The not-so-slow music session

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There are some pubs around here which host folk music ‘sessions’; when anyone can just turn up and join in. The snag is that unless you are an accomplished player it can be really hard to join in, everyone plays so fast, they know all the tunes off by heart or if they don’t they are talented enough to just join in by ear, and the tunes just merge from one into another, often with no explanation or introduction. To try and help with this, someone about ten years ago set up a ‘slow session’ as a sort of entry-level get-together for people to build up their confidence. The sessions are held once a month, but after a few years of the same musicians regularly going along, they have all got so much better at it that now they generally play rather fast as well! I have one friend (we sometimes meet up to play our recorders together) who tried to go but found it a horrible experience. She found it unfriendly, she couldn’t work out what tunes they were playing and when she did hear them announce the name of a tune she got flustered looking through the music and couldn’t find the right place to join in. She ended up leaving at the interval after the first hour, and to make matters worse, on the way home her recorder fell out of her bicycle basket into the road and got damaged! Afterwards her music teacher told her that if she had known she was going she would have told her not to do it – two other of her students also went along on previous occasions and found that it really knocked their confidence. So not such a slow session after all