The following is a description of a Tunewriting workshop that Mark has offered in the past, and will be teaching at the Wannadance Uptown in Seattle, Washington this October.

Making It Yours, Letting it Go:
Tunesmithery as a Path to Tradition

Philosophy

Any musician attempting to create within a strongly marked regional style of traditional music, whether or not that style is native to them, faces the challenge of preserving that traditional style while surrounded by access to music from all over the world, from many historical periods, and ranging the gamut from village to cosmopolitant techno ambient. People who want to learn a musical tradition that they were not raised with have particular challenges to face.

I have found that writing new tunes in traditional styles is a powerful path of learning, of getting inside the tradition in a different way. It involves crossing two complementary bridges: making the music your own, and letting go of ownership of what comes from within you.

Making it your own. Learning to listen to a traditional tune as if you wrote it, so that the formative forces in the tune speak to you out of your own creative inner voice, is a way of "making the music your own." The point here is not to demand a forum for arbitrary personal expression, and then insist that the tradition change to accommodate that expression. Rather, it is to cultivate an inner "genie" or daimon who speaks (or sings) to you spontaneously in forms that align with the tradition with which you would unite.

Letting it go. But this very experience of cultivating an inner "tune genie" begins to change one's understanding of what is personal and what is trans-personal. When you realize that your inner ear can create musical forms without the intervention of your conscious, intellectual activity, you begin to see that many or most of our thoughts may have that character. What we have thought of as "our" personal expression is, at its strongest, often something larger than us speaking through us. Then tunewriting changes from being an exercise in "getting my own tunes out there" and instead places the focus where it belongs, on the music itself. We write those tunes that need to be written.

If we can approach tunewriting in this spirit, then it need not decline into the spectacle that some traditional musicians perceive in the "original tunes" phenomenon: countless musicians who have not learned the tradition in enough depth to really appreciate the existing repertoire, generating their own batch of tunes out of fin-de-millenial nerdcissism. (I've been there, guilty as charged.) Instead, through the doorway of writing tunes we can learn more about the structure of traditional tunes, the natural forces of variation as tunes leap to new players, instruments, regions, genres, etc., ways of hearing tunes and learning them quickly by ear, varying them in stylistically appropriate ways, accompanying them with harmonic language that complements and augments the natural modalities of the music rather than imposes other forms from without. If we make up tunes in a park and never play them again, or spontaneously play a new tune for a dance which vanishes when the music stops-it's all right. And if something we create catches the ears of our companions and community and lives on as part of the ever-renewing tradition, then we will have added our voice to the stream.

Exercises

To follow this path, I have created a set of exercises over the years that can help to strengthen the musical faculties required for this kind of post-modern apprenticeship. Some of the exercises can be done individually, some need a partner, some can be done in groups of various sizes. Some require an instrument, but many simply require the exercise of one's musical imagination: you can deedle tunes aloud, or even play them silently with your "inner instrument" (I don't want to say "in your head" because I think the metaphor is misleading and limiting), while riding on the subway, or waiting in the mall while your girl friend tries on bathing suits, or while out on a blind date waiting for him to stop talking about himself...

Working with this "starter set" of exercises, and perhaps borrowing or inventing and discovering others, we will work together over the course of this weekend workshop to cultivate our "inner instruments." We will design a flow of activities best suite for the experience and desires of participants: listening to field recordings of "geezers," sharing made-up tunes by participants, discussing our attitudes and beliefs and experiences with music, playing and creating together.

Over the course of the weekend, we will introduce a selection of the exercises, so that people can practice the skills on their own after the workshop, and (for more advanced participants) teach them to others (including adults and children).

Because of the nature of our work, these workshops can accommodate a wide variety of levels of experience in music, interests in traditional genres, and instrumental skill. The workshop can be adapted to a single evening, a day, a weekend, or a week-long course to be given at a music and dance camp or summer school. An extended version of the material has been organized into a block that can be presented as part of a music education curriculum in school programs.

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