Beginners dipping their toes for the first time into the Irish session music scene often ask this question. The answer is not nearly as simple as you might think.
It’s a question that concerned me a lot. Admittedly I had my first exposure to traditional music as a student back in the 1960s, and admittedly I learnt a tiny bit of whistle, a scraping of fiddle, and even had a flute (modern, cylindrical, metal) for a couple of years. Admittedly it was in the 1990s that I made myself the worst flute that I have ever seen out of a piece of polythene tubing. I did hear of a flute, although I never saw it, fashioned from a large carrot. That one may have been even worse than my polythene effort, although I wouldn’t count on it. And admittedly it was later in the 90s that I got my first half-way reasonable wooden flute. But it was not until a year or more into this millennium that I decided to make the effort to get somewhere with it.
I was living in Ireland at the time, and sessions were easy to find. Some seemed quite relaxed, so although I didn’t have many tunes I began to dare to go on and join in a bit. I do remember turning to a neighbour at one of my first sessions (I won’t name him, RIP) and asking “So what tunes get played a lot here?” I did find the answer of “Oh, there are so many” unhelpful, but bit by bit I asked people “What was the name of that last one”, I got hold of tune books, I spoke to the friends I was making at the sessions and began seriously to build up the stock of tunes that I knew.
Starting at this latish stage in life, I did find that I was playing “catchee-upee”. Some people, of course, had grown up with traditional music, and many of the non-Irish “blow-ins” had been interested continuously for a couple of decades, so they had lost count of the number of tunes they knew. Eventually, after about four years, I started to feel that I had, in a sense, got “enough” tunes. In another sense, of course, you can never know enough – it is only natural and proper to always be learning new ones. But with the best part of 200 tunes under my belt I found that at most of the sessions I would go to I would know at least a fair number of tunes, perhaps one quarter or one third of those that got played. Not as many as the hardened sessioneers, although my repertoire did have a relatively high proportion of odd tunes from odd places – my 200 were not actually 200 “session standards”. But it was enough not to feel that I simply sat at the edge all night hoping that one of the tunes that I knew would come up. It was a good working basis.
And then I came to live in Sydney. I tried one session (in Paddington) for a few weeks. I wasn’t too comfortable with it, as it leant in the FARTing direction (that’s FAst Reel Thrashing, by the way). After three or four visits, however, my enthusiasm waned even further when it was pointed out that I would have to find another seat, since the one I was in was the one for “Mick” the banjo player (I think it was Mick). Mick had been away for a few weeks, and Mick had not turned up in time to get a good seat for himself, but Mick was expected today, so I had better let him have “his” seat. I got the message.
After a while another session started in Newtown, and I began to go. The pace was much more enjoyable and while, of course, there were “senior” musicians, there was more of the sense that they were first amongst equals. But I soon came to feel that the number of tunes I knew was hopelessly inadequate. The “old favourites” of Skibbereen were either altogether unknown or deeply unpopular. How many did one need to know? This difficulty was exacerbated here because two of the “senior musicians” have, for different reasons, a phenomenal, even encyclopaedic knowledge of tunes. I started to look at the lists helpfully provided by various people of what were held to be “core” or “stock” tunes, tunes that almost any player should know. You’d think this would be a good idea. I did, at least, but close examination led me to the understanding that this approach is a dead end.
First, there is only a limited overlap in the contents of these lists of “core tunes”. I analysed several such lists, as well as lists of tunes that were actually played at certain sessions and festivals, with the help of Excel data sheets. It turns out that the majority of tunes on which there is agreement that they are “basic” are hardly ever played, because they are considered to be hackneyed. On the other hand, a good proportion of the allegedly “core” tunes seem to be idiosyncratic choices with which other list compilers disagree. In the middle, tween those two groups, we find a sample from a large body of more or less popular, more or less well-known tunes, but the sample depends on the background of the list compiler.
So what happens to the beginner who, in contrast to my experience, does get given a list of, say, 100 “important” tunes? Let’s imagine that the beginner is very enthusiastic, and manages to keep up properly learning a tune a week, or even more. Because they are unlikely to be learning in a vacuum, a beginner will also be learning other tunes not on this list, so nevertheless it will take them something like two years to learn these tunes. Now suppose they take the list seriously, and go away to learn them all. When they have the courage to turn up at the session again, two years later, they will find that of the tunes they have learnt, about one third are hackneyed and corny, so that nobody wants to play them. Another third were not popular tunes at all, and one could sit in sessions every night for a year and not hear them. The third in the middle were popular at one time, but things have moved on, and most of the third are now either forgotten or hackneyed. The beginner has spent two years and has no more than a handful of useful tunes. Not thrilling.
The whole approach is clearly just wrong. We could learn 500 tunes (and that will normally take quite a few years), sit in sessions, and still find ourselves waiting and waiting for a tune that we know. The number of tunes that we know is in fact not very important at all. Of course, we do have to know tunes, and it is good if the number is high, but the way we can play is far more important. If we know just a few dozen tunes, but we can deliver them with drive, with lift, with joy and with musicality, people will want to hear them. If we know just 100 tunes (which in this context is not terribly many), but can deliver them as just described, we could make a really valuable contribution to a regular session; some of our tunes might be played often, some less often, and of course a good player doesn’t join in every tune or every set.
So if I am asked again about how many tunes are session player needs to know, the answer will be that although in time one will certainly know many more, a few dozen is enough to get started, and that from then on the way we play them is more important than the number that we know. And as to which tunes they should be, the answer is that we should learn the tunes that we like and the tunes we can share with our fellow musicians. Whether they are hackneyed, obscure, generally popular, last year’s tune, next year’s tune – these are also unimportant questions.
