Fwd: Re: Music to the Child Ballads

[Brett Williams]

You wrote: 
>
>> I prefer, personally, to use tunes I've
>> learned from other people in preference to hitting the pages of
>> Bronson.* 
>
>Is this due to some uneasiness in learning from written music, or is
>it that you tend to prefer the tunes you hear?  If the latter, I 
>suspect that you prefer those tunes because they are more likely to 
>have been modernized.

Neither. I read music-- slowly, when compared directly with an ability 
to learn a tune very quickly by example. By three repeats I've usually 
fixed it in my memory, and with a few more repeats can usually come up 
with extempore harmony. I can also 'arrange' spontaneously. I'm very 
interested in the 'folk process' itself-- meaning that I like to 
collect, given the time and opportunity. That's a pursuit I view as 
independent of my interest in the Society and a happy coincidence that 
collecting is facilitated by the Society's pool of knowledge and field 
of interest.

>Cultivating a good ear for period music is difficult.  (And there are
>lots of different periods involved to complicate things; "period" is 
>not so homogenous as we often treat it.)  We each have a lifetime of 
>modern music competing with the renaissance music we (probably) only 
>started listning to recently.  Some modern folk music sounds (to the 
>casual listener) similar to the renaissance music, so there's a 
>tendency to be led astray by the modern stuff.

I can recognise the difference between chromatic and non-chromatic, 
Mixolydian and Ionian modes, Aeolian and Dorian, and plagal, hex- or 
pentatonic variations of all of 'em (useful to read Bronson...).  
You're right, a lot of people can't make those distinctions due to lack 
of training or exposure. {As an aside, I've heard a number of 20th 
century musicians use a variation in the "C" part of the Bransle dex 
Chevaux that effects a temporary, chromatic shift in modes. My interest 
would lead me to try and find out when that variation came about-- 20th 
Century or earlier?}

>However, there are differences, and to people who've studied music of
>our period they're quite obvious.  Unfortunately, the only way to 
>really get a feel for those differences is to listen, listen, listen.  
>Fortunately, libraries these days often have CDs, so you don't have to 
>spend huge amounts of money on this.
>
>Ellisif
>

Yep. 

But, to address your last comment, too late! Are you're suggesting I 
should give up one of my lifetime pleasures, accumulating more *music*! 
Hah! :)

ciorstan

(whose husband is keeping an eye out on record-once/record-many-times 
CD technology so his wife's collection of out-of-print folk music on 
[shudder] black vinyl can be transferred to something a tad less 
ephemeral)