Any good books?

Whistle
1

Hello,
I’m new to the forum and happy to be here. Recently I started to learn the Tin Whistle for a high school senior project. I’ve been doing pretty well with the learning but we have to do a research paper where we show examples of sources we used for our project. I am at a loss because I can’t find any sort of book on whistles besides song books. I was wondering if anyone knew of a good book or website for whistle history or anything else that might be helpful in my project. Anything help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Brendan

2

Hi Brendan,

Welcome to C&F. :smiley: I am not sure if this will help but I think that the gentleman that wrote this article http://www.chiffandfipple.com/lehistory.html is a member of this website. Maybe he could head you in the right direction if you would email him.

Cheers,
Kathy :slight_smile:

3

I’ve recently been trying to do some research on the history of the tinwhistle. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of information out there, but both of these books did have some information:

  • Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance by David Munrow (Oxford University Press, 1976)
  • Musical Instruments of the World by the Diagram Group (Paddington Press Ltd., 1976)

Hope this helps!

4

Hi there, if you are looking for a basic tin whistle tutor there is a pretty good one available in Ireland and maybe at Amazon. It is called How to Play the Irish Tin Whistle, by John Ryan and while it is certainly basic it also gets you into playing irish tunes without having to read music!

5

Hi John - I have that tutor book, not bad at all. It covers the basics, some info on ornamentation, and gives twenty-one tunes using the letters of the notes instead of dots on a music staff. I’m actually planning on getting rid of it (moving soon, so cutting down on clutter) so if anyone wants to talk to me about it please send an email or private message.

6

The two Grey Larsen (Essential Flute & Whistle and Tin Whistle Toolbox) books at http://www.greylarsen.com/ are apparently execellent (I don’t have them yet).

Grey also has a bunch of sample excerpts from the two books there in PDF that have some good information in them, and the Finger Exercises E-book is also worth the money.