Ornamentation

[Guinness]

If you want to tongue everything, play the recorder or Boehm flute.

More accurately, if you want to tongue everything, play classical music. You can articulate with cuts, taps and rolls on a recorder or a boehm flute. It's not about the instrument.

Tonguing every note in classical music is atypical. One does not define the other. Tonguing every note on a whistle does have a staccato effect, not unlike single note bowing on a fiddle (Donegal style?) or some styles of button accordion playing. Are these folks classical wannabees?

[talasiga]

I am really liking this Guinness today.
Seeing as I am teetotaller can I go to a pub
and ask for another post of Guinness instead of a pint?

[pancelticpiper]

Guinness states that tonguing everything in "classical" music is atypical, but when I've taught Irish flute or Irish whistle workshops I always get people new to Irish music with a "classical" background, coming from Boehm flute or recorder, who have the greatest difficulty playing without tonguing every note. Some of these people simply cannot play without tonguing, and I've had to resort to having them hold their tongues against the roofs of their mouths so that they can experience what it's like to play fully legato. Much of the problem may lie in the way Irish music is notated: when "classcial" musicians see those notes which are not tied/slurred together they automatically seperate them with tonguing. Then there's the other extreme: I was at a Baroque flute workshop and an eminent expert on Baroque music told us that on the Baroque flute you tongue everything, even when notes are slurred together. True legato, he taught, is never done.
Likewise these "classical" people sitting in Irish flute or whistle workshops often play a constant vibrato on every note and sometimes it is simply impossible in a one-hour workshop to get them to stop doing it.

[talasiga]

Coincidentally, this other topic has come up about now and some members are advising a newbie to tongue his Irish whistling a bit more
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=52698 for to improve his playing. They are giving other good advice also, of course.

[Guinness]

...when I've taught Irish flute or Irish whistle workshops I always get people new to Irish music with a "classical" background, coming from Boehm flute or recorder, who have the greatest difficulty playing without tonguing every note. Some of these people simply cannot play without tonguing...

Yes, that may very well be. But just how advanced were these classical folks? Tonguing is almost the first thing that's taught on every wind instrument. Could they like play this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_ZSSkMzS5E

Sheet music here (for clarinet):
http://www.free-scores.com/download-she ... p?pdf=2288

Or here (for flute):
http://notes.tarakanov.net/flauto/syrinx.zip

(Did you hear or read lots of tonguing?)

[Mitch]

I think much of this difficulty with "classically" trained musicians is not justified.

from what I understand, a fomally trained musician would have no difficulty with the legato/stacato style of whistle playing if it was present in the notation - the formal approach has a certain respect for the composer/arranger who they assume has made the effort to include all the important nuances within the notation. Such nuances are largely absent in the notation we use in ITM - here we assume that the player posesses enough knowledge of the style to be able to faithfully apply it.

In all that there is still the danger that one may become no more than a human-jukebox no matter which approach you took.

[talasiga]

a matchless post by mitch ......

[walrii]

Building on what Mitch said, I wonder if we sometimes confuse the beginners at classical music with classical music as a whole. I would define a professional in any field as one who, first and foremost, has complete command of the tools of his trade. The professional musicians I have known (whether they got paid to play or not) had complete command of their instrument and could play it in any fashion required by the music and the setting.

I can imagine a classical clarinet forum where one of the old heads describes a newbie whistler coming to the clarinet and slurring all the notes with no articulation and making the whole thing sound run-together and muddy (a pretty fair description of my early attempts at legato). This imaginary clarinet teacher then wonders why the whistlers just don't tongue some notes and clean the whole thing up. We whistlers would all note that the clarinet teacher is confusing a beginning whistler with whistling in general and would point out that good whistlers DO tongue notes and, in fact, are quite good at it, they just don't use it very much. We may sometimes be taking the same approach to critiqueing "classical" music.

[Guinness]

"If you want to tongue everything, play the recorder or Boehm flute."

"...if you want to tongue everything, play classical music."

If you can`t tongue the notes, then play a toy like the whistle!

No, the real issue is RESPECT.

[talasiga]

.
......No, the real issue is RESPECT.

I have, in my particular tangential way, somewhat disagreed with pacelticpiper's comments here. I hope that my disagreement was not marked by disrespect.

We do need to respect the freedom to say things and to say things incompletely sometimes at the risk of being misunderstood.
I mean, who would want to fit a thesis in every post. ?

[pancelticpiper]

In a one-hour workshop I don't have the time to get into people's background, experience/skill level, etc etc. I have to take the people who happen to show up and do whatever it takes to make them sound as "Irish" as possible in a few minutes. Often I can infer their recorder background, such as when they show up with several high-end recorders and one whistle they told me they just bought five minutes ago. Or I can infer a Boehm flute background due to the high-end Boehm flute in their lap, and a cheapie whistle they just bought. It's these very people, whatever their background, skill level, or experience level, who usually play with constant tonguing and vibrato, and insist on playing rolls like classical "turns".
Yes the notation is usually the problem as I stated above. I've actually written out a few tunes especially for these workshops with ALL the articulation etc notated correctly, which has helped these people understand the music very quickly (a picture is worth 1,000 words). I also have a "Rosetta Stone" page with excerpts of tunes the way they are usually notated in Irish music, with a detailed notation of the same passage for comparison. I explain that, as whistle/flute players, they by necessity will have to become their own arrangers, knowing where to put in the breathing places etc.

[jemtheflute]

Just to reinforce a point already made: the main reason that "classical" players of any instrument stereotypically play ITM or other trad music totally détaché when notation is plonked in front of them is that they are simply reading that notation according to the mainstream convention which expects articulation and ornamentaton to be notated by the composer/copyist. They are reading what they think they see.

The notation of traditional music has evolved a slightly different set of conventions, from its early days of (mostly classicaly trained) collectors writing down as best they could what they heard. Because of the relatively short-phrased, highly repetitive nature of most trad dance music, proficient players play repeated sections slightly differently every time. Different instruments articulate and ornament differently on the same melody according to the idiom/technical capacities of each instrument. These facts make it pointless to write down in full "classical" notation a precise indication of such details, unless one is attempting to record accurately and fully a particular performance (or, as Pan has said, to provide stylistic exemplars to classical players). Therefore we have a convention that trad melodies are written out "straight", without phrasing or articulation being marked, and with "ornamentation" either omitted or indicated loosely/schematically as in the Ceol Rince books. Explain this to a classical player and they should get the point! Even if they are not period instrument specialists, they are likely to have played enough Baroque music, written before composers wrote in all the playing instructions, that they are not entirely unused to applying a set of interpretative conventions carried in their heads to relatively "plainly written" notation. They just need to be taught the conventions and the un-notated, implicit idiomatic stylistic/technical expectations.

Orchestral musicians are assuredly quite capable of playing legato, without vibrato, etc., if they know (i.e. get told!) that that is what they need to do! No-one can be expected to pick up unfamiliar ideas/practices by osmosis/telepathy or whatever, nor should they be criticised for not having special knowledge of something unfamiliar to them! Many, but not all(!!!!) orchestral players find playing solely by ear very difficult (they haven't practised it - it is a learnt skill, like any other in music - so it is unfair to criticise them for being "unmusical" for that, just as it is unfair for some of them to sneer at people who don't read dots/play fluently in all keys) however technically accomplished they may be: but if they can learn by ear, they will be as capable as anyone of copying what they hear. Their necessary abilty to sight read fluently is dependent on consistency of notation standards.
Surely we should welcome and encourage their interest?

[sbhikes]

One thing I wonder about with classical musicans, the ones that are really very good, is why they do not sound Irish. I mean, if they are really very good musicians they ought to be able to hear that they do not sound the same with the vibrato and the tonguing and playing rolls as turns etc. So why do they not try to emulate what can be heard by real Irish folk musicians? Do they feel that folk musicians are doing it wrong?

I'm thinking here about two musicians in particular. One is a woman I heard in a pub playing "Irish music" in an "Irish band". Excellent flautist, and a scholar of music with a Master's Degree in Ethnomusicology, but it just didn't sound Irish. And it wasn't about her beautiful sterling silver flute. It was about her vibrato and tonguing.

The other is Sir James Galway. I bought a CD. He's an excellent flautist but does not sound Irish. When he plays the penny whistle I have to laugh at his rolls. They are turns, not rolls.

Why do neither of these two excellent musicians try to sound Irish? Is it because they cannot hear it? Or they think that their way is better? It makes no sense.

[jemtheflute]

Re: Jimmy Galway - he IS, of course, Irish! From Belfast, as he endlesly reminds people when talking - and he's a fine raconteur in the best Irish tradition! Although he very early chose the classical route, he was not, I believe unaware of or unexposed to both trad and flute band music in his childhood, although in protestant Belfast in the 1950s there may not have been much trad due to its Catholic/Republican associations. He left home to study classically in London in his teens, so there the influence may have ended, although because of his Irishness he has been (commercially) rubbed together with ITM players on-and-off ever since he became famous in the 1970s - most infamously with Matt Molloy on the Val Doonican show on the BBC. His whistle playing is certainly not very traditional in style, and I suspect you are right that he isn't very interested in doing things the trad way. He doesn't try to play Baroque music with any cognisance of appropriate performance practice either, although that is now a fairly "mainstream" thing to do. He's an out-and-out late Romantic mainstream classicalist (which is a "tradition" in itself!), and a very accomplished one at that - if that is what you like. He certainly worked incredibly hard to get where he is and be able to do the things he can do - more than most of us can imagine, let alone contemplate doing. Me, I like period instrument, historically informed classical and traditional traditional....... so Galway's rarely to my taste, though I respect his technique and his ability to communicate and enthuse.

[PallasAthena]

The other is Sir James Galway. I bought a CD. He's an excellent flautist but does not sound Irish. When he plays the penny whistle I have to laugh at his rolls. They are turns, not rolls.

I noticed the same thing about Galway's "Irish" playing. It doesn't sound right. His tone is absolutely beautiful, but it is too smooth for trad--it seems that most traditional flutists have a slightly airier tone. Also, they use their breaths to accent notes in a way Galway doesn't.

His classical playing, however, is amazing beyond question.

(By the way, is it just me, or to ITM fiddlers hold their bows differently than classically trained violinists?)