| Music
Trad Music Index Finds Way Into Computer World
By Maureen Doll
 "The
only source of knowledge is experience," said Albert Einstein. Something
of this sentiment, years and contexts away, can be found in a Web site
known as the Irish Traditional Music Tune Index (ITMTI). It is a long title
for a simple concept: Irish music, like much of life, can only be learned
through experience. This is something its creator, Alan Ng, has learned,
rather appropriately, from his own experience.
The Index catalogs thousands of Irish tunes, a bridge between musicians
and the music they want to learn. Ng, seated in his tidy office with a
sweeping view of Lake Mendota, speaks calmly of a passion which has led
him to listen to more than 300 albums, methodically identifying and plotting
each tune online with the aid of homemade software. It is a time- consuming
enterprise—gathering the raw data alone took place over seven years—and
one he does entirely in his spare time.
Ng is driven by a desire to help musicians access real recordings, as
opposed to learning from books or abc code (a typed notation system whose
birth parallels that of the internet). He considers these useful tools
for research, but when it comes to learning music from "dots on paper,"
the result is something Ng terms "musically horrible."
And he should know, for this is exactly what he once tried to do. "I
could see what was on paper… I would play it as a classical musician, a
classical violinist, and hear somebody like Sean Keane or Matt Molloy play
the same thing. I would like theirs so much better," he recalls. As an
undergraduate majoring in music and physics at the University of California,
Berkeley, he was trying to read fiddle music from a book. Something was
lacking. Ng has since "learned from the older traditional musicians that
you need to learn this stuff from listening." He adds, "There’s no way
to write it down."
The Index is a web of information, with links leading further and further
into its layers. The musical data, Ng’s explanations, advice and answers
to perplexing questions—including how to pronounce ‘Ng’ ("ing" in American
English)—appear in close-set columns and graphs. It is not a source for
listening to music (restricted by copyright law), but can be used to track
recordings and transcriptions, identify tunes and composers, learn the
history of tunes and build tune sets based on bar count and key change.
Just what is lacking in music learned from a book? "Rhythm, rhythm,
rhythm," says Ng. He is eloquent on this point, defining rhythm as something
happening on a microscopic scale—within one note—to large scale considerations
such as tempo and phrasing. In fact, this understanding has influenced
his study of German poetry, which was the theme of his dissertation. "I
started to understand," he says, "the breadth of what… rhythm means...to
me, the difference between poetry and prose is rhythm."
The Index lists 4,136 distinct tunes in 16,614 different recordings
or printings at the time of this writing. Ng says, "it’s quite amazing,"
that "I’m not tired of it yet. The tunes still come across as really gripping."
The Tune Index is not to be confused with a song listing. "I’m not a singer
and I don’t claim to be building a song index," he says. Tunes are the
actual melodies, which may or may not include songs. In Ng’s words, "I’m
not the right person to ask about Danny Boy," noting that the most common
question he receives is a request for the words to this song.
At this point, 95% of the songs he listens to are already in the Index,
perhaps titled differently or played in a different key. For the first
time, Ng is asking for more CDs and encouraging those who want their recordings
listed in the Index to mail him promo copies. He thinks it ideal to learn
tunes in person, but says in reality musicians don’t always live next door
to someone who knows the tune they want to learn, even in Ireland. And
so they use recordings, and he says "that’s become part of the traditional
community now."
Ng’s mind is a meeting place of technical and artistic impulses, and
a look at his past reveals the roots of both. Born in Atlanta, Ng’s family
relocated in Nashville before settling in Seaside, Calif. His mother is
a mix of English, Scots-Irish and German heritage; his father is Cantonese.
Ng’s mother was teaching him to read music and play the recorder by the
time he was 6; the violin began in fourth grade. While a high school student,
Ng took outside courses on computer programming. At Berkeley, he began
as a double major in physics and music, eventually dropping the music half
for German and graduating with a B.A. in German and physics. He played
the violin with the University Symphony all five years, and ran his own
business building and selling PCs on the side.
While at Berkeley, Ng became fascinated with Irish tunes. "They’re Mozart.
They’re up there on the scale of great composers… They’re just really good
melodies." But, "I was a classical musician; I didn’t even know how to
learn by ear." As he struggled to find recordings, the need for a database
became evident. He wondered, " ‘How on earth do you find a recording for
a tune?’ There’s no way to do it. So I started by trying to just help myself."
After a stint teaching English in Austria, Ng moved to Madison to study
German as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When
the university was recommended by professors at Berkeley, Ng asked, "Is
Wisconsin one of those states north of Chicago?" With the exception of
one year spent doing research for his dissertation in Berlin, he has lived
here ever since.
It was in Madison that his girlfriend "dragged" him into the Irish dance
scene, and he has since come to love céilí dancing. His day
job is working with faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to design
online courses in the continuing education division, for which he also
teaches German and Irish fiddle.
A member of four local bands—The Snug, Public House Céilí
Band, West Wind, Lilies of the Alley—he is primarily a fiddler, and plays
the tin whistle, bodrán and one-row button accordion. He philosophizes
about a traditional music session on his homepage as "a haven of pre-modern
communication and community." He writes, "Our music is a social function
and a shared aesthetic experience, not a product or a message."
As much as Ng loves Irish tunes, he admits "there is in fact more to
it than me liking the melodies." He finds Irish music one piece of an "organic,
living, healthy culture and tradition with real people in it." He explains,
"Irish music is healthy and on its own… It’s not reconstructed. It never
really died out. It’s still the same thing being handed down by person
to person. And that’s really hard to find now in the modern world."
 
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