Chiff and Fipple Forums

You could of course go wild and make a separate flute for each note. That invention is termed a “kist [chest] o’ whistles” in Scotland, with a list of attested uses here . The oldest of them ties directly into traditional music and is juxtaposed with bagpiping in the text where it appears, publishe...

Dance tunes written in 9/8 normally have three beats per measure, placed on the dotted quarter note/crochet.

Thanks for the additional links! YouTube placed a further one at the head of my “New to You” list shortly after I put a link to the blog on my Facebook page. This is either an astonishing coincidence or kinda unsettling. Either way it’s a really interesting presentation of Niel Gow on his home terri...

If it were still possible to edit the preceding comment, I’d prune it substantially before adding this one. In the interim, I’ve looked at the development of keyboard accompaniment in ITM in the opposite direction. Relevant pictorial and written evidence begins to appear in mid-18th century Scotland...

Remember that Irish flutes mostly lost their keys, only to begin regaining them in the 21st century. This is an outright corruption of history (saying this as a musicologist who began publishing on the history of woodwind instruments over 50 years ago). …no one has offered any reason to question my...

English flageolets aren’t the same as whistles and don’t sound that much like whistles; historically, they were also unnecessarily expensive compared to whistles due to their wooden construction (which is likely why whistles overtook/replaced them in ITM). The English flageolet came first and was b...

Fully keyed whistles were always extremely rare. I’m not aware of more than 1 or 2 makers who ever tried to make them. If instruments such as the csakan (as seen here ) and keyed English flageolet ( here ) and are permitted in this discussion, the value of that appraisal crumbles. As long as we’re ...

“Better,” “superior,” and other such words are only useful if we define “for what” and “for whom?” Hear, hear! I wonder how much discussion of this type surrounded the emergence of the 10-holed fife (eleven-holed if the hole for the lower middle finger is doubled). There are pics of one together wi...

…is there a reason why double holes are common in recorders and not for whistles? Assuming you’re referring to the design now commonly marketed as a Baroque recorder, such instruments are expected to produce a full chromatic scale over their entire range. This is done with evenly voiced in-tune cro...

I am not sure Tony played with the Kilfenora although many musicians from the area sat in with them at one time or another…. But my point was really that the ceilibands have a lasting presence and influence in (Clare) music. I got the impression that Tony was a member of the Kilfenora from what I a...

The older musicians often liked a but of ‘help’ from a backer when playing in a more ‘performance’ type of setting and the piano would have been the instrument of choice from the connection with the ceiliband sound . …just two weeks ago I was at a night with Tony Linnane and, Eamonn O’Riordan as pa...

The Rolling wave had a look at the role of the piano in Irish music. For want of a better place I stick the link here: Thanks! These episodes don’t appear at all on the Rolling Wave podcast, which I follow regularly. Guess it’s time to change venues. Aoife Nic Cormaic ever so informatively traces t...

…my interpretation of the meaning of the “tonguing symbols” used in tutorials or written sheet music, past or present, is not so much a reference to an articulation on a wind instrument, but rather a description of the intended sound in terms of human vocalizations. Tutorial texts through the mid-1...

There always were, and still are, many ways to articulate notes using all stages of the vocal tract. Players, even today, use a very wide range of techniques to achieve the effects they want, and styles differ among players. I would be very surprised to learn that present-day wind players use the w...

Perhaps the title of this thread ‘ Tonguing- where and where not expected’ raised expectations of what the blog would be dealing with. There is a two-paragraph abstract between that title and the link, intended to key such expectations. I would have thought that it clearly enough indicates a 17th-c...