November 2021 – New Ealing Sessions

Learning by ear and developing your own practise

I think that learning by ear and remembering the tune go hand in hand – that’s not to say you can’t remember a tune that you’ve learned from the written music, but rather that learning a tune by ear gives you a head start. Here’s why:

When we learn by ear, we are learning in a way that always us to internalise the tune – we’re not reading or relying on an external source but rather the whole thing is in our heads, at least for a bit, which is to say it’s in our short-term memory. Internalising the tune is step one in remembering it in the longer term.

From there we need to reinforce and repeat the tune over time to help to move it from our short-term to our long-term memory. If you dive for the sheet music as soon as it’s available, then you are letting go of that internalisation and you are far less likely to remember it in the longer term. Don’t be afraid to forget the tune. Seriously. You probably won’t forget all of it but if you do then you are much better off relearning it from the video or from an audio source – the second time of learning will be much quicker than the first time, the third time will be even quicker again as you strengthen the neural pathways in the brain.

By all means refer to the music if you need to check a note or to remind yourself of what note the B section starts on but try to avoid cleaving to the dots for fear of forgetting, as you need to partially forget and relearn a tune several times before it’s fully internalised and in your long-term memory. Building this kind of recall is a process and if a tune isn’t all there, that just means that you’re not done yet.

Experimenting with the ornamentation and variations that we cover in class is a great way work on tune recall as it demands that you repeat and reinforce the tune many times in a creative and proactive way that really gets you inside the tune and understanding it (internalisation), also allowing you to develop your own way of playing.

Another benefit of relying on audio sources rather than written music is that you will start to hear the rhythmic and stylistic nuances of the music that simply can’t be expressed effectively in written music. I often throw in extra elements for the more experienced players to try – the more you listen the more you will hear. I’m generally unable to create website posts until later in the week, so making your own recordings at key points in class is encouraged!

Folk music by its nature consists of communal ownership of material (a shared repertoire of traditional tunes) and personal agency (individual expression and interpretation). I try to design exercises and tasks to empower people in both aspects of the genre, but this does demand a proactive, independent approach. I hope this post makes all of this a bit clearer!

My Darling Asleep

Here is the tune from November 15th, another Irish tune to go in a set with Lilting Banshee. Look for the fidget shapes to add rolls (highlighted example in blue), and for the crotchet-quaver rhythm moving by step (highlighted in red) for adding turns. Some of the turns work better on the fiddle and others work better on wind instruments – try the notated version in the PDF and see which ones work for you.

Here are the dots:

Here is a PDF with some more ornaments written in:

mda Download

Lilting Banshee

Here is the tune from November 8th, The Lilting Banshee. This is an Irish tune, with a few places to put our specific ornaments in: look for the ‘fidget’ shapes (example highlighted in blue) to add a roll, and for repeated notes in between main beats (example highlighted in red) for single cuts. These are fully notated in the PDF version.

lilting-banshee-prog Download

Here’s the video demonstrating the tune:

Stylistic elements and variations

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve also looked at ornamentation and variation elements. The idea here is to look at the broader picture of where these are generally used in order to empower players to use them independently in their playing, rather than giving you a strict model to copy that isn’t as easily disseminated.

Single cuts in between repeated notes.
Adding connecting notes in between notes that are three or four notes apart.

Here is a short video that explains these things, with examples:

Walking Bass Lines

Over the last few weeks we’ve used the idea of walking bass lines, either as an actual bass line or as a harmony for the melody players. Here the lowest note walks between each chord, moving by step rather always being the root note of the chord. This is indicated in the chords with markings such as D/F#, meaning that you should play a chord of D with an F# as the lowest note in the chord. It’s not about adding extra F#s, but about using a particular inversion of the chord, and you might end up using only the higher end of your instrument in order to accommodate the full scale.

Here is a video to demonstrate the effect – you’ll notice that I’m keeping the rhythms quite sparse in the accompaniment for a more delicate arrangement.

We can use this idea through out mst of Sir John Fenwick (just not in the final phrase of each section) and throughout Star Above the Garter, as well as in the A section for Spring at Last. Here is a PDF with suggested chord sequences and bass lines for these tunes.

walking-bass-lines Download

If you want to try this on some other tunes, then it’s useful to know your arpeggios/the notes of the chords. For instance, a chord of G = GBD and a chord of D = DF#A, so if you’re going from one to the other you could play G-F#, D-D or B-A in the bass.