benhall.1 wrote:
Nanohedron wrote:
BTW, I'm in the "The whistle, as a class, is diatonic" camp.
I swing both ways on this one.
Twice the fun - or twice the disappointment.
Allow me to be serious for a moment: I get that. Totally. If you play a whistle with scads of half-holing and such, you get a more or less chromatic result so far as it goes. BUT: as NicoMoreno pointed out, how about playing in the key of Eb on a D whistle? At best it would be a parlor trick. Supposing it could be done, I'll stick my neck out and guess that it wouldn't even sound good. So that's why I say diatonic. Press me harder and we can allow for chromatic departures, but they're
departures, and that word makes all the difference. An illustration:
There was a fellow, a professional clarinetist IIRC, who was trying out a whistle for the first time. He was pretty good for starters - like a duck to water, you could say - but in the key of G he was confounded over what to do for Cnat, and I had to show him. He had understandably taken the layout at face value, so the concept of crossfingering wasn't even on his radar.
The best concession I can make in this debate is that the whistle is diatonically
constructed. Not much of a concession, is it...
To me, the instrument's construction is the crux of the issue, not what you can wring out of it. In its construction, a fully keyed flute is chromatic; all the notes are right there at a touch. In its construction, a keyless flute (or a whistle) is diatonic; you can get accidentals, but you have to perform tricks to do it, and a satisfactory outcome is not guaranteed.