Achieveing room to breathe!

Whistle
1

Woo-hoo! I’ve finally figured out how to drop notes from jigs to make breathing room! I’ve understood the concept since first reading Brother Steve, but actually doing it while playing has been another matter entirely. Part of the problem was that have tended to depend a lot on muscle memory, and muscle memory (for me at least) is pretty rigid, and not able to compute on the fly whether the next note is vital or expendable.

But lately I’ve been becoming far less dependent on muscle memory, since I’m finally developing a more holistic awareness of the relationship between the key I’m in and the set of fingerings I’m most likely to encounter there, particularly the notes of the tonic chord. This makes it easier for me to mentally remember the structure and movement of a tune.

Another contributing factor is that I’ve been working on getting a better feel for the rhythm of jigs, and awareness of which sub-beat each note lands on. Previously I’d been sufficiently overwhelmed by the challenge of getting my fingers to cover the right holes in suitably rhythmic way, and so any more detailed orientation was lost in the cognitive overload of attempted performance.

As an exercise in getting a better feel for rhythmic emphasis among the sub-beats, I decided to try distorting an innocent jig into what I think of as an “ultra slide”, by going “ta-YUMP (…) ta-YUMP (…) ta-YUMP (…)”, where the (…)'s are omitted notes, the center notes of each jiggy little group’o’three.

And lo and behold, after alternating playing the ultra-slide version of the jig with the complete version, the two began to merge in my head, and not only did I have a better sense of emphasis among the sub-beats, but also my fingers and intuition now agreed on which notes I could omit to take a breath. Unfortunately, I seem to need to repeat this process with each jig I know… but it’s fun, and it makes my playing sound so much better. It makes me feel like I’m Catherine McEvoy!

Speaking of whom, I think it also helps that lately I’ve been listening to her obsessively, particularly her phrasing. I love how her breath punctuates the music, to make it more interesting, playful and meaningful. And since she’s playing flute, she needs to breathe more, and there’s lots of interesting phrasing going on.

2

SquidGirl, that’s great. Do you listen to much ITM? I find that listening to anyone playing any ITM properly helps my sounding Irish. And as you say, listening to a flute player helps my fluting and listening to a whistler helps my whistling.

But most help of all is sitting next to good players in a session. I guess there’s more to absorb or something.

3

Yeah, lots of whistle and flute stuff, tho’ I also enjoy the podcasts from Clare FM. But mostly i like having the focus be on the one instrument, so I can hear just what s/he is doing with it.

I 'm (quite happily) single and (less happily) insomniac, so I do a lot of my best listening at night. I pick a CD and put it on repeat, and take the edge off my insomnia by closing my eyes and immersing in the music. Enjoyable, educational, and more likely to lead to eventual sleep than getting up in the middle of the night and awakening the laptop…

4

Yes, in Irish flute workshops I’ve done, it’s the notion of where to put in breathing spots that’s the most confusing to people coming from the classical world.

Because they think that they are duty-bound to play every eighthnote in a jig or a reel.

I tell them, “you know how when you’re playing some Baroque piece and you see a long string of eighthnotes coming up so you take a big breath so you can get through it? Well Irish jigs and reels are NOTHING but long strings of eighthnotes. The only way to play the music is to learn WHICH eighthnotes you can leave out in order to create a breathing spot for yourself.”

But there are two approaches (not mutually exclusive) to the placement of these breathing spots that I’ve observed in various players:

  1. there are players to tend to put breathing spots in places that are “out of the way” a bit, hiding them in effect, and vary the point in the melody where they place the breathing spot on each repeat of a phrase, so that the listener gets the completeness of the tune.

  2. there are players to tend to make their breathing spots big and dramatic, using them to create, in effect, a new shape to the melody, and their breathing spots are “built in” to their version of the tune and thus the breathing spot occurs always (or nearly always) at the same point. A fiddler or accordion player learning a tune from such a version would be hard-put to know what note or notes to use to fill in these gaps.

On the flute at least (because to me it doesn’t work as well on the whistle) there’s one particular sort of phrase that players who like to make their breathing spots an important part of the tune will do, but I’m not sure I can describe it:

In a reel where there could be five eighthnotes of the same pitch in a row, a long roll followed by a short roll or a long roll followed by a quarternote if you please, a lot of these oldtimey breathy fluteplayers will play the long roll, then seperate the next note with a “breath push” of the diaphragm rather than with a digit, then immediately after the breath push leave off for a breath.

for example the reel which starts (pardon my ignorance of the ABC system)

Beee eeAG

F#DAD BDAD

the Beee is a B followed by a long roll on upper E. But the next E is articulated with a breath push, and the E after that is left out for a breath, giving

B e (cut) e (pat) e (breath push) e (gap) A G

this gives an amazing lift to the music, much more so than if you articulated all those e’s with cuts and pats, or played the second beat as a long quarternote e.

Listen to Michael Tubridy, he was a great one at that.