Secrets of a fiddle

Perhaps the old fiddle can teach the new mandolin a few tricks

No musical instrument evokes a sense of mystery like a fiddle does. (The difference between a fiddle and a violin? A violin is usually in tune.) For a guitar you can go to the nearest instrument shop to buy a Taylor or a Martin. For a bagpipe or a hurdy-gurdy you order one from a maker after shopping around at the Le Son Continu Festival. I recently bought a beautiful A-type mandolin from a maker in Breda, The Netherlands after trying it out at Gooikoorts. And all those instruments have proper brand labels on them that are protected by international law. You hardly find the kind of counterfeiting you see in the clothing industry.

Don't believe the label

I have no idea, however, where my fiddle comes from, who made it, who played on it, or how old it is. I bought it from a fiddler in the Irish music scene in The Netherlands who had bought it on a flee market - or so he said - but I have no idea where that was or from whom he bought it. There is a small label inside saying "Anno 17 [blank] Carlo Bergonzi fece in Cremona". Carlo Bergonzi was a world famous violin maker, famous for being the finest apprentice of the great Stradivarius. He is also famous for the numerous fake labels in violins with his name on them. So I'm not exactly inclined to take the label very seriously. Millions of violins were made in the region now known as Germany and the Czech Republic with such labels, apparently because they were modelled after Bergonzi's design. So I guess my fiddle is one of those.

Wait - that wasn't me

So how old is this fiddle then? I am no expert in this, and I know you should never trust the internet (at least that's what I tell my students), but a little browsing here and there brings me to a range between 1870 and 1940. That is a long time. Still, it's an intriguing idea that this fiddle of mine is probably at least 76 years old - older than both my parents. Who played it since? What did they play on it? Surely it was not all high-brow classical music, considering that it is not exactly a high-brow instrument. For folk music it's perfect: it is fairly loud, especially with the steel strings I usually put on it. But recently I changed strings (I am looking for a somewhat warmer tone), and while doing so I noticed the wear marks on the fingerboard under the D string (see picture). Note how they go all the way up to the body of the fiddle. This is where you get when you play third position or higher. I never play third position, especially not on the D string, so I'm sure it wasn't me! All music I play (Irish, Dutch, and French traditional music) is in first position. And I'm so bad at it I can't even play vibrato, let alone higher positions! Playing in the second or third position is more common in gypsy music though, as well as in some east European traditions. So perhaps a gypsy fiddler earned his daily bread with it, or it was a classical violin player after all.

MSEAS Brest: My impressions

Yes, I brought the fiddle, and
no, I did not play it.

Tonight is my last night in Brest after an intensive and massively enjoyable conference on Understanding marine socio-ecological systems: including the human dimension in Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (MSEAS). It's been one of those events where you soak up loads and loads of impressions, which take time to digest, which I just did today in the magnificent Océanopolis - I figured that would be an apt place to reflect on the human dimensions of marine management. So here are my thoughts.

MSEAS did much, much more than the average economics conference to stimulate debate and to provoke creative ideas. I much enjoyed the open and creative atmosphere that brought together people from fields as diverse as biology, economics, and anthropology. As far as I have seen in all discussions people were very open and respectful to each other's views. Which is different from what I have seen in some of the more disciplinary or conservation-oriented conferences. Oh, and getting a cartoonist capture the sessions was an excellent move. He was not just funny, he actually contributed to the debate and gave us fresh new insights. More input from artists next time please!

Beth Fulton on people's trust in models

Boy, do I envy this generation of young researchers working in this field. The Young Researchers Workshops gave them the chance to pose questions to more experienced researchers in the field on all kinds of issues. (I felt to old to ask a question and too young to answer one.) I wish EAERE had this when I did my PhD!

From the presentations and keynote lectures I got the overall impression that there is a particular need for social indicators (other than economic ones, and employment), analyses of governance and institutions, and further integration of the whole range of issues in analyses and assessments. The topics were clearly skewed towards fisheries, which is a shame given the growing importance of other sectors, but also understandable given that this was an initiative by people within the ICES network. I was somewhat surprised to notice that there was not a single cost-benefit analysis, especially considering that the OECD's Ocean Economy report explicitly calls for more cost-benefit analyses of ocean management.

Shame she wasn't there second
time I visited the Océanopolis

I was particularly enthusiastic about some of the qualitative research that shone a new light on economic analyses. Edwin van Helmond presented an analysis of Dutch fisher behaviour where interviews with fishers helped resolve a number of puzzles in the data that statistical analysis could never have solved. Matthias Kokorsch presented the results of a series of interviews he did with Icelandic fishers on the effects of the tradable quota system in that country.

Slow sessions are just not my thing. I went to the Sunday session in the Tara Inn: there were loads of people, the atmosphere was great, but the music just did not appeal to me. It's not the pace: there's nothing wrong with playing a bit slower if you can't keep up with the standard speed. In fact it's better than playing above your level! But the playing was sloppy. Luckily I did get the chance to see some of the local traditions at the very last evening:

Meet my new band

I've joined a new band: we're called Tobermore, we're mostly Dutch (our uillean piper is half Irish, half Flemish, and makes great chocolates), and we play Irish traditional music with the occasional Americana song.

Although I joined them only a few months ago, this actually started somewhere in 2009-2010 when I stood in for the guitarist of another group, Harmony Glen. I got along quite well with their then box player, Vincent, and Vincent and I formed a duo playing Dutch music, Hete Bliksem (yes I know the link is broken - the website is still under construction - as is the band). After a couple of years, Vincent left Harmony Glen, and joined Tobermore; when they asked me to join them as fiddler I did not need long to consider their invitation. They're great musicians and, most importantly, great company.

My interest in folk music started with, as for so many people, The Pogues. There was a time when I would go to Ireland every year, first with my guitar, then with my bódhran, then with my mandolin. Visiting the Saint Chartier Festival in 2000 changed many things in my life, not least of all my musical focus: I bought a fiddle and immersed myself in bal folk music. I still play bal folk, mostly with old Dutch tunes, but I'm also happy to be back in Irish music again.

Stop reading music

No musical instrument illustrates the yearning gap between classical music and traditional music like the four-stringed wooden box I've been playing for the last 13 years. It starts with the name. Ask me what I play, and I would tell you I play the fiddle; ask a classical musician what it is I play and he would say "violin". But really, it's the same instrument. (Admittedly, this only applies to English - the Dutch call it viool, no matter how you play it.) I sometimes meet violinists (that is, classically trained musicians) who approach traditional music as a simple sort of classical music - a subset of classic, to use a mathematical term. If you can play Paganini's works, sure you can play The Maid Behind The Bar, right?

Wrong. They're totally different paradigms. Different worlds. It's almost like you're playing a different instrument. And let me be blunt: a classical training is a serious impediment to playing traditional music.

It starts with the fact that we know the composers of almost all compositions in classical music, but most tunes in traditional music have composer "unknown". The composer of a classical piece still owns it, as it were. Change the notes and it's not the same piece anymore; even worse, it would be disrespectful, like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Yes, classical musicians interpret the music they play in their own way, through the intonation and the dynamic they (or the conductor) choose. But they must stick to the written music. On the other hand, apart from recent compositions, traditional music is public property. In fact, part of the fun of playing traditional music is the freedom of interpretation: let's put in some more syncopation by playing these notes a bit differently... Did you know that this tune sounds great when you play it in a minor scale? If I bind those notes and skip these it sounds really great on the fiddle. Also, there are often many versions around of the same tune.

Second, traditional music was originally developed to accompany dancers, so the most important element of it, high above the rest, is the rhythm. You can be a virtuoso all you like, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Classical music, on the other hand, remains a work of art, strongly associated with the composer. So all facets, including melody, harmony, and arrangement, are to be appreciated, and rhythm is usually not the most important part of it.

Third, a classical training starts with reading music, whereas a good workshop in traditional music teaches the tune by ear. Let me be even clearer on this. I know a musician who took classical music lessons as a kid and she told me her father would slap her if she gave only the slightest hint of playing by memory rather than from sheet music. On the other hand, in most fiddle workshops people have recorders with them (mobile phones, nowadays), and the teacher distributes sheet music only at the end of the workshop, if at all.

This will sound mean to you if you are a classical musician, but every now and again I meet violinists who cannot learn a tune by ear, and even if they know the tune they still cannot play it by heart. Like barrel organs, they're lost without their sheet music.

So kids, when you want to learn to play music, stop reading it.

Matilda, three songs, and the melancholy of travelling

'Tis the season again. In The Netherlands this means that a bunch of radio jocks have a public fasting exercise to collect donations for the Red Cross. Serious Request it's called, and, guess what, the main thing is to make your donation together with your request for your favourite song. I'm not too much of a listener to 3FM (their radio station), but it's becoming a bit of a tradition for me to request Tom Waits's Tom Traubert's Blues every year:

Waits wrote the song in the 1970s, when his music was usually a bourbon-soaked mix of jazz and blues, with a Sinatraesque ballad thrown in here and there, and as major themes booze, gambling, and bad women. Everything changed, however, when he met Kathleen Brennan. She got him to give up drinking, introduced him to the music of Captain Beefheart, and thereby induced his major shift to the almost absurdistic albums he made from that point on, like Swordfishtrombones, Raindogs, and Bone Machine. I must admit I usually prefer the post-Brennan crazy stuff. His 1970s ballads could verge dangerously on the sentimental and the cliche-ridden; meanwhile, nothing beats the spooky weirdness of What's he building in there?, or the brutal stomp of Singapore.

Except, that is, for this one song. The lyrics conjure up strong images, yet are sufficiently abstract to give the song an enigmatic quality - and to provoke lots of debate on what the song is about. Some think it is about addiction, or even suicide. Tom Waits himself usually introduces the song by saying "this song is about throwing up in a foreign country." Supposedly he wrote the song after a drinking binge in Copenhagen with Danish singer and violinist Mathilde Bondo (hence the subtitle "Four sheets to the wind in Copenhagen"). Another story is that he wrote the song after hanging out with LA's down-and-out ("every single guy...a woman put him there" he is reported to have said).

I used to think the song was about the First World War - seriously. When I started listening to Tom Waits I had been playing Irish music for a few years. The standard repertoire includes The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by the Scottish-Australian songwriter Eric Bogle:

That song is about WW1, telling the story of one of the many Australian soldiers caught up in the murderous meat grinding machine of Gallipoli, in what was in those days the Ottoman Empire. The title of Bogle's song (and the chorus in Waits') refers to Waltzing Matilda, an Australian folksong about a transient worker that was (and still is) Australia's unofficial national anthem. Apparently, 'To waltz Matilda' is Australian slang for travelling by foot with your belongings stuffed in a rucksack. Bogle's song describes how Waltzing Matilda accompanied the soldiers' march to and from the battlefield, their remembrance marches, and perhaps even their afterlife:

And their ghosts may be heard as you pass by a billabong
Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

So when I heard Waits sing:

I'm an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And I'm tired of all these soldiers here
No-one speaks English and everything's broken
And my stacys are soaking wet

I couldn't help but imagine a lonely American, lost somewhere in a faraway corner of the crumbling Ottoman Empire (say, present-day Egypt, or Jordania), with nothing but his once fancy, but now torn and dirty clothes and shoes. And what about these lines?

You can ask any sailor and the keys from the jailer
And the old men in wheelchairs know
Matilda's the defendant, she killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go

I figured the old men in wheelchairs could very well be the veterans in Bogle's song:

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Renewing their dreams of past glory
I see the old men, bent, stiff, and sore
These tired old heroes of a forgotten war
And young people ask: what are they marching for?
And I ask myself the same question

Bogle wrote his song in 1971, so it is possible - but I'm quite sure it is a coincidence and Waits did not have The Great War in mind when he wrote Tom Traubert's Blues.

Not that I care much for whether he did. To me, this image of a forlorn Westerner, lost in a country where he does not speak the language while the world is crumbling all around him, fits the lyrics perfectly. The song has a loneliness and a lostness to it that Waits must have recognized in the LA skid row (or in the Copenhagen porcelain truck after his drinking binge with Mathilde). I usually play the song on my mp3 player when I'm abroad for work. When you are in the bus from the center of Reykjavik to your hotel in a depressing office quarter at the border of town, nothing fits your mood better than hearing this grinding voice wail

It's a battered old suitcase
To a hotel some place
And a wound that will never heal

Just writing it gives me goosebumps: a wound that will never heal. When we travel, we leave behind the places and people we know and love. But we also develop a fondness for the place we've travelled to, which only gets stronger as we stay there longer. What I'd give for just one more bike ride along the coast of Santa Barbara, or a Guinness in Gogarty's, Dublin, or a fried fish and a vinho verde in some small unassuming restaurant on the Azores... Wherever you go, even if you go home, part of you still wishes you were back somewhere else.

Weird music, ditto beer

Call me a snob, but I've never cared much for the music you hear on everyday radio. I don't know what it is. I prefer the grinding doom of Ufomammut and the richness and purity of a skilled traditional fiddler to the polished one-size-fits-all music mostly served on prime time. So while around 80,000 pop music lovers were sweating away in a simmering Rock Werchter, I was one of the 5,000 folk music lovers enjoying the atmosphere, the music, and the local lambic beer at the Gooikoorts festival.

I discovered traditional music (like many of my generation) through The Pogues. While attending college I spent four months in Ireland, going after the local folk music with my guitar and buying a cheap and crappy mandolin. Years later the Saint Chartier festival was a revelation to me: all those musicians, all those dancers, all those instrument makers, in such a small village! As soon as I came home I hung the mandolin on a wall and bought a fiddle. The fiddle's been with me ever since. Slowly the Saint Chartier festival gave way to Gooikoorts, which feels like a much smaller and friendlier version of Saint Chartier with even a higher degree of joie de vivre. In Dutch I would call it "Burgundian", a term that refers to the days when present-day Belgium, Luxemburg, and The Netherlands were part of the Duchy of Burgundy, but also to the stereotype of a people that loves the good life.

Gooik is a small village (about 9,000 inhabitants) in the Pajottenland, southwest of Brussels. The region is famous for its mattetaarten (cakes made from cream and buttermilk), but even more famous are its unique beers. Unlike most beers, where carefully selected yeasts convert the sugars to alcohol, geuze and lambic get their fermentation bugs from the open sky. The beers are an acquired taste: deeply sour, and in the case of lambic not a single bubble of carbonate. But once you get used to the sourness you start appreciating the tones of apple and oak not found in any other beer. Many brewers from other regions, from West-Flanders to the United States of America, have tried to imitate the process by taking samples from the Pajottenland air, but so far they haven't been able to beat the real thing. You need the right mix of micro-organisms, especially Brettanomyces bruxellensis, which is a bacterium unique to the region. Real geuze and lambic can only be brewed in the Pajottenland, and nowhere else.

Since 1997 Gooik has its own geuzestekerij. "Steken" is a local term for blending, so a stekerij is a place where geuze is matured and blended, but not brewed - they get the wort from other breweries and mature and blend it in Gooik. I finally had the opportunity to visit the geuzestekerij and buy some bottles of the stuff. The place is crammed with 200-year old oak casks where the beer matures, soaking in the oak flavour as well as more germs. The beer matures for 3-6 years ("1 bottle = 3 years work", the label says) and is then blended to oude geuze or mixed with fruit. What struck me was the dedication to tradition of the people working in the stekerij, but also its international appeal. Just when I entered the building there was a delegation from Brazil tasting the local brew.

The local brew and the excellent food are just two of the many factors that add to Gooikoorts' Burgundian atmosphere. The bands play mainly traditional European folk, varying from strictly traditional Flemish folk songs, to jazzy interpretations of French dance music, to mixtures of Finnish polka and bluegrass. All generations are present: young parents with toddlers in their arms, teens with hormone-driven chutzpah, pensioners with an open mind. For me, the greatest enjoyment was to meet old friends, and to grab the fiddle and play. Ten years ago, at the first edition of the festival, we would play until the sun rose, sleep a few hours, and party on. Now most of us had kids, a demanding working life, or both, so we took it easy. And easy is how you take Gooikoorts.

Have a great summer.

Wise words from the Bird

Originally I planned to include in my PhD thesis the following quote:

Learn all that stuff and then forget it.

At the time I thought it was Miles Davis who said that, but it might as well have been Charlie Parker (sorry Miles, Bird makes for a better blog post title). I'm not really into jazz: the quote tricked me into looking up some Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on Spotify but after a few songs I always decide to turn on Pelican instead. The closest to jazz that I listen to frequently is the Tom Waits. I absolutely love Tom Waits. Oh, and Ethiopians like Mulatu Astatke or Getatchew Mekuria, but only when I'm in the mood.

But this quote - wow, I could tattoo it on my forehead if I were into that kind of thing (don't worry, I'm not). It defines how I view the theories I work with, as well as the musical traditions I play. I consider myself a mainstream economist, but I do have my question marks regarding the behavioral and ethical models applied in my field. I don't think there is any meaningful way of measuring existence value, if it exists at all. I don't believe economic valuation can capture moral or religious considerations. I appreciate the role that social norms, traditions, or downright stupidity can play in human behavior. But I also think that it is too easy to throw your hands in the air and declare the entire body of neoclassical economics as overly abstract nonsense, or worse, to refuse to learn microeconomics because economists did not predict the latest financial crisis.

The bottom line is that you can only criticize a theory if you fully understand it. By the same token, you can only renew a musical tradition if you master its techniques, its rhythms, its harmonies, and its social context. Miles and Bird could only invent and develop bebop because they understood what came before it. Likewise, if you want better economics, well, make sure that you first understand the orthodoxy.

On the other hand, there is also the "forget it" part. Don't let the tradition hinder your creativity. Dare to break its rules, to explore its boundaries. Dare to question a theory's hidden assumptions, don't accept such excuses as "this is how we have always done it." Know the rules, but don't obey them.

The quote, by the way, never made it into my thesis. My professor thought it cynical, as if I recommended the reader to forget all I wrote. I didn't agree, of course, but I also figured that if he interpreted the quote like that, so would many others. So I left it out. I still regret that decision.

No tu-ning jokes please

I could think of no better way to start the academic year than by welcoming our first Chinese sessioneer:

Read more about the monthly traditional music sessions here.

How to cram the whole world in a small Dutch pub

One of the greatest things about Wageningen is that you meet people from over the world. It's a fairly small university, but it is very internationally oriented, so there is no escaping our international students and staff.

Some of them find themselves in a small pub on a Sunday afternoon listening to a couple of folks playing bagpipes, fiddles, hurdy-gurdies and other strange acoustic instruments. That would be me and my fellow musicians at the monthly traditional music session in Café De Zaaier:

(I'm the one holding the camera.)

We have been doing this every month for more than 10 years now, and I know we should count ourselves very lucky. It's the perfect setting for a traditional music session: the pub is a traditional 'bruin café' (literally "brown pub" - a type of Dutch pub named after its dark brown wooden interior) with a large collection of Dutch and Belgian genevers, many different beers (including Guinness and Kilkenny - Irish sessioneers seem to be quite keen on that) and the owner is a musician with a love for folk music. This being Wageningen, we have enjoyed the company of musicians and listeners from Mexico, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Eritrea, and, lately, the Basque country:

Everybody is welcome to come and listen or to play along. All traditions are welcome - this diversity is one of the fun things! The only thing to mind are three rules:

• We play 'around the table' so that all musicians get a chance to start a tune or a song;
• It is better to play something simple you feel confident with than to play something difficult that you have to start over and over again. In other words: if you play, you play;
• Feel free to join somebody else's tune or song, but don't overdo it, especially if you don't know the song or tune.

Curious? We have a website where you can find all the details.

My highlights from EAERE 2012

My highlights from the 19th annual conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists:

• I was surprised to see how crude estimates of travel costs still are in non-market valuations of recreational sites;
• Also, how few of those studies have done a proper qualitative analysis before they do their quantitative study;
• Linda Nøstbakken had a very nice paper on how a combination of diversified monitoring and self-reporting incentives can greatly enhance monitoring of fisheries legislation;
• Martin Quaas proposed using a "shadow interest rate" as a way of expressing the quality of fisheries management;
• Nick Hanley is a Les Paul man:

And rightly so; Fender people are evil.

I played the fiddle in a Prague biker bar

So this is Bajkazyl:

It started out as a bicycle repair workshop but since last year they have a bar and live music almost every evening. Prague has a small but growing scene with young people interested in traditional Breton and Czech dances, so we played some Breton, French, Dutch and Czech tunes and pissed off a lot of cyclists doing that. Prague has a wonderful liberal atmosphere: any Dutch bike repair workshop trying this would have its ass sued to hell within a week.

It's going to be an interesting EAERE this year

Whoever is bored of the EAERE welcome reception and wants to hear some weird music: I'll be playing that evening in Prague with these guys:


Meet L'Arrache-Coeur, a Czech group playing a very liberal interpretation of French trad music and klezmer. The guy playing the hurdy-gurdy (that's the instrument that looks like a cross between a fiddle and a coffee grinder) is Daniel Kahuda: Daniel stayed in Wageningen a few years ago, where he was a regular visitor of our monthly folk session.

Some years later I was in Prague for the European Congress of Conservation Biology (with very mixed feelings, I must say - see my posts on economics vs ecology). We met up and had a few great gigs and sessions. Here is a picture taken at the Grabstejn World Fest, where we played with L'Arrache-Coeur's accordion player František Tomášek and Puck Duits, who is one of Holland's best bagpipe players.

Anyway, L'Arrache-Coeur is playing on Wednesday evening 27 June, and Daniel invited me to join them. The place is called Cafe-Bar Bajkazyl, and apparently it's a cross between a bar and a bike rental. I have no idea what I'm getting myself into, but I'm sure it'll be fun. Environmental and resource economists welcome.

And now for something completely different

The picture on the right was taken on the first day of this year's Roadburn festival. The venue you see is Het Patronaat (formerly an annex to the nearby catholic church) although most concerts are in 013. For lovers of psychedelic/sludge/stoner/post/doom/whatever rock, Roadburn is the place to be. I mostly prefer the stoner and desert rock bands (I still regret not having seen Fatso Jetson in their own café when I had the chance), but occasionally you see stuff you thought you'd hate but that turns out to be actually quite good. My revelation this year was Sleep, which I thought nothing special on CD but was very convincing on stage.

Another devout Roadburner

Getting a ticket to Roadburn is no easy task: last year tickets were sold out in 15 minutes when they came on sale at 10am CET. Nevertheless, it has a very international audience with visitors from all over Europe and even the United States. That's right: some folks on the American east coast are willing to stay up at 4am to buy a ticket so they can cross the Atlantic Ocean to Roadburn.

One thing I have never understood though: does it really have to be this LOUD? I know the question sounds lame, but at some concerts at least half the audience wears earplugs. I also wear them - I mean, if you're a music lover your ears should be precious to you. It's not just about hearing loss, I once met somebody whose hyperacusis almost drove him to suicide. So why not put the volume down a bit?