Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Trip to Birmingham by Josie McDermott from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to address the topic, why read music? I, I've been working on a course for learning to read music. Boy, there's a lot you can teach in the realm of music theory. I'm having to kind of restrain myself and limit myself to trying to identify the best way to teach basically functional music reading that would be helpful for fiddlers because the goal is just to take you from not being able to read music or having very little comfort to having it be helpful for you picking out tunes learning tunes, that you can do that without the numbers written in.
I'm making on this course. It's, it's calling on everything. I mean, all my experience teaching violin and fiddle. I also taught some general music. So that was teaching kids who weren't musicians to read music. Even making me think about homeschooling my kids. Yeah. This course is I've spent a lot of time thinking about it.
So the question is, why should we bother reading music? Look, a lot of great players don't read music, I just played a gig with a fabulous musician, Rachel Eddie. And I brought a binder of tunes to the gig. And I showed it to them. And they were like, those dots don't help me. And basically, Rachel didn't need the music. I mean, they knew everything so well and could pick things up so quickly, that they were right that the dots didn't help them.
I mean, talk about a player to give you a complex know, Rachel and I are both 41. And I've had this long career and on the fiddle. And then Rachel plays the fiddle really well, I mean, professionally, but also plays the banjo really well, professionally, and the mandolin and the guitar kind of made me feel like what have I been doing with my life? Why don't I know all these instruments?
I don't know. Some folks are just, you know, they really get into it. It's good. It inspires me to work on my guitar playing. I'm trying to learn guitar right now.
Music reading didn't even become widespread to try to teach people to read music until kind of the latter half of the 20th century. And at the same time, they started teaching it, you know, in schools and studying the effects. Right? So it was pretty obvious to researchers, that if you were only treating music as a visual exercise, you know, show a kid this thing on the page, have them press this button and blow into the clarinet. You could sometimes do that bypassing the sound part, you know, see this do that people call it typing. Like you're just typing on the piano.
And then taking a look at the children and the adults who learn that way. It definitely felt like something was missing. That learning music experiencing music as an aural, a sound experience when you're learning is really, really important. And in terms of Suzuki, or Gordon's Music Learning Theory. You know, they went in the other direction. They said, Well, we shouldn't really show people anything on the page. It just messes them up, it distracts them from the sound that they should be focusing completely on the sound without a visual reference.
You know, they point to amazing players in all different genres, who don't read music and create spectacular music without, you know, reading the dots without reading sheet music. I agree that there should always be music you're playing without a visual reference. As a fiddle teacher, with my little teacher hat on. It does mean If you're not reading music that you can look at your bow, see if your bow is straight on the string, you tend to listen to your tuning your tone a lot more. If you're not reading you, you focus more on the listening side. You'll also just look and listen at other people that you're playing with and be more responsive to them.
So you want to have easy tunes, tunes you've memorized tunes, you're picking out working out by ear, as part of your practice part of your playing. I don't think you ever want your entire practice session, just reading stuff off the page. I mean, you know, go back and listen to the thing about improvising, improvise, and play by ear.
But let's get to the question, should we bother reading music? What the heck. Last year I worked on the Tchaikovsky Concerto for a little while. I wasn't really good enough to play it in college. But I figured, you know, 40 years old, it's time to work on Tchaikovsky, and I spent a couple of months on it, it came along pretty well, I only kind of got halfway through the first movement.
That's an example of a piece that was pretty hard for me. And I would not have been able to work it out by ear, I needed the music. And in terms of fiddling there are tunes like that. I mean, it can be genre specific, but there are tunes that are complicated, they're a little beyond you. And having the music there to break it down and take you through step by step can be super helpful. You know, a tune like Catharsis, Gravel Walk or showy tunes bluegrass tunes.
Yes, you could work it out by ear over the process of a really long time. But there's a little shortcut there, read the music. Reading music helps us tap on music that we can't hear. I mean, these days, it's much easier to access recordings, there were a lot of times when you might have a book of music, but not a recording to go with it. So the only way to see what the music sounded like was to read it and play it. And then you would know what it sounds like.
Written music is a shared language, it's a way to get very specific, especially with complicated music. So that you can talk about well, you know, in the second section in the 10th bar, we're going to do this or it's this note, if it wasn't written down, it would be much harder to have that shared language. I mean, I've played an orchestra, so you really need it, you need a way to to talk, the more complicated the music, the easier it is to have a shared language to discuss it and describe it.
Some of us are just very visual, I'm a pretty visual person, I find it helpful to have a visual reference of definitely taught a lot of students with differences in their hearing ability, their memory, their attention, their processing, some of them just have a much easier time with reading. And if it wasn't there for them, they might not play they might not enjoy their playing.
I think reading music is a window into what other people have thought up and created and written down. Just like reading language is a window into what other people have made up and written down. So you're not just walking around with your thoughts all day. Or what people say to you, you can open up a book and and find out like, what did he think about that? What what did she? What does she have to say about that? You can read that in a book. Which if you couldn't read, you wouldn't have access to that.
And with music. The way that we write down and read music comes out of a European tradition. So some of the window is just into that tradition that classical music but because it has become very widespread. It's used in a lot more genres now. So it it can be that that window into someone else's musical mind, their creation.
Yeah, that's my little spiel for reading music. Take my course if you want to learn should be done sometime this month.
Our tune for today is trip to Birmingham. This is a real in G by the flute player Josie McDermott from we played at a session at the Arthouse bar. It's a very popular flute tune. It was recorded by well known flute player Matt Malloy, and his first album, he just called it Josie McDermott's.
But apparently, Josie called it trip to Birmingham. So when I talk about flute, I'm talking about wooden flutes, traditional Irish wooden flute that sometimes has no keys. Sometimes it has some key which helps you play in some different keys and get a few more notes.
My husband Charlie plays this flute he started just on the kind of PVC pipe flute with holes drilled in it. Now he has a keyed wooden flute. And Josie McDermott was a very highly regarded flute player out of the Sligo tradition. Born in 1925, and counties Sligo.
I learned a lot about Josie from an interview on YouTube. You can go on YouTube look for Josie McDermott. And there was a TV show made about Josie that was partly in the Irish language. And it had a lot of tunes including this tune. And it was fascinating. I really enjoyed it.
Josie had very poor eyesight. And for most of his later life was completely blind, friends said he could see the difference between lighter and darker, and that was it. He was known for being a really helpful person never wanting to be a burden. And was very famous for his flute playing.
He was also I'm told quite particular about playing the tunes correctly, and not changing the tunes. So they they had a clip of him talking about this in the show that I watched about him. And he said he's sort of talking about younger players and he says if you want to play around with tunes, compose your own tune, but don't you know, don't change this old stuff leave that or it's going to be lost if you keep changing it.
He was he was known for being particular about getting the tune exactly right both with himself and with his, his students and the people he played with.
The story about this tune trip to Birmingham is I guess he went to Birmingham pretty often to play with Comhaltas there. And he was on a plane on his way to a dinner and the plane was diverted because of fog had to land in London fog in England who knew and he got on a taxi to Birmingham. And while he was in the taxi, he composed this tune called it Trip to Birmingham. So it's pretty well known tune we're gonna play it for you by Josie McDermott?
Thanks for listening, you can head over to fiddlestudio.com to find sheet music for this tune and more information about becoming a member of Fiddle Studio. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.
