stringbed wrote: ↑Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:46 am
The characteristic ornamentation style of the uilleann pipes has significantly influenced current practice on the flute and tin whistle.
Well, I agree with this sentence.
stringbed wrote: ↑Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:46 am
For example, constraints are placed on the use of tonguing which is otherwise a core expressive device on woodwinds blown directly by mouth.
I think this is somewhere between misleading and incorrect, depending on which instruments you are talking about. For example, with tin whistle playing, tonguing is still very heavily used, as evidenced quite explicitly throughout Mary Begrin's tutorial series. Tonguing is not the only ornamentation style she uses, but she still uses it very extensively throughout every tune. The decision to use alternate ornaments in various places is driven by the desire to achieve subtly different musical effects, in the context of the chosen tune and phrasing.
Flute player Conal O'Grada has a nice discussion of this in his tutorial book. He discussed the relative strength of various types of ornament that could potentially be used, and how different choices can be applied in different contexts. The effect of certain ornamentation techniques, including tonging, on the flute is subtly different to the whistle, so while O'Grada's use of tonguing will differ greatly to Bergin's use of tonguing, there is still much commonality between them regarding which notes to emphasis or articulate, and the relative strengths of effect that they consider desirable in different places. And with how these choices integrate with phrasing and breath points.
Tonguing does not occur on Uilleann pipes, for obvious reasons, so pipers have, out of necessity, been forced to explore a wide range of alternate strategies for distinguishing and emphasizing notes. This has lead to a rich variety of approaches to select from. Almost all of these have the potential to cross over to the flute and whistle, and where they have added something deemed valuable they have done so, giving flute and whistle players a richer set of choices to select from when deciding how to express their musical intent. Most of the choices are not, and never have been, captured in written representations of the music, but that is not because they didn't exist.
stringbed wrote: ↑Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:46 am
Inversely, the failure to understand the ITM idiom is often personified by a tin whistle player punching out every note in a tune individually as a naïve recorder player might.
Of course, if you place equal emphasis on all notes, either articulating them all or none of them, that is just wrong, and does indicate a failure to understand the music. That is not an issue of tonguing being a wrong articulation technique per se.
stringbed wrote: ↑Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:46 am
In deeper historical perspective, tonguing has shrunk from being an almost prosodic woodwind technique using an elaborate system of syllables, to simple articulation.
I don't think this is true in practice. 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. There is nothing simple about it today, and I suspect that, if anything, the range of options has grown over time as people have tried to emulate the style of others.
stringbed wrote: ↑Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:46 am
Tonguing syllables were still in their heyday in 1672, when they appeared in a treatise on bellows-blown bagpipes to describe what was to become a design consideration with the uilleann pipes. Prior to their advent, traditional Irish dance tunes were played on other wind instruments, leaving a question about how extensively tonguing syllables may have figured in period performance.
This is discussed in detail
here.
I think the question you finish with here is really more about how music was represented in written notation over history. This has never really been that relevant in the context of the oral tradition of Irish traditional music, where there is a very rich diversity of techniques, most of which have rarely, if ever, really been notated in a formalized way. Some of the more recent tutorials, such as Grey Larsen's "The Essential Guide to the Irish Flute and Whistle" have attempted to define notational standards for addressing this, and while these are quite rich, they tend to immediately run into the problem that the range of techniques used in practice, and the diversity of styles, both personal and regional, is so rich that they are criticized as appearing too rigid or restrictive, even if that was not their original intent.
I agree that this is an interesting subject that deserves much more study. And I should add that I do agree with most of what you said in the article.