jkrazy52 wrote:
In my school, music classes started in 5th grade. If you wanted to take music, you had to get a "real" instrument. My choice was saxophone ... the parents' choice was a clarinet (cheaper). They won.
~Judy
I wanted a saxophone, my parents couldn't afford more than a clarinet or flute. And I guess they won in the end, because I wouldn't play either. All the girls ended up playing flute or clarinet, and I wanted to play something different.
But I can never remember playing a recorder in school. My first "real" music classes were 7th grade and a mini casio keyboard.
I own a Yamaha recorder that I like very much, but I prefer both the fingering and lightness of the tin whistle.
I sing the birdie tune
It makes the birdies swoon
It sends them to the moon
Just like a big balloon
When I was a child, my parents never played music. They are typical consumers of music but never played despite having an upright piano. (My dad had purchased it as a refinishing project and ended up selling it years later to someone that was going to refinish it) Singing was the only time that they participated, and then only at church.
My neighbor’s daughter played the flute and tried to show how to blow a note. Do not remember anything else about her except that she may have babysat me and made Jiffy-pop (those tinfoil stovetop thingys)
When I entered school they handed me a recorder and had the class follow along to sheet music projected over head. The voice of my recorder was drowned out by the 30 other students. I knew that I wasn’t following along with the notes, but, without hearing myself play I could not correct myself. It felt much like when the class was suppose to read together out of a book and I was stumbling one word behind my lips moving quietly. The same lips that were pressed up against a piece of plastic that had been placed in other peoples mouths and had teeth marks on it.
Later, around 5th grade, they tested us for our musical abilities. We first chose our top three instruments we would like to play, and then took an aptitude test. (In retrospect, it seemed that the test was designed not to play to the strengths of the student, but away from their weaknesses). I had long arms and so I became a trombone player.
For several years I played either patriotic songs or songs that I had never heard before. The songs were a series of notes that were practiced alone and expected to suddenly fit with the rest of the band at the end of the week. I did not understand the music, much like I did not understand the pledge of allegiance that we chanted every morning (although with the childish words that we inserted into it).
So I did what my parents did, I bought my music. It was powerful and I understood it. I listened to heavy metal, classical, and everything in between.
In the end, I wanted to not just consume music, but make it.
Remembering the flute that my neighbor had, I decided to by one at an antique store about the same time I bought my first fife.
For me there was no reason to play music until I appreciated it. The teachers did not have time to find something I wanted to play and I had little exposure. Like my reading, that only improved when I found subjects that I was interested in, I did not learn to play until I had something I wanted to play.
And then I wanted to play so badly, and now I do.
Do I hold a grudge against recorders? The trombone? No, Just memories that can only be laughed about.
I found a recorder in my grandmother's attic when I was about thirteen, in a little box with a fingering chart. I had a blast with it! The first piece I learned, once I got the basics, was a Handel sonata allegro movement from a record my parents had. Saved up all my money for a year to go buy a "real" one at a music store in New York city, and have played them with great pleasure through the years.
And here's the odd part. I truly cannot remember ever buying my first whistle, or learning the fingering, or reading music with it. It was probably sometime later in high school, or college... I had a Generation, or two or three, and played them whenever someone else was playing something that sounded like the right kind of music for it. Old-timey, and later Irish.
And then someone up at a fair in the interior told me about this group. The first time I ever came across the anti-recorder sentiment. Though I thought you were all joking! Now I'm wondering if I'll lose your respect. Well, tough. I refuse to tolerate intolerance, and I didn't want you for friends anyway.
Jennie wrote:And then someone up at a fair in the interior told me about this group. The first time I ever came across the anti-recorder sentiment. Though I thought you were all joking! Now I'm wondering if I'll lose your respect. Well, tough. I refuse to tolerate intolerance, and I didn't want you for friends anyway.
-It was a dark and stormy night, and both parents took up recorder while raising kids- likely for sanity/escape, the same urge which drove one or more of your parents to bridge, book discussion groups, bowling, choir, or just about anything in which the kids are not involved. Anyway, I have good memories of family recorder music and good friends also enslaved by this insidious agent of the muse.
-I think its true as a generality that r*c**d*r players are kind of tighta**es, but a good college friend puts the lie to that chestnut. What can one say about a person with passions for both early music and shockabilly music by by Eugene Chadbourne?
jkrazy52 wrote:
In my school, music classes started in 5th grade. If you wanted to take music, you had to get a "real" instrument. My choice was saxophone ... the parents' choice was a clarinet (cheaper). They won.
~Judy
I wanted a saxophone, my parents couldn't afford more than a clarinet or flute. And I guess they won in the end, because I wouldn't play either. All the girls ended up playing flute or clarinet, and I wanted to play something different.
I played my clarinet for 6 years, then switched to a baritone horn -- and trombone. A major change, but fun. I've actually never met a musical instrument I didn't want to at least try. I don't know how I missed the rec*r .... er that "other" fipple instrument ..... Maybe they weren't available in the stone age (my school years).
Yeah, we had a neighbor who would bring a big shell like that to youth hockey games. He had a hole drilled in it, and he blew it like a trumpet.
One time, he blew it, and the opposing team (like a bunch of 5th graders) thought it was the horn signalling the end of the period, and stopped skating. That's how powerful it was.
Will I be burned at the stake for asking....are there tin whistles with a thumb hole in the back, to make jumping octaves easier? Or does that place it too close to a recorder?
peeplj wrote:
I will say that I like recorders just fine but I've never been able to make Irish music work on a recorder. That's not to say it's impossible, only that I can't do it.
--James
But it is impossible. And that is the problem. People trying to force an instrument into a tradition that it doesn't fit into is the problem. Recorders should be used to play the music that was developed on them and whistles should be left alone to best express the music developed on them.
But you also have the problem of people prefering the recorder sound and so adapting whistles to sound like recorders but still play whistle music. I have come to the conclusion that I don't like this. There is nothing like a tin whistle played in the wild and idiomatic style characteristic to it.
And a consort of recorders playing chamber music can be transporting.
I guess I am an instrumental separationist.
Baglady
Put the music under thier feet and lift them to the dance.
Oh, and,
"If you want to play chords, use standard tuning. It is better." --Martin Carthy
Lost-in-North-Dakota wrote:Will I be burned at the stake for asking....are there tin whistles with a thumb hole in the back, to make jumping octaves easier? Or does that place it too close to a recorder?
SEIZE HIM! SEIZE HIM!!!
...just kidding.
Yes, some people play whistles with a thumbhole in the back. I happen to know a VERY good whistler, studied under Noel Rice, who plays one. What the purpose is I don't remember. She's trad as trad can be, and an awesome player in any case, so it's not for me to fault her about it. I couldn't care less, really.
I got lucky and missed the recorder phase of school. I came to a school in fourth grade that had taught recorder in third, so I was able to start clarinet with no hard feelings. I have no idea when I got my first whistle, but the recorder was a present when I was pretty into Renaissance stuff and my mom thought I needed an appropriate instrument. No hard feelings, either. I tend to play whistle more, especially after I got my Bb Gen.
The recorder quintet at my church played on Sunday. Very nice and stately, like going back 500 years. Then I went home and listened to a Chieftains tape....what fun.
Nanohedron wrote:I just remembered: the thumbhole in the whistle I mentioned above is for Cnat. I don't think it has any application in jumping octaves.
I have a secondhand Burke with a C-nat thumbhole in the back. I don't much care for it personally, and have taped it over.
