Bergin tutorial: starting w/o tonguing??

Whistle
1

I’d learned from other tutorials that one should always tongue a note either starting a tune or after a rest.

But in Mary Bergin’s tutorial (Vol 1 p 24) she shows the tonguing pattern for “Níl Sé 'na Lá”. And she shows untongued notes in the second, fourth and sixth full measures following eighth-note rests.

And on the CD, it sounds like she is indeed playing just that way - starting those notes after a rest by just blowing. I can’t even hear a throat catch, much less tonguing.

She doesn’t comment on this in the tutorial.

Comments? Are my older tutorials all wet? An idiosyncrasy of Mary and some others? Or am I hearing wrong?

2

Any tutorial that tells you “always” is not to be trusted. :wink: Music is an art, not Ikea instructions.

But look, you can’t learn everything all at once. Any good tutorial or teacher will choose to instruct a subset of everything you can possibly do, to get you started: Always cut with the T3 finger; always roll 3-beat notes; always vent the second register D; always tongue a starting note; etc. You build a repertoire of solid techniques to handle typical situations. Then, when you gain more experience, you can add all the other things you can do.

Tonguing a starting note is a good default. Not tonguing it, using breath only, is equally valid. Learn the one well, then the other. Then throating it, huffing it, cutting it, sliding into it, etc.

Of course players, including top players, tend to fall into habits, or at least preferences. It’s part of what defines a player’s identifiable style. I haven’t studied Mary’s articulations for a while. But if she tends to prefer breath only, it’s natural that that’s what she teaches. After all, presumably one chooses the Mary Bergin tutorial instead of another because one likes her playing. So try it her way. If you’re already comfortable with tonguing, you’re adding another arrow to your quiver.

And BTW, it’s excellent that you’re double checking this by close listening to the recordings. You’re doing it right. :thumbsup:

3

I haven’t looked at the tutorial in great detail, more a quick leaf through at the launch, but most tunes seemed to have fairly detailed instructions on what to do where. It makes sense though, from the instructor’s point of view, to ease off on the detailed instructions at the very start in order to let the very new player get on with playing the notes without having to think too much about anything else.

4

If you do use tonguing, be sure to keep it subtle. Just enough to help get the note started cleanly. The higher up the scale you go, the more useful a bit of tongue is.

5

I’ve not seen Mary Bergin’s book, but I have quite a few “how to play” books for uilleann pipes, whistle, and Irish flute and nearly all of them have things incorrectly notated, or incorrectly explained, or both. (“Correct” meaning how the person who wrote the book actually plays.)

Usually it’s because the traditional players who write these are not familiar with the norms of music notation. Oftentimes it’s because the players are not aware of how they themselves are playing things (which one sees at workshops all the time, with these people in the flesh).

I’m not talking nuances so subtle that notation cannot express them; of course notation will always fall short of the actual sound! I’m talking about the sorts of things that occur in Irish performance which are an ordinary everyday expected part of musical notation in ‘legit’ (non-trad) music, things that written notation expresses all the time, but which are curiously absent from any notation of Irish music.

So if Mary Bergin has her exact articulation (or lack thereof) correctly notated, good for her! There’s a real need for correctly notated Irish music: people coming to trad music from the “legit” world will be able to plainly see what trad players are doing because it’s written into the music. Trad players oftentimes like to make these things sound mysterious.

The only time I can recall seeing anyone accurately notate a performance of Irish traditional wind music was at a whistle workshop many years ago. I don’t remember who the teacher was, but he had written out, in painstaking detail, several Mary Bergin medleys from her Feadoga Stain album. Every tongue, slur, and breath was notated, just as might be found in a fully notated piece of orchestral flute music. It was an eye-opener for me and extremely useful to have Mary’s approach to articulation clearly laid out for all to see.

Anyhow, from the title of this thread I thought it was going to be about Mary advocating that beginning whistlers not tongue at all, at first. I see it isn’t. But it would make sense, because people coming from Baroque flute, Boehm flute, and recorder always misunderstand the tonguing in trad Irish whistleplaying, that it is carefully chosen punctuation/articulation laid over an essentially flowing legato groundwork (rather than a tongued attack being an essential everpresent aspect of each and every note).

6

Not at all. In fact,I’ve never seen another tutorial which teaches so much tonguing in each tune.

Such quantity that it would be too much of a stylistic shift which I’m not interested in making to play in that manner. Lest some beginner reads into this that I don’t think they’re really good tutorials-they are.

7

Interesting that this thread is happening just after I dug out that old Joe McKenna Low Whistle CD. I’ve not listened to it since I first got it several years ago. It really surprised me how much tonguing he does, more than sounds ‘right’ to me.

Thing is, for years I played Irish flute and I didn’t tongue at all on that, while I played soprano D whistle with about as much tonguing as people often do, the Mary Bergin style I suppose it could be called. Now I’m playing Low D whistle all the time and I’ve been floating somewhere between those two extremes, using some tonguing but much less than I would on soprano whistle. Even that amount of tonguing has been criticized, because one person described a YouTube video I posted as being, how did they say? “pippity poppity” or summat. For sure Low Whistle lends itself to a flutelike flowing style.

So I was taken aback, a bit, to hear Joe McKenna throw in loads of tonguing in every phrase. What would my pippity poppity critic say? Oh, he would probably think it sounds great.

8

Yeah, it is a challenge to tongue as much as she suggests, but who am I to argue? I’ll give it my best shot and hope some of that Mary Magic rubs off on me.

I think my playing is better as a result.

My two gripes are her inclusion of her own penned compositions rather that sticking solely to traditional repertoire. I prefer to learn tunes I will be able to use in future sessions.

And secondly many of the reels are in the same key (A?) and are very similar in structure. They get all muddled in my head.

But, if you play along with Mary and you sort of sound like she does surely you can’t be going too far wrong?