'd be clouds in the sky,  (complex dialectic discussion on the state of the weather)

And the little rain-drops would keep on falling,

And I'd be so sad.

It's a lovely day today!                           (simple repetition of original statement, with even more conviction)

 

It works for me.

 

Another genre that I enjoy playing on the concertina and the banjo is Scottish Psalm tunes (and sometimes Welsh hymn tunes.) I have all the words of the well-know ones in my head, and as I play, I "think" the words. This means that I alter the melody accordingly: now tying two notes that are otherwise discrete, now playing two quavers where other verses would require a crotchet. With the Scottish Psalms this is most marked. Normally, songs are written to provide a breathing space at the end of each line, but in the Psalms, it often happens that a phrase of the text begins in the middle of a line, and ends in the middle of the next. The Scottish choir singer learns to allow for this, and go from one line of the text to the next without taking a breath.

Take the probably best-known Psalm 23 (verse 1):

 

The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.

He makes me down to lie

In pastures green; he leadeth me

The quiet waters by.

 

Obviously, taking a breath at the end of each line would disintegrate the syntax of the text. The correct way would be to sing:

The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.                  (OK - One sentence, one breath)

He makes me down to lie _ In pastures green;       (main clause all in one breath; then take breath for next main clause)

he leadeth me _ The quiet waters by.                   (all in one breath)

 

Each verse of the Psalm is structured differently; if I played the tune (preferably the tune Crimond) through several times, "thinking" the text as I played, each iteration would be different.

 

Yes, words are essential to understanding!

Ceers,

John

 

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

Just think of the well known tune "Three blind mice"... Which is one way of remembering some basic musical note sequences. Within its simple rhyme.

[Anglo-Irishman]

As a dabbler in the violin and mandolin, I was quick to learn that, to recognise a fifth interval, I just had to sing "Baa, baa, black sheep."

Cheers,

John

 

[David Barnert]

1 hour ago, Anglo-Irishman said:

As a dabbler in the violin and mandolin, I was quick to learn that, to recognise a fifth interval, I just had to sing "Baa, baa, black sheep."

 

There are many examples of easy mnemonics for common intervals. “Taps” for a 4th, “Hearts and Flowers” for a minor 6th, the CBS chimes for a minor 3rd, etc. But it wasn’t until Leonard Bernstein wrote “West Side Story” that we had  examples for a tritone (both “Maria” and “Cool”) and a minor 7th (“Somewhere”).

[bellowbelle]

On 10/11/2022 at 11:58 AM, Mikefule said:

......Using words may be a device for remembering the start of a tune, or the rhythm of a particularly tricky phrase. However,  a purist might argue that a sequence of letters and syllables is no better than a sequence of note values. It is just that for most of us, letters and words came long before note values in our education....

Now that I think about it some more... I do first try to just learn the tune, no words.  I take note of the intervals, the chords, anything that helps.  And if that's all I need to do, then I don't write words. But if the tune just won't stay in my mind for some reason, then I write a verse, and that works. 

 

Some of the ones that are easily committed to memory are not super simple, either, but something about them just works. Then, there are the simple tunes that still need help, from some words.

 

 

 

 

[bellowbelle]

19 hours ago, David Barnert said:

 

There are many examples of easy mnemonics for common intervals. “Taps” for a 4th, “Hearts and Flowers” for a minor 6th, the CBS chimes for a minor 3rd, etc. But it wasn’t until Leonard Bernstein wrote “West Side Story” that we had  examples for a tritone (both “Maria” and “Cool”) and a minor 7th (“Somewhere”).

Ah yes, I have used the "West Side Story" tritone for reference many times!  Took a solfege class way back in my (very short spell of) college.  

[bellowbelle]

On 10/11/2022 at 12:35 PM, Jolly Hamster said:

Here are my lyrics to the English country dance tune "Shrewsbury Lasses":

 

Let's have a sandwich
A jolly, tasty sandwich
The tastiest sandwich you've ever, ever seen
(repeat)
Toast and Marmite
Beef and mustard
Egg and custard
Cheese and tomato
Ham and potato
Let's have some for our tea!
(repeat)

 

Sadly I still can't play it properly.

I'll have to try these words.  That's one of the tunes I've got in my notebook but I haven't played it much yet.

[bellowbelle]

21 hours ago, Anglo-Irishman said:

......Another genre that I enjoy playing on the concertina and the banjo is Scottish Psalm tunes (and sometimes Welsh hymn tunes.) I have all the words of the well-know ones in my head, and as I play, I "think" the words....

 

I wonder how many are the same as what I'd know from my own church history. Many of the tunes in the Baptist hymnals had Scottish or Irish origins. (And after singing them every week for years, I couldn't forget them if I tried!)

 

I recently got a Robert Burns songbook and another Scottish one. And some Jean Redpath CDs with her singing some, so I can play along.  This all has led me to study Scottish Gaelic with Duolingo (though, Burns did not use Gaelic, but Scots-English I guess it'd be called).

 

 

 

[bellowbelle]

So anyway, the tune "Sad Is My Fate" is one I found on thesession dot org. It's also known as 

 Is Bronac Mo Cineamuin.  

 

I tried to add an image but that didn't work... later

 

Edited October 12, 2022 by bellowbelle
Image was bad

[Mikefule]

On 10/11/2022 at 10:02 PM, Anglo-Irishman said:

 

I've only tried this out on one tune_ Carolan's Eleanor Plunkett. I already had all the right notes in the right place, but the lyric helped me to phrase the melody better. Here are the words; as you said, @bellowbelle, not great poetry, but valuable nonetheless:

 

It's a lovely day today!                           (emotional statement)

Do you think so?                                    (called in question by another "voice")

Yes, I think so. It's a really lovely day.  (affirmative reply, with more emphatic repetition)

If it weren't such a lovely day, there'd be clouds in the sky,  (complex dialectic discussion on the state of the weather)

And the little rain-drops would keep on falling,

And I'd be so sad.

It's a lovely day today!                           (simple repetition of original statement, with even more conviction)

 

It works for me.

 

 ...as I play, I "think" the words. This means that I alter the melody accordingly: now tying two notes that are otherwise discrete, now playing two quavers where other verses would require a crotchet. With the Scottish Psalms this is most marked. Normally, songs are written to provide a breathing space at the end of each line, but in the Psalms, it often happens that a phrase of the text begins in the middle of a line, and ends in the middle of the next.

...

Each verse of the Psalm is structured differently; if I played the tune (preferably the tune Crimond) through several times, "thinking" the text as I played, each iteration would be different.

 

Yes, words are essential to understanding!

Ceers,

John

 

Makes me think of two things:

 

1)  The legend about children's TV show, The Clangers, in which the characters communicate by whistling.  According to legend, the people whistling were working from a script in English that was sometimes full of foul language.  For example, when Tiny clanger "whistle's angrily" because the door won't open, the actor whistling is reading a script that says, "F*** it! The b*****d door won't f******g open!"

 

2)  The Kipper Family (a duo of comedy folk entertainers who assumed the characters of a father and son partnership from Norfolk, UK) used to do a whistling monologue.  The monologue had all the rhythm and cadences of a genuine music hall monologue, but was performed solely by whistling.   When they did it well, you could almost follow the story.

[Alan Day]

One of my tunes I remember from the following words.

"What are you doing out of the rain when you could be home in bed"

Al