Reflections on playing music with orchestra musicians

So, I'm a complete rando with minimal formal music education who picked up a stick with some holes in it 15 years ago and made noises on it until I could play tunes, and eventually I became good at doing that, and MUCH later figured out how to play in the same key as other people.

The vast majority of my experience playing with other people has been in Irish sessions, and I've only been able to do it for about 2 years now. You show up, you hang out in a pub, drink a free drink, enjoy the craic, and spend a few hours playing tunes you've memorized at home with cool strangers.

There's a great event every year in Roswell, GA called "IrishFest Atlanta", which is where I first learned about the existence of sessions 8 years ago. It always has music workshops you can sign up for with the famous people who are playing in the concerts. I've been to a few of these, [1] since it's cool to meet the musicians, and [2] it's good to be exposed to people who actually know things about music when you have almost no such exposure. These classes have all thus far been entirely learning by ear. And in one I attended last year with Joanie Madden (of Cherish the Ladies, one of my favorite bands), there was a professional basoonist. And he really struggled to follow Joanie by ear (He said so himself.). This surprised me, because like, it was really easy for me, and I'm not a professional musician. Like, I don't even completely know what I'm doing. I play the recorder with my hands backwards (which is historically attested in great abundance, mind you!); I didn't even have recorder lessons in school. I had a year or so of piano tutoring 21 years ago, and extremely brief choral training when I was 9 or 10; that was it. How am I doing so well at this when this man, whose entire profession is music, is openly struggling?

Fast-forward 6 months, and I find myself in a group of SCAdians interested in playing period music together. And it happened again: the lady hosting it, a professional musician, struggles to play by ear. She said she was punished whenever she tried to as a kid. 1, that's heartbreaking; 2, I'm realizing this isn't just that basoonist: this must be a systemic thing. Like maybe the entire way people are being taught music is just completely locking them out of ear-playing. Which, I have to say that is kinda wild to me: for nearly all of human history, people learned music exclusively by ear. Sheet music wasn't invented in the West until the Middle Ages, and normies weren't using it until the Modern era. And now, in just a couple centuries, we've gone from everyone playing by ear to very few playing by ear. How have we managed to educate away such a natural inclination? We had a piano when I was a kid, and I always liked improvising and trying to play tunes I liked. I enjoyed the challenge of it. I figured out the right hand part of Pachelbel's Canon from the playing of George Winston when I was 11 or so. Not because I'm some kind of prodigy; but because no-one was there to stop me from noodling around freely on the piano. I feel like this is a pretty normal thing for humans? Yet whenever people learn that I play by ear they're impressed, like it's some rare gift. I really don't think it is!

A month later, I returned to the SCA music group for its second session. It was a different group of people this time (multiple real, professional musicians). It was interesting. I ended-up realizing that this is just a totally different style of group-playing than Irish sessions are. Everyone is sitting in-front of sheet music, many have not played or even heard the tunes in-question before, and people are playing very different parts. They're saying fancy music theory words. (My current incomplete knowledge of what fingerings correspond to what note labels (A, B, C, whatever) continues to make communication difficult; I need to rectify that...) When I sat down, they were surprised that I did not have or want sheet music in-front of me (I am illiterate. Not so much willfully so much as the pay-off for the time-investment is very marginal when you're a hobbyist who can already play well by ear.). Some suprises for me: most people had not actually practiced any of the tunes beforehand? Very different from a session. And we repeatedly ended-up in situations where we couldn't proceed because the sheet music available was truncated; or, in Il Trotto's case, effectively missing. After we got through the setlist, the host thought about maybe having us try Whiskey in the Jar for fun, but her sheet music for it was in Eb, which is not easy for her instrument to do. I was like, oh, pfft, no problem, we can just play it in D, the normal key. And she looked at me with ¿terror? and scoffed that mentally transposing Eb to D on the fly is beyond normal abilities. That got me thinking a bit. So, like, idk how it is with the dots on the lines on the page, but for me, when I want to play a tune in another key, I just, like, do it. I know the tune in my head. I know what the tune sounds like. I know how to play all the chromatic fingerings for the first 1.5 octaves on standard English Baroque recorders. And I know what fingering orders belong to what... ¿scales? (I lack words to label these things.). If I want to play Whiskey in the Jar in Eb, I just use the Eb fingerings, and play the tune from my head (and make lots of mistakes, because Eb is, like, all of the hard fingerings in one scale (That's how I know which ones to use: All the hard ones!).). If I want to play it in C, I use the C fingerings. And so-on for the other keys or scales or whatevers. But here, next to me, a professional musician, and the professional musician to my left, can't play an Eb tune in D without sheet music written for D. This is wild to me.

And so I thought some more. And I realized: professional musicians are just spec'd into a totally different class. They're playing music very differently from me. It's like when I met a Blues harmonica player and I couldn't do what he was doing and he couldn't do what I was doing (I can literally play jigs on harmonica.): same instrument, incompatible playstyles. Here, it's not the playstyle but the learning, reproduction, and communication which are vastly different. And so you can have these very talented musicians who just can't do some of the things that some random, washed-up, non-classically-trained player can do (and of course vice-versa!).

I also thought about how sheet music isn't central in trad. It's definitely widely used, but it's not central. So what happens when a ton of random people get together at a pub and play music? It becomes a bit much. I remember one year at IrishFest Atlanta, there ended-up being three separate sessions going on at bars around town because there were so many people looking to jam that we couldn't all fit into one session. Heck, there was one room that had over 20 fiddlers in it! And that got me thinking: there's kind of an optimal size for a session. It's like how Scrum teams of more than 9 people are just too unwieldly. If you get over that size, the experience degrades; and at a certain point, you have to split the session or the Scrum team or whatever. Well, sheet music + a conductor breaks that limit. You can put a TON of musicians into one orchestra, and have them all play parts in isolation, and create this beautiful music that you could not have gotten without such organization. Orchestral musicians, then, are spec'd into playing music like a well-oiled machine. This is very different from traditional music. So when I show up with my wide-bore, flipped-handed recorder playing Medieval tunes by ear and from memory (which I must point out is literally why it's called a "recorder": its players play from memory; ils recordent), of course there is going to be this disconnect! I'm playing kinda like it's 1500AD and they're playing like it's 1950CE. The only thing in-common between me and these professional musicians here are the tunes, the base pitch (A=440ish Hz), and the intonation (12-TET).

Anyways, 9pm rolled around, we finished up, and I made some suggestions for tunes we could try next time. The host exhortated the finding of sheet music for any suggested tunes. I am not a great candidate for this, since my ability to read it essentially consists of "note go up, note stay same, or note go down", meaning that while I might be able to verify that a particular piece of sheet music generally matches a tune, I'm going to struggle to know if it's the right version unless there's accompanying audio. I managed to find some sheet music and tabs on YouTube, and shockingly I found a Medieval Italian dance on TheSession.org (!?). But during this process, I became surprised / mildly dumfounded by how large an industry there is of selling sheet music. Like "pay $6 to unlock Concerning Hobbits!", "oh, you can't download without paying, that's piracy!"; and I'm just over here playing it for free because I heard it a few times. Can other people not hear music? Isn't hearing it the whole point? Hello? Why are we spending so much money on sheets? You probably don't actually need to bother with sheet music if you're not a professional musician or playing in an orchestra or living in the 1800s on the frontier with no grammophone. Why is sheet music the foundation of music education? I'm guessing it's just because the people teaching music nowadays are generally classically-trained and just repeating how they learned; but boy it sure works out well for the market. "Oh, you bought a tune in Eb but you want to play it in D? That'll be $6 more!" Kinda scammy tbh! Somehow our society has managed to take something that used to be free (playing music by ear) and turned it into a paid service (playing it by sheet), and this has persisted even in spite of easy access to audio from nearly any imaginable tune online. Which, on that note: God bless TheSession.org for providing both sheet music and audio completely gratis.

Another thing: the classically-trained people I've been meeting lately also can't play tunes from their heads unless they've drilled them, and drilled them specifically on their current instrument. Again, this is kinda weird to me? If I know the tune in my head, I can typically play it 80%–99% on my first try if it's not particularly complex. One of the attendees jokingly suggested we play The Dragonborn Comes and I was like "oh sure" and then I played it perfectly. I don't even know if I've played that before. I probably haven't even heard in 10 years. But I have the tune in my head, and that's enough. I told the person sitting next to me that I liken it to their sight-reading: they can sit down, look at some sheet music, and play most things 80%–99% on their first try if it's not particularly complex. Well, it's the same thing for me: my memory is my sheet music equivalent. And so, to that point: if I know a tune on one instrument, it is typically NOT hard to then play it on literally any other instrument I know. Yes, I'll make mistakes, but it will typically be shockingly close on the first try. But for these people, even tunes they know by heart on another instrument, they could not deign to attempt on their current instrument. That's kinda weird to me, and I don't understand that. But I guess it must be just another part of what classical training does to people?

I'm not trying to spit on classical training, mind; it definitely serves very useful purposes, and it has uses for non-classical players. One thing that always comes to mind here is Cathy Jordan saying "[You can always tell which fiddlers are classically-trained because the Irish ones will be all hunched-over and playing like this *gestures* and the classically-trained ones are up here *gestures*. The Irish ones end-up with a bad back.]". I just think maybe it's too widespread or at least too dogmatic or all-consuming, and doesn't leave room for people to develop their musical senses naturally. And as someone coming from very much outside this millieu, seeing how vastly it affects people's capabilities... it's jarring! Which, on that note: this is a good Segway into wondering about the effects learning to read has on us... but that is, of course, way out of scope here! And not something I can answer from experience, as I learned to read really young. Maybe there's an illiterate person somewhere who can fill us in on their shocking interactions with the literate?