Hello Chris
I think you have made some excellent points but we all have similar
experiences of "knowing" a tune and then, in a new context, it goes
awol.
I'd reached a reasonable standard and had learnt all of my tunes by ear
when I had my first few tunes with Will Atkinson in his cottage at Glen
Aln in1977. Simple hornpipes like Redesdale and Friendly Visit deserted
me despite having learnt & played them (without dots) for years.
Looking back, what thew me was his style of phrasing which I'd not
really come up against down on Tyneside. A few hundreths of a second
added to or taken off a note can make all the difference to how well we
are able to fit in with it. If it was a Tap & Spile session you were
talking about then it was probably David Oliver leading it and he too
feels the music differently to other people. Trust me it is just a
matter of time and listening to the different (music) accents out
there. There's a tale I heard recently of Hannah Hutton and Fred Jordan
at a festival. They had breakfast together everyday for a week and at
the end of it Fred commented what a lovely lady Hannah was and how she
was full of tales and chat at the beakfast table but at the end of it
he admitted he hadn't understood a single word of what she had said all
week!
The same happens in music. Listen and get used to different styles so
you are able to sing them in your head and you'll be more than halfway
there.
Anthony
--- On Thu, 11/6/09, ch...@harris405.plus.com
<ch...@harris405.plus.com> wrote:
From: ch...@harris405.plus.com <ch...@harris405.plus.com>
Subject: [NSP] Re: re notes v. ear
To: "Dartmouth N.S.P. site" <nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Date: Thursday, 11 June, 2009, 8:03 AM
I'm not an artist, but my wife is, and she swears by a book called
"Drawing on the right side of the brain".
The premise is that the two halves of the brain work in different ways.
The left side (and I may have got this garbled, correct me if I'm
wrong)
is analytical and logical, and the right side is intuitive. Drawing
effectively doesn't need the analytical bit of our brain, but the
other.
And some people naturally tend one way, some the other. But either way,
techniques for using the right part of the brain can be learned.
I wonder if the same applies to this issue of playing by ear/learning
from
notes. As a highly analytical and logical computer programmer, I would
expect that I naturally approach things with the left side of the
brain,
and I can't play by ear to save my life.
This is a considerable frustration, and I realise it makes me a second
class citizen in the traditional music world. There are a few tunes I
have
learned by heart (from music) and I can now play without; but if I
don't
play them on a regular basis, I forget them, and there's only a limited
number of tunes one can play through regularly.
But it's worse than that. I clearly remember one session in Hexham when
someone suggested a tune that I knew without music, and regularly
played.
"Great!" I thought, "I don't need to go scrabbling to find this in the
tune book and come in after everyone else has already started." After
the
first couple of bars, I lost my way, and didn't find it again till the
tune was finished.
So now, even if it's a tune I know without music, if I'm in company, I
find the dots just for reference if I need it.
But I think the ability to play by ear is somehow buried somewhere in
the
other side of the brain if I could just learn how to access it.
Sometimes
I can be playing a tune (on my own, from the music) and my eyes lose
track
of the place in the music. But sometimes I can continue, if it's a tune
I
know well, for several bars, before my eyes get the right place again.
If someone were to write a book on 'playing music on the right side of
the
brain' I'd be a customer.
Chris Harris
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