When I mouth-whistle, I separate the notes by briefly stopping the breath, then starting it.
I think those are glottal stops. Anyhow it’s as close as I’ve been able to come to being
able to say clearly what I think they are. Comments welcome as to whether this is accurate.
Catherine McEvoy, in a workshop at the St. Louis Irish Fest, advised us to use glottal stops
as our means of attacking notes, as opposed to tonguing, say.
I’ve been trying to do this.
Also someone pointed out to me (in a thread partly about Patsy Hansy, in fact) that, with practice,
it’s possible to do a series of glottal stops very rapidly, so that one can substitute glottals for
ornaments like rolls and crans.
Not all teachers have told me this. One told me to tongue. But I certainly like Catherine M’s playing
and I’ve been trying to do this, erring on the side of separating notes with glottals, often replacing
ornaments with rapid series of glottals. I like the effect, so far.
I wonder what people think of this and if anybody else is doing it? Emphatically I am NOT
saying this is the only way to go, and it strikes me as an interesting way to
approach articulation.
Yes, the stopping you use when you mouth-whistle is, at least for me, the same as what people refer to as a glottal stop or gutteral stop or “throating” (to use Grey Larsen’s term for it).
Catherine can do lightning-fast triple-stops with her throat that sound like tongued triplets but better; she only uses them on a few tunes (there’s a hornpipe she plays where she does this).
I think of these stops as similar to playing a stacatto passage on the pipes: the default position is a closed windpipe and you’re letting notes out one by one, closing between each. The glottal stop is used to end the note, and you use a breath pulse when you open your throat for the next note. Glottal stopping is as much about how you end a note as how you begin it.
Catherine once demonstrated how a tune (the Mountain Top) sounds with no stops and how it sounds with glottal stops. That’s a tune that lends itself well to cleanly separated notes in the first part, but not all tunes would sound right that way – some tunes like the Copperplate in G, for example, sound better played legato. You wouldn’t want to play all tunes with stops nor would you want to play all tunes totally legato.
Way back when I was first learning flute I was trying to teach myself and somehow got into the habit of using WAY too many glottal stops. It was to the point, like you said, where I’d use them in place of proper ornamentation. I articulated most notes this way and my playing was very staccato and had no flow whatsoever. It sounded terrible, and I was rightly scolded about it during my first flute lesson. I quickly learned to stay away from this technique and ONLY use it when note separation can be accomplished no other way. My advice would be to use this sparingly, and certainly not in place of traditional ornamentation.
But glottal stopping is in fact a traditional way of separating notes. I wouldn’t call it ornamentation. I almost always use glottal stops to separate repeating notes; some people advocate using grace notes to separate repeating notes but if you listen carefully to good traditional Irish flute players (apart from a few exceptions like Paddy Carty) you’ll find that most of them separate repeating notes with stops, or they’ll use stops for the first two repeating notes in a series of three and a cut on the third note.
Listen to the playing of Jack Coen, for example – lots of glottal stops, no rolls anywhere, lots of cuts and triplets. Wonderful music. Even a supposedly “smooth” player like Mike Rafferty used a lot of glottal stops; you can often hear him vocalizing on his recordings when he does the stops (it can be challenging to do glottal stops without vocalizing, especially in the second octave).
Ditto what Brad said. I cannot imagine playing without glottal stops. I never tongue, though I do sometimes try to tongue a triplet – especially on the C.
As an illustration, if you listen to this clip of Matt Molloy from a Willie Clancy Week performance in the 1980s, you’ll hear lots of glottal stops; he uses them to separate repeating notes and also in passages of single unornamented notes. There’s a lot of very fast finger articulation going on here, but also plenty of glottal stopping.
This is a good example of a flute playing who’s usually described as having a smooth flowing style, and yet if you listen closely you’ll hear glottal stops a-plenty.
Whether I use glottal stops or tonguing tends to come about organically. Sometimes the separation of notes just seems right when done by the tongue, but if the sound seems off, I will switch to glottal stops without really agonizing over it. My conclusion, then, is to use whichever suits the way I want the tune to flow. I don’t think there is a right or wrong to the decision. I don’t do either when doing rolls, cuts, or strikes.
I disagree with you there, drewr. From what I have understood many players use lots of glottal stops, sometimes every 2./3. note. Glottal stops are also often preferred over rolls when the last note of a “three note sequence” falls on the first beat in a bar. For example, first four bars of McKenna’s Jig: d2B, BAB, dBB, BGE. Between the third and forth bar is a “three note sequence”. If you attempt to roll these three Bs, you will loose some of the momentum and rhythm in the tune, because the tap in the roll will not give as great an rhythmic effect as a glottal stop (or tonguing/articulation). Kevin Crawford would throat all the three Bs (three glottal stops in a row!), with great success, as this adds great lift and beat to the music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8fyLylJEhs
I think the key to doing successful glottal stops, is to make them more “gentle”, softer. This won’t make the tune sound as staccato.
Hairballs and furballs and whiskers on kittens,
glottal stops, tonguing and warm woolen mittens,
old cocus flutes with keys tied down by strings,
these are a few of my favourite things…
