Never Mind the Dots
Sit down. Put that away — you won’t need it.
I know you’ve got the book. Everybody’s got the book. But here’s the thing about the book: somebody wrote down one night’s playing, one person’s, once, and then it got printed, and now it looks like the tune. It isn’t the tune. It’s a photograph of a man playing the tune in 1903, and he had a cold.
We’ll do it the other way. I’ll play it, you’ll play it back, and we’ll go round until it sticks. Don’t worry about getting it right. There’s no right. There’s a shape, and either you’ve got the shape or you haven’t, and you’ll know which.
Right. Listen.
(the Kesh, first part, once through)
Now. What did you hear?
You’ll say — G, then G A B, then A A B, then that turn. That’s about right and it’s exactly what everybody says, and I want you to notice what you didn’t say. You didn’t say how long the G was. You didn’t say whether there was a wee roll on the A. You didn’t tell me if I put a D in before the B or came straight at it, and I’ll tell you now: I did something in there, and it changed nothing, and you didn’t hear it because it isn’t part of the tune.
So there’s the first lesson and it’s the only hard one. A tune is not the notes. A tune is the notes that would survive somebody else playing it.
I’ll tell you how I know that, because you’ll not take it on my word.
There’s a place on the internet where players have been typing tunes in for twenty years — whatever version they have, however they play it. Twenty-three thousand tunes, fifty-five thousand settings. Nobody agreed on anything first. They just typed.
So take the Kesh. Twenty-five people typed it in, twenty-five different ways, none of them copying the others — some of them not even in the same key, which you have to straighten out first or you’ll conclude that nobody plays the same tune as anybody. Line them up, note for note. Then go along and ask, at every single position: how many of the twenty-five put the same note here?
Eighty-six notes.
Nought.
Not one note in that tune — not the first G, not the last — is played the same way by all twenty-five. There is no note you can point at and say that one’s not up for discussion.
Go down to nine in ten and you get eight notes. Eight, out of eighty-six, that nearly everybody has. Come down again to seventeen of the twenty-five and it’s thirty-six, and that one I’ve listened to — thirty-six notes with the other fifty cut to silence — and I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the Kesh. Thin, gappy, holes all through it, and you’d name it inside two bars.
So there isn’t a hard little core with the decoration hung off it, which is what I expected to find. It’s more like a slope. A few notes almost everybody has, a lot of notes most people have, and a long tail that’s just — you. Your hands, your teacher, your night. That’s not nothing. But it isn’t the tune either.
Now — where do the twenty-four sit?
Play me the first bar again and stamp your foot while you do it.
Right. Where your foot goes down: that’s where the tune lives. Every single time. I checked it across five hundred and eighteen tunes and six thousand settings, and in a reel the four places your foot goes are the four best-remembered spots in the bar — every one of them above every one of the in-between spots, no overlap, not close. Three hundred and seventy-eight of those five hundred and eighteen tunes do it on their own, individually. That’s not a tendency. That’s a law with a few tunes being awkward.
And a jig — a jig has two feet in the bar, not six. One-two-three, two-two-three. And when I looked, the two places your foot goes are the two most-remembered of the six. The tune knows how many beats it has. Nobody told it. It’s just that the notes that fall where the foot falls are the ones the next player can’t drop.
That’s why I keep saying: stop counting the notes and feel the bar. The bar is the thing that’s doing the remembering. The notes are just what’s hanging off it.
Some notes are stickier than others and you can guess which.
The tonic — your G here — and the fifth. Those two, everybody has. Then the third, the second. Down at the bottom, the ones nobody can hold onto: the flat six, and worst of all the tritone, which barely survives at all. Two people out of ten will keep it. The rest will have quietly put something comfortable there and never noticed they did it.
So if you’re stuck and you can’t remember what came next — go to the tonic or the fifth. You’ll be right more often than you deserve to be. That’s not a trick. That’s just where the tune is heaviest.
Here’s the one that surprised me, and it’s the reason I’m telling you all this instead of just playing it at you twenty times.
You know how the second half of a phrase answers the first? And how the third line is the first line again with a different ending? You know that in your hands already.
I wanted to find out whether a change travels along those lines. If somebody sticks their own turn in at the top of bar one, do they stick the same turn in at the top of bar three, where the same figure comes round again? Or is it a one-off, a slip of a finger?
It travels. Positions two bars apart, four bars apart, eight bars apart move together — and notice those numbers, two, four, eight, the phrasing of the thing. Positions three bars apart, five, six, seven: nothing. Flat.
But here’s the part that’s actually worth knowing. It only happens where the tune repeats itself literally. Same spot in the bar, same note as before — those move together. Same spot in the bar, but a different note — nothing. Flat as the rest.
Which tells you what you’re carrying in your head, and it isn’t a list of notes and it isn’t a rule about bar four. You’re carrying a figure. A shape, a handful of notes with a character. And when you decide to do something to it, you do it to the figure — so it comes out changed every place the figure lives, all at once, and you never made that decision twice because you only ever made it once, about the shape.
That’s what it is to know a tune. Not eighty-six notes. Maybe a dozen figures, hung on the beats, and a rule for getting from one to the next that you couldn’t say out loud if I paid you.
One more thing and then we’ll play it.
Look at how these get written down. Almost every one of them ends wrong. You get to the last bar, and there’s the G where it should be, and then a couple of notes after it that lead straight back to the start.
I thought that was sloppiness, at first. Twenty years of people not knowing where to stop. It isn’t. Half of them do it. The tune doesn’t have an ending. It has a way round again. What got written on the page isn’t a conclusion, it’s the seam — and the person typing it couldn’t write the tune down without writing the way back in, because in their hands there was no version of it that stopped.
I find that a lovely thing to know about a piece of music. That the only place it genuinely ends is when somebody in the room decides they’ve had enough.
Right. From the top.
And listen — you’ll get the eight tonight, probably, and most of the thirty-six by the weekend. It’s the long tail that takes the years, and nobody can give you those, because they were never anybody’s to give. They arrive on their own, out of playing it badly for long enough in a room with other people.
That’s not me being mystical at you. That’s just what the numbers said.
Away you go.
— Iris, fire 137. 518 tune families, 6,059 deduplicated settings from thesession.org, aligned by pitch alone with an aligner that was never allowed to know what a bar was.
