Interview with Barry Foy

Rick Steves interviewed Barry Foy, author of Field Guide to the Irish Music Session in the second half of his show on NPR this weekend. You can listen to the whole program online.

Seisiún: How to Ruin a Session

No, that's not a typo in the title. I'm going to propose a unified theory of session suckage.

Let's consider a list of things people complain about / forbid / write guides to discourage doing at sessions:

• Use of sheet music
• "Noodling," and other efforts to play an unfamiliar tune during the session
• Guitars, recorders, and other "non-traditional" instruments
• People who start too many tunes
• People who play over other people when they are trying to start a tune
• Bodhrán owners (as opposed to bodhrán players)
• Multiple bodhrán owners
• etc.

Now none of the above strikes me as intrinsically evil. If you're a good musician, looking at sheet music isn't necessarily going to turn you into a bad one. There are some truly great guitarists, such as Arty McGlynn and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill.¹ But what they have in common is that they're devices which seem to facilitate people playing along with tunes which are not the best in their personal repertoire or which maybe they don't know at all. Guitarists with no background in traditional music may show up wanting to "jam." People frustrated at how long it takes to learn to play the music may buy a bodhrán because they think it's "easier." Folks who are good sight readers might try and play along with tunes they've never heard before. Etc.

At both of the sessions I go to, people tend to play along with every tune they know, and sometimes a few that they don't. Granted, one is a learning session, and one started life as a beginning session and is still very beginner-friendly. So that sort of thing isn't completely against the rules. But one of the things I really like about, for example, the CD Music at Matt Molloy's is how frequently there will only be one or two musicians playing. Here you have a group of some the finest musicians in the world spending much of their time with their instruments on the table listening to a couple guys play a tune together.

Since I spend a lot of time listening at sessions, people seem to go out of their way to tell me that I "have as much right to play as anyone else" and ask me if I'd like to start tunes. That's really nice, and I appreciate the fáilte, but I consider time spent actively listening at a session to be productive time.

To be clear, I'm not saying that people who are terrible musicians shouldn't play at all; I'm a beginner myself! I just think that if something like sheet music can allow me to play when I should be listening, it's doing me — and the other folks in the session — no favors.

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¹ Sadly, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill died this week. I started a Wikipedia article about him as a small contribution to his memory.

Seisiún: Slow Session

I went to a new (for me) session yesterday. It's a slow session, and very different from Bardic Circle, the other session I attend.

Bardic Circle started life as a beginner's session and is still very beginner-friendly, but many if not most of the regulars have now been playing together for several years, have a pretty wide repertoire, and the tunes are not generally played slowly. I spend most of my time at Bardic Circle sessions listening instead of playing, which doesn't bother me at all.

At this session, however, everyone is studying the same 20 or so tunes, and I happened to know six or seven of them. The group played, in general, much slower than Bardic Circle. We also did some ear learning exercises, so I ended up playing more than I listened. I'm going to work on learning some of the other tunes that group plays.

Overall it was a nice experience.

Seisiún: Sessions at the 2005 Dublin Irish Festival

The photo above is my daughter dancing in the session tent. She loves Celtic music. She walked into the middle of the session and was leaning in close to the musicians to get a good look. Stuart, the fiddler with the green shirt, said to her, "You know, this is dance music. You could dance..." She did, and for the rest of the festival she was asking me, "Let's find more dance music!"

For the most part my whistling skills were too weak to keep up with the session. But I made a point of sitting down and playing when the session tent was empty or when there were only one or two people there, to keep things going.

Bardic Circle session playing at the Emerald Isle stage. I sat in for one tune, but I had my daughter with me on Sunday and it was kind of difficult to play with her crawling all over me!

The session tent again.

Seisiún: An Air is Still an Air, Even If Whistled

Here's an entry in the list of "Things which seem obvious in retrospect, but which hadn't occurred to me before."

After someone at Bardic Circle commented that it was refreshing to play slower tunes I started Sheebeg Sheemore, which is quite slow and has the added benefit of being one of about two tunes I have down well enough to play in public. Folks listened long enough to figure out what I was attempting to play, and then started to join in. But everyone was playing it differently, in part because it's an air and in part because the room we were in was noisy and it was hard to hear what others were doing. I found this quite confusing and ended up losing my place in the tune; I pulled the whistle out of my mouth to listen for a spot where I could jump back in.

At this point a visiting musician — a talented fiddler — spoke up and noted that:

• Whoever starts the tune sets the tempo, and...
• For an air, you can pretty much forget following someone's tempo well unless you've practiced it with them.

So when someone plays an air, you should just sit and listen. This is exactly the same etiquette recommended when someone sings an air.

This is not at all what I had in mind when I started the tune! I wasn't expecting to do it solo. But I started over from the top and played it to the best of my abilities, even managing to play a couple of cuts without losing my place in the tune.

I was happy that I managed to play it OK in the end, but I don't think I'll be doing it on a regular basis at Bardic Circle, as I prefer to play along with others. Time to learn more jigs and reels....

Earlier that evening someone started The Blackthorn Stick, so I jumped in and tried to keep up. This was the first time I have tried to play along with a tune which someone else had started at full speed. Wow, that was really fast! I did manage to keep up for a few measures, which was fun, and the whistle sounded nice amongst all the fiddles.

Seisiún: Bardic Circle at Amore Pizza

Bardic Circle session will be playing at Amore Pizza in Westerville, OH, on Thursday 26 May from around 7:00 p.m. through 11:00 or so. Amore is on County Line Road at the intersection of Sunbury road. The full address is:

Amore Restaurant
1186 County Line Rd
Westerville, Ohio
43081
[Click here for a map.]

If you don't care to play, come enjoy the food and music!

Seisiún: How to Find a Session in Your Area

This post presumes you know what a session is. If not, read this brief history of the Irish Session and this description of sessions today.

There are already many articles on and directories for finding a session in your area, so this post would seem at first to be redundant. But they all omit what I think is a fairly critical detail, so maybe this will help someone. Many of these directories have been online for years, and the sessions have stopped, moved, or changed times or skill levels. It's important to confirm the information before attending. Here's the process I followed:

1. I used the links above and some other sites to come up with a list of possible sessions.
2. Then I sent email to the organizers listed, asking whether or not the listing was current and how appropriate it would be for someone just getting started playing the tin whistle.
3. I picked the most appropriate session still happening, and received updated information as to its time and skill level. The players in this session had improved since the information was posted several years ago!

Of course, I read up on session etiquette before attending. This is somewhat difficult to avoid, at least for anyone who reads about this stuff online. Indeed, it is difficult to find a description of what happens at a session which doesn't consist mostly of long descriptions of what not to do.

So I'll close this post by focusing on the positive: It is nice to find a group of more or less random people coming together to make music and have fun. A drum circle might qualify, too, but I like the Irish tunes better!