Dance tunes, tradition vs. inovation?

[bill_mchale]

Yep definitely imflammatory enough!

 

There must be many variations of a tune that could claim to be traditional rather than a narrow, one truth, version.

 

(light the fuse and retire to a safe distance)

 

Wally, I hope you laid your fuse to the right powder keg ...

 

Because there are four different kegs. The problem that many Listers don't realise this, being intellectually confined betweeen the ends of their concertinas ...

 

(Is that inflammatory enough for this thread?)

 

The four kegs labelled "Traditional" are: traditional dance music, traditional song, traditional material and traditional performance.

 

Just to keep it imflammatory, let's forget dance music. This is not really music, or at best it is an inferior genre of music. Stands to reason - if it were not inferior, people would stop dancing and listen to it, so it wouldn't be dance music.

 

I could deal with this statement below when you talk about a dull dance recording... but I have to object most strongly where the sentiment is made most strongly. In fact, your statement here is so imflammatory, that it is taking me a great deal of restraint not to tell you exactly what I think about it! Even if the statment is done tongue in cheek, I think it is the biggest bunch of balderdash I have ever heard. Actually my emotional response to music is quite different than yours. The more I want to move when I listen to the music.. either tapping my toe or wanting to get up and dance, the more I like the music. Frankly if the dancable dance music is not worthy of listening to on its own merits, it either is not good dance music or its not performed very well.

 

That leaves traditional song. This is what tradition is all about, because song has verbal content, and it is through traditional song that we gain access to the ideals, opinions, emotions and politics of the generations before us. We can use them to calibrate ourselves - what attitudes have we inherited, how have we improved, and what can we learn from similar situations in the past? And what other good reason could there be for neglecting the music of our own time to dwell in trad.?

Some traditions also have instrumental pieces for listening, e.g. airs, pibrochs. I would class these as "songs without words", because they have a strong emotional and aesthetic content that is missing in dance music.

 

Tadition is not about words.. I mean words can be part of a tradition, but they are hardly necessary for something to be a tradition. Shoot, in practice verbal traditions seem to be the ones that are most likely to get confused over time. Half of the Americans who are going to celebrate St. Patrick's day next week are going to want to hear "Irish Eyes are Smiling" despite the fact that it wasn't written in Ireland. Again, I think you are missing the connection that dance music can bring to the table here. When I listen to ITM dance music, I feel connected to all my ancestors in the West of Ireland; I can imagine myself sitting next to fireplace, on a cold winter night, in a tiny thatched cottage (like my Dad was born in), playing a tune on the concertina... or at house dance where a couple of musicians on sitting on the kitchen table to make room for a couple of sets, playing, laughing, dancing and drinking into the wee hours of the morning. I feel far more connected to the past of Ireland knowing that music like this has probably been played there for 200 years or more than I do when I listen to yet another song about an Irish man exiled to Australia, or in prison or dead at the hands of the British.

 

Ultimately, tradition is what is passed down over the generations. I took my first steps in playing Irish Music when Dad taught me a few tunes when I was young on his B/C accordion, and 25 years later I would pick it up again to cultivate within me that gift of tradition that my parents gave me.

 

--

Bill

[Guest Peter Laban]

You seem to have a limited perception of traditional singing though, if your description is anythign to go by.

[bill_mchale]

You seem to have a limited perception of traditional singing though, if your description is anythign to go by.

 

I would say more a limited exposure than a limited notion. Most of the stuff we get around here are either pub songs, rebel songs or songs nostaligic for Ireland. Not much of the Sean Nos singing or other styles.... Of course, since Sean Nos is usually in Gaelic, for most of us, the actual singing is simply another musical instrument since we aren't likely to know the words.

 

In any case, I am not really complaining about the notion that singing can be traditional, mainly the notion that was originally posted that it is somehow a more authentic tradition, and more worthy to be listened to than the dance music.

 

--

Bill

[Guest Peter Laban]

It's not uncommon to hear the song tradition referred to as the core of it all and that to understand the song tradition, sean nos or otherwise, will yield the key of understanding the whole of the musical tradition.

I am not going to argue for or against that and I wasn't picking on you for the few examples you quoted but in general I am exposed to a lot more sides of the singing tradition than that few stereotypes (in fact we hardly get any of those mentioned here). And singers would argue that getting across the story, the words would be vital to the activity. We'd drift very far from the original topic though should we follow that line any further.

[Mikefule]

You can have a traditional tune (or song); a traditional style; a traditional mode of transmission; or a traditional context. Sometimes you have two or more of these; sometimes all of them.

 

No one would call Thin Lizzy singing Whiskey in the Jar "traditional music". If William Kimber had picked up a music hall tune, adapted it to his concertina and used it for the Headington Quarry men to dance to, pre-Sharp, we would call it traditional.

 

Innovation, development, fusion, evolution, experimentation and so on are not all the same thing.

 

Over 25 years ago, having never had a music lesson in my life, I picked up how to play harmonica simply by listening to songs and melodeon tunes. I made up a tune which fits nicely onto a harmonica, and is in the traditional format of 2 or 4 bar pharases, and 8 or 16 bar parts, with an A and a B music. I started playing it at the folk club, and after a few times, people started to hum along with it.

 

25 years later I started to play Anglo. With a greater awareness of chords and harmonies, I found that the tune was more than a melody; it neatly fits the pattern of chord changes I find in other tunes.

 

Occasionally after Morris practice I get asked to play it, and sometimes the rest of the lads join in. Most of them don't know that I "wrote" it.

 

I'd say that's traditional music, although not a traditional tune.

 

But if I set out to incorporate ideas from other styles, or to make significant changes to the format of an existing tune, it becomes something else, even if the material comes from impeccable traditional sources.

[david_boveri]

i think the further you get from the dance element in the mind of the musician, the shakier it gets. if you truly understand the pulse and flow of the music, to me it doesnt matter what form your music takes, because you will not be able to divorce yourself from it.

 

tommy potts' music was a radical departure from any of the norms of the day, and i do believe that it still is much more progressive than any of the fusion or innovative music of today. tommy did not like the strict rules imposed on him by his elders and his peers, and he cast them aside to delve deep within himself. but i think the key thing is that he did not think that the music was broken, or that it needed to change, but that he needed to find himself within it, and that no tradition or notion of danceable rhythm would stand in his way.

 

so you listen to his music for the first time, and you might think he cant play. the first time i heard it, the sound hit my ears as nails on chalkboard. a few months later, someone said to me, "tommy potts is my favorite. it may sound like he cant play, but that's cuz you dont get it." so, i gave it a try. it was hard. so i bought the album, and it was still hard. and then i got it.

 

it doesnt matter that tommy adds extra beats, dropps beats, changes time signature, slides off of the wrong note or plays as if he's falling down the stairs, because he's not doing it to innovate, he's doing it because he meant it. they say he used to cry as he played, and i believe it. from my ear, every scratch, missed beat, stumbled note is purely intentional, purely honest, and that is what makes it so brilliant. who cares that it is not danceable?

 

noel hill often speaks of the music as being deep inside. on an rte program, he is quoted as saying that the tradition will never disappear as long as people pull it from deep within themselves. i think it is allb about respect for the music, and respect for yourself. when you have both, danceable, undanceable, innovative or traditional doesnt matter.

Edited March 14, 2009 by david_boveri

[Alan Day]

noel hill often speaks of the music as being deep inside. on an rte program, he is quoted as saying that the tradition will never disappear as long as people pull it from deep within themselves. i think it is all about respect for the music, and respect for yourself. when you have both, danceable, undanceable, innovative or traditional doesnt matter.

I often wonder if THIS is the reason why some Irish musicians think only the Irish can properly express their music.

Al

[Steve Mansfield]

Hi

all this leads me to wonder at what point in history would you like to 'freeze' the music. This sort of debate has gone on for years in 'folk song' and nobody has a definitive answer. I believe music has to change to survive but the question is- at what speed and in what manner?

chris

 

I've been wondering exactly the same thing. The tension has always existed between the concept of tradition as something that can be preserved in a pure and unchanging form, versus the concept of tradition as a constantly changing continuum. This argument has been going on for a long time - witness, here in England, the recent ceremony and celebratory day at the HQ of the English Folk Dance and Song Society intended to symbolically end the long rift between Cecil Sharp and Mary Neal, two people who stood on the two sides of this very argument (to oversimplify drastically).

 

With one of my other hats on I'm fascinated by the whole Historically Informed Performance movement in classical music, and the concept that what you and I hear in our mind's MP3 player when you think of the Hallelujah Chorus or the opening bars of Beethoven's 5th Symphony are very very different from what Handel and Beethoven intended that we should hear. This is very relevant to the idea of a rigidly preserved traditional music. Should we only play on period-correct instruments? Should we even be daring to play the music on new-fangled concertinas or guitars or fiddles made using modern construction methods (let alone modern imports like bouzoukis and low whistles, both of which I plead guilty to)? Should we even be tuning to A=440?

 

The work of the Village Music Project, to name but one strand, is rapidly eroding the last remnants of the Victorian romantic notion of the 'pure' traditional English musician untouched by the outside world, and replacing that idea with something far richer and more fascinating - a complex web of influences, imports, fads and fashions, of acquisition and adaptation. The concept that the music should effectively be preserved in aspic, This Far And No Further, doesn't stand up to that research. The big advantage we have over previous generations, of course, is that if we wish to we can keep the 'good old way' on our CDs and vinyl.

 

Chris Wood talks about the ghosts of everyone who has previously played a tune or sung a song, hovering behind you. If you're too extreme in your re-imagining of the material, the ghost gives you a nudge in the ribs of admonition - but also, if you are too cautious in bringing something of your own mind, the sound of ghostly snoring is distinctly audible ...

Edited March 14, 2009 by Steve Mansfield

[Mayofiddler]

The work of the Village Music Project, to name but one strand, is rapidly eroding the last remnants of the Victorian romantic notion of the 'pure' traditional English musician untouched by the outside world, and replacing that idea with something far richer and more fascinating - a complex web of influences, imports, fads and fashions, of acquisition and adaptation. The concept that the music should effectively be preserved in aspic, This Far And No Further, doesn't stand up to that research.

 

Chris Wood talks about the ghosts of everyone who has previously played a tune or sung a song, hovering behind you. If you're too extreme in your re-imagining of the material, the ghost gives you a nudge in the ribs of admonition - but also, if you are too cautious in bringing something of your own mind, the sound of ghostly snoring is distinctly audible ...

 

I think the first comment I quoted above has been answered perfectly by Peter Laban earlier, nobody is trying to freeze the music. Have a read of his comment.

 

The second comment about ghostly snoring is once more something that people use regularly to say that things should move on. I personally think that is just a symptom of modern generations who can't concentrate on anything for more than 30 seconds at a time. Unless music is changing, images are flashing, emotions are raging etc. people get bored. Let the ghosts snore on waiting for their next short and cheap thrill, and miss music that could bring them back to life if they had the patience to absorb it fully :-)

[Steve Mansfield]

The work of the Village Music Project, to name but one strand, is rapidly eroding the last remnants of the Victorian romantic notion of the 'pure' traditional English musician untouched by the outside world, and replacing that idea with something far richer and more fascinating - a complex web of influences, imports, fads and fashions, of acquisition and adaptation. The concept that the music should effectively be preserved in aspic, This Far And No Further, doesn't stand up to that research.

 

Chris Wood talks about the ghosts of everyone who has previously played a tune or sung a song, hovering behind you. If you're too extreme in your re-imagining of the material, the ghost gives you a nudge in the ribs of admonition - but also, if you are too cautious in bringing something of your own mind, the sound of ghostly snoring is distinctly audible ...

 

I think the first comment I quoted above has been answered perfectly by Peter Laban earlier, nobody is trying to freeze the music. Have a read of his comment.

 

The second comment about ghostly snoring is once more something that people use regularly to say that things should move on. I personally think that is just a symptom of modern generations who can't concentrate on anything for more than 30 seconds at a time. Unless music is changing, images are flashing, emotions are raging etc. people get bored. Let the ghosts snore on waiting for their next short and cheap thrill, and miss music that could bring them back to life if they had the patience to absorb it fully :-)

 

Ah, I'm out of this one.

Edited March 14, 2009 by Steve Mansfield

[hjcjones]

Why is innovation acceptable if it comes from Tommy Peoples or William Kimber but not from Sharon Shannon or Chris Wood?

[david_boveri]

Why is innovation acceptable if it comes from Tommy Peoples or William Kimber but not from Sharon Shannon or Chris Wood?

 

not everyone accepted tommy people's innovation, and thought that he was betraying the music by putting too much jazz into it. in the seventies many thought that the bothy band was ruining the music by infusing rock with irish music, but today, we would probably not notice very many rock influences in the bothy band at all, in comparison to other, more-modern music. indeed, many did not appreciate sean ryan's application of classical technique to irish music!

 

time adds a lot of perspective to things. i was just at the art institute in chicago and i was thinking about why so much of classical art is better appreciated than modern art. i had a revelation--in general, the best art survived. the art that people liked the best was preserved, and in some points in history, people fought and risked their lives to preserve it (the same goes for in china, when the KMT stole thousands and thousands of artifacts to preserve them). art that nobody cared about has been thrown out, destroyed, neglected and forgotten over the last 500 years (in the case of paintings, for example). however, in modern art, it is all very new. although some people like just about everything, i bet you that eventually in the next several hundred years, most of it will be thrown out or destroyed, and only the very best "red squares" or "solid black" canvases will survive,

[hjcjones]

Exactly! That's how a tradition works, by filtering out the things that don't work. Innovations in Irish music like the concertina, or more recently the bouzouki, work and have been accepted. The saxophone has found a place in modern interpretations of English music because it works, whereas it doesn't work for Irish music. 1970s folk rock worked for a while, but was too rooted in its own era to last.

 

We either like the innovations ourselves or we don't, but we shouldn't worry that they will undermine the traditions. We should trust the traditions to adopt and adapt the innovations which move them forward and reject the ones that don't.

[Anglo-Irishman]

time adds a lot of perspective to things. i was just at the art institute in chicago and i was thinking about why so much of classical art is better appreciated than modern art. i had a revelation--in general, the best art survived. the art that people liked the best was preserved ... art that nobody cared about has been thrown out, destroyed, neglected and forgotten over the last 500 years. however, in modern art, it is all very new. although some people like just about everything, i bet you that eventually in the next several hundred years, most of it will be thrown out or destroyed, and only the very best "red squares" or "solid black" canvases will survive,

 

David,

This is my revelation, too. I reached it via stringed instruments, and the question why old violins and mandolins always sound wonderful, whereas many new ones are crappy. Of course there have always been crappy instruments made, but they got thrown out, or neglected until they were unusable, whereas the good ones were used, cared for and renovated.

 

Same applies to folk songs. Songs that were catchy, meaningful, etc. got adopted by musicians and listeners, and survived when the books or broadsheets they were originally published in rotted away. Sometimes a song-book from the period in which our "folk" songs originated surfaces, and we can see that there was quite a bit of tripe written back then, too.

 

As you say, anything modern (not only in the arts, but in technology, too) has good and bad elements in it. Time will tell which is which. But some of us want to know NOW what is good or bad, perhaps so that we can learn it, buy it, or copyright it to our later advantage. Subjective judgement is involved, and our verdict very much depends on whether we are basically conservative or progressive in our attitude.

Some say you're not an artist if you do exactly what the generation before you did; others say that if you don't do exactly what the generation before you did, you're betraying the tradition. And there are many positions between these two.

 

Time will tell ... and there's forty shades of green

 

Cheers,

John

[Mayofiddler]

Exactly! That's how a tradition works, by filtering out the things that don't work. Innovations in Irish music like the concertina, or more recently the bouzouki, work and have been accepted.

 

I don't know who has accepted the bouzouki except the pop-bands playing Irish tunes and pretending to be traditional. Same goes for mandolins, guitars or any other pointless and useless "accompanying" instrument. They're generally tolerated, not accepted (at best resignedly accepted). The tunes stand on their own and need no accompaniment. There is nobody who would complain if there were none of these instruments in a session, except the players of them. However if there were six bouzoukis and no fiddles, flutes, pipes etc. then I can't imagine anyone crowding into the pub every week to listen to the session.

 

As for copyright, was that tongue in cheek or did I miss the point? When bands started copyrighting their "arrangements" of traditional tunes that were freely given to them by previous generations, that was a nadir in Irish trad. I mean how do you say "We innovated and changed that sequence of notes so we can sue you if you do it, but we're a traditional band so buy our CDs while the boom in trad is going on" ?? Never mind the fact that many other people may have used the sequence of notes in previous generations but didn't stop whomever from doing it. There's no problem selling CDs but copyrighting traditional tunes is the grossest arrogance, outright theft, and the biggest slap in the face you could give the traditional community.

 

 

<edit>Sorry, sorry I have a bad way with words. I don't want to spoil the friendly and often very amusing community spirit here. I just get over-zealous about this, I knew I shouldn't have joined in this thread. Just ignore me and winnow out anything useful you might find amongst my varied rantings if you can be bothered.</edit>

Edited March 15, 2009 by Mayofiddler

[hjcjones]

Exactly! That's how a tradition works, by filtering out the things that don't work. Innovations in Irish music like the concertina, or more recently the bouzouki, work and have been accepted.

 

I don't know who has accepted the bouzouki except the pop-bands playing Irish tunes and pretending to be traditional. Same goes for mandolins, guitars or any other pointless and useless "accompanying" instrument.

OK, the banjo, then. Or the bodhran. Or, for that matter, those new-fangled fiddles, flutes and pipes, which must have been innovations once.

[Mayofiddler]

Exactly! That's how a tradition works, by filtering out the things that don't work. Innovations in Irish music like the concertina, or more recently the bouzouki, work and have been accepted.

 

I don't know who has accepted the bouzouki except the pop-bands playing Irish tunes and pretending to be traditional. Same goes for mandolins, guitars or any other pointless and useless "accompanying" instrument.

OK, the banjo, then. Or the bodhran. Or, for that matter, those new-fangled fiddles, flutes and pipes, which must have been innovations once.

 

The banjo!!?? The banjo! Arrgh! If there is one instrument completely, utterly and totally unsuited to Irish music the banjo is it. I would honestly rather sit in a session with 24 alpenhorns, ten sets of bongoes and 400 piano accordions than be machine-gunned to death by a banjo. Just because some folk-singers decided to accompany themselves on banjo and then took to bashing out the odd jig or reel at the end of their songs, it deluded a horde of...of... people into thinking it was OK to play Irish music on the banjo. Thank god it's mostly restricted to Comhaltas children in Ireland who usually grow out of it, with one or two exceptions. Come back bouzoukis, all is forgiven...

[Guest Peter Laban]

hehe