Where was I? I was learning a tune. I was asking myself, what does it mean to learn a tune? The tune in question was ‘The Bag of Spuds’. First I heard it, or heard it again after many years, was from Patsy Hanley’s playing of it on RTÉ. Then I did something that would have been unthinkable at the time, some twenty or thirty years ago, when I was learning tunes day and night: I looked it up on the internet. Back then, in the late seventies, I was immersed in music, and for some years never a day or night went by than a tune, or a rake of tunes, would be beeling about in my head, or I’d be playing them at some session or other. The air was filled with waifs and strays of melody, strains and half-remembered snatches. I’d sit down with a tin whistle in...