California Cotillion

Last month I saw a request on the Seattle Old-Time Music Facebook group for sheet music of some of the tunes taught at the Canote String Band Class. I thought I might transcribe some of them and also use one for the tune of the month, but I realized that almost all of the requested tunes were crooked or weird in some way, and at the same time I realized that I’ve been picking crooked or weird tunes of the month for a while now. It hasn’t been on purpose, exactly, it just turns out that I like crooked and/or weird tunes a lot.

This one, though, was pretty straightforward, so hopefully it’s a relief for those of you who aren’t into crooked tunes. I don’t really know anything about it other than what’s in its entry at the Traditional Tune Archive, and I’ll let you go there if you’re interested in that.

The Facebook post generated some discussion about the role of sheet music in a traditional art like this, and that’s a topic I’m always interested in. My own feeling is that the ideal way to learn a tune is to be in the room with someone who is playing it and can either teach it to you or repeat it enough that you pick it up. If that’s not available, then a recording (preferably video) is great, and it’s certainly easier to rewind, slow down, repeat sections, and anything else that makes learning it easier for you. Sheet music is in third place for me, but–and this is where I differ from some more traditional approaches–I don’t think that learning a tune from sheet music necessarily means that you aren’t participating in a traditional context.

Are you going to pick up all of the nuance of a person’s playing by reading a transcription of what they played? Certainly not, any more than you would know how someone delivered a speech and what their voice sounded like by reading a transcript of it. But how important is that, really? We no longer live in an age where you can meaningfully be culturally isolated by geography. Even someone learning a traditional tune at the feet of a traditional practitioner is going to bring their own interpretation to it, and they will be influenced by every other piece of media they’ve ever absorbed. If you aren’t bringing your own interpretation to a tune, I’d argue that that is something that steps outside of tradition, in fact.

So does it really matter whether you learn a tune from someone who learned it from someone who learned it from someone in an unbroken chain going back eventually to whoever composed it? Maybe a little: you probably shouldn’t be trying to separate the music of a traditional culture from the rest of the culture it’s from, and knowing something about the people a tune passed through before it got to you can be an important part of participating in the tradition. But is it the only legitimate way to wind up knowing a tune and making it your own? I don’t think so.

You have to really know the tune to make it your own, though. I think there’s a difference between being able to play a tune and knowing a tune, and it’s not just in whether you’ve memorized the notes. One way to really know a tune is to have listened to and absorbed a ton of music from the same tradition or region or player that the tune comes from, so you know whether it just sounds right or not. But even if you don’t have that frame of reference, then I think another way to do it is to learn it from sheet music and then just keep playing it until it’s something that happens naturally, and what you have is your version of that tune. Is that so different, really, from hearing it from a traveling musician at a dance in an era when there was no audio recording technology available, then going home and trying to remember it well enough to play it again?

I don’t know. I’d love to hear what you think, in the comments.

Full disclosure: I don’t actually know this tune myself; the recording I made for WOTFA was probably the third or fourth time I had ever played it. So here are some other resources for listening to California Cotillion:

• A recording of the Canotes at Mossyroof: https://stringband.mossyroof.com/
• A recording of the recording of the Original Bogtrotters at Slippery-Hill: https://www.slippery-hill.com/content/california-cotillion
• See if you can find anyone playing it on YouTube. I haven’t found many, but here are a couple: