Terry McGee wrote:
PB+J wrote:
In the quote you added he goes on to say that anyone serious as a musician--anyone desiring to make money at it--played the fiddle or the flute: "No one but a born musician, or one who had no other outlet for his musical instinct, was likely to learn to play the flute."
I think you meant to say "played the fiddle or the
pipes" in the above?
"The halt, lame, and blind, driven to the practice of music as a profession, invariably chose the Union pipes or fiddle, as the most available instrument to touch the sensibilities of the people".
Interesting the choice of the word "available".
I think O'Neill is a difficult source, given he includes the whistle in his omnibus "flutes". The economics of whistle and flute availability are different now and were surely different then. But we have few sources to work with!
Yes, fiddle or the pipes!
He is a somewhat difficult source. In histories of jazz most of the focus is on tenor and also sax, trumpet, and piano, more or less in that order, and the reason has to do with ideas about progress an innovation. Jazz is supposed to be moving forward and to have an avante garde and stylistic breakthroughs; it's usually viewed more through the lens of art music than folk music, and the musicians who fit that model tend to be horn players. It's a perfectly good way to see the history of jazz but it's not the only way, and it has its own problems. It's a "narrative frame" just like O'Neill's claim about the flute are a narrative frame.
I'm still trying to figure out O'Neill's specific way of understanding what Irish music is. Sometimes it's the mother at her chores lilting, but usually it's some virtuoso who is way better than anyone else. His letters spend a fair amount of time rating this or that player above other pipers or fiddlers. His model isn't really folk music in that case, it's virtuoso performance.
You would know better than me--had flute players figured out how to play irish dance tunes yet? It may be a dumb question, but I really don't know. The history of guitar, for example, is full of guys figuring out how to get the guitar to do sort of what a piano does, or sort of what a horn does, or trying to sound like they have a bass player when they don't. When I listen to those Tom Morrison recordings I hear a guy figuring out how to make the flute do stuff it doesn't easily do. I wonder if, in O'Neill's day, much before the 1920s, flute just wasn't played the way it is now? I wonder if O'Neill played the flute like Morrison, or if he played it in a different way that left the dance tunes to the pipers and the fiddlers?