As part of learning a tune I also “learn” where I want to put breath placements. After that it’s somewhat in stone. I’m wondering if others are able to decide where to put breaths in a tune improvisationally (aka on the fly) and if that is valuable thing to work toward in ones playing.
Thanks,
JeffS
I dunno about on the fly, but both of my teachers say that in Irish music one should find many more places to breathe than is necessary and vary the breathing pattern. I’ve been told that I shouldn’t breathe in the same place more than twice in a row. I presume this is the dropping a note type breathing rather than the there’s a gap in the music type breathing. Some tunes just have such obvious places to breathe that I don’t think variation is necessary. OTOH, one doesn’t always have as much breath some times as others. Tonight for example in my case.
I’m curious to hear other points of view.
Yes, a lot of traditional tunes seem better suited to fiddles where no breaths are necessary. Learning when to breath and which notes to cut or leave out entirely, is necessary and useful. Nothing is set in stone, because mistakes are average. One hiccup or missed note, or whatever, and the entire train of breaths might be thrown off.
when learning a tune off paper, i don’t like to predecide where to put the breath, i rather learn the tune to where i really know it (not just the notes), and then naturally the breath falls in places that work with the tune.
My wife plays violin and does not always agree with my approach and where i end up taking the breath spots, but that’s not my problem 
If you’re wanting to learn how to breathe in a tune “on the fly” as you put it, listening to good players with clear phrasing is extremely important. Its all about familiarising yourself to the structure of the tune, exposing yourself to the different possibilities of phrasing and experimenting with these choices. The more you listen the more the different possible phrases becomes intuitive to you, and the less you have to consciously think about varying the phrasing. And yes I would say it is a valuable thing to work towards. For one thing it get repetitive for you and very boring for everyone else listening if you don’t vary the breathing.
Having to breathe and using that breathing to create good and interesting phrasing is IMO what distinguishes a flute player from players of other instruments.
And if you’re learning from sheet music I strongly advise you to stop. At this stage it does more harm than good for you.
AMEN!!!
However, I will respectfully disagree with that statement at least in such a blanket form; if you have a good recording of what you’re trying to learn I see nothing wrong with “the dots” as a supplement. Being a visual-type person it actually helps me sometimes to “see” intervals, phrases, the shape of the tune, and … occasionally, even where there’s a good place to breathe!
And of course in cases where I don’t have a recording, playing the dots enough – keeping in mind, of course, phrasings, styles, etc. and the ever-present “How would So And So play this tune?” hypothetical question – at least burns the basics of the tune into my brain.
It’s also handy when one has to learn a lot of tunes fairly quickly.
Even a lot of professionals recognize the efficacy of the dots, or of ABC (which to me is just another form of notation). Go to a workshop, and there’s a pretty good chance there’s going to be something written out in some form. I have what must be close to a ream of “sheet music” actually handed out by Kevin Burke, Matt Cranitch, John Williams, Mary Bergin, John Doyle, John Skelton, Francis McPeake and Darach De Bruin, to name just a few. And then there are the dots on the Scoiltrad CDs. And the old tune collections from, like, the 1700s. Someone has to learn them and record them first, and sheet music’s pretty much the only link there.
I’ll concede sheet music’s a crutch, but as long as you recognize it as such and also concentrate on learning to walk without it, I don’t see it as a mortal sin.
I’m not by any means an agent of the Aural Didactic Gestapo, as I still pick up tunes from the staff , but my breath phrasing on tunes I’ve learned by ear is far more natural than tunes I learned from the staff. And for tunes that I learn from the staff, breath phrasing is far better if I’ve heard a “recording” of the tune.
By “recording” I mean that of a flute playing on its own or with minimal accompaniment so that you can hear as many nuances as possible. I’m not saying it’s bad to learn tunes from super-groups or other instruments, but it’s not as easy.
Cheers,
Aaron
Don’t wanna hijack the thread but this idea of a separation between “dots” and “by ear” bugs me. When I read music - see dots - I hear sound. When I hear sound - I see written music. It’s the same thing. When I learn a song by ear, I usually just go and write it out. When I learn a song by reading, I hear it in my mind the same way and play it.
I’m still quite new to flute playing - about a year and a half. Finding good breathing spots in tunes is something I definately need to work on. There are definately times I breath when I have to rather than when I choose to.
I was considering the approach of actually marking the breathing spots on the music for the tunes I’ve learned from a written score, but that seems much too mechanical. When I start learning a tune, I play it much slower than that I will eventually play in in a session. If I mark breathing spots when I’m playing the tune at a slow speed, they may not work well at all later when I can play the tune faster. It seems to me that finding good breathing spots on the fly is the way to go. Now the questions is, how? …
…there always has to be a showoff!
Can you do the full staff chord thing or just one voice at a time?
That may be my single biggest problem playing the flute. Frequently I try to coax one or two more measures out of a breath than usual. Not only does the sound inevitably start fading, I have to take a breath in a really bad place.
My two teachers are telling me kind of contradictory things – the one trying to teach me phrasing and flow wants me to build up my breath so that I can play longer phrases. The other says there’s no such thing as too many breaths, just too few. Of course, he (both of them, actually) can play probably 1.5 whole sections of a reel on a single breath. There is always counterexample, though. I heard a tune by Micho Russell once in which he took something like 7 breaths in the A part of a reel (one time through). But in such a way that you didn’t notice it unless you were counting his breaths.
These are not contradictctory pieces of advice, if you look at it like this: You goal is to take breaths where you want to, not where you have to. On the one hand, taking lots of breaths is waaay better than running out of air. On the same hand, you don’t want to take a breath out of desperation. So you work on the problem from both ends – find lots of good places for breathing, but also work on not needing them.
Off topic trivia for cocktail parties: Oboists need to find places to exhale, as well as inhale. Sometimes, we can keel over from lack of oxygen, because our bodies have used up all of the oxygen from the air that is still in our lungs but not blown out of the instrument yet.
can you talk continiously without taking a breath? i dont think so, when playing the flute you take a breath when you need to, just like talking or singing, some players take more breaths than others because they need to,
it actually forms a distinctive style for some players.
i think flute players should relax a little when playing and naturally feel the call for breath a couple of seconds ahead of time,
too often flute players try to streatch the phrase that little bit extra any wind up either running out of breath or ruining the tune.
I’ve got a little confusion here. I have tried playing the whistle a bit. I’m not disagreeing with anything here, just describing what I thought and wondering if what I thought is wrong.
I thought that phrasing and breathing were independent of each other in IT dance tunes. Unlike in classical music (I’m not really sure about this) where the end of a musical idea might be a place you would breathe, I thought in IT dance tunes you would only breathe by cutting the length of time a note was held or by leaving out a note that was not critical.
I guess those things could certainly come at the end of a musical idea (my word for a phrase for now), but I didn’t think you were to plan it that way necessarily. In fact, I think I thought you were supposed to avoid breathing at the ends of phrases so it wouldn’t get boring. It seems as though phrasing is often repeated, maybe I’m not hearing it right though.
I guess what I’m saying is I didn’t think breaths were the way you made phrases on the whistle because you might well be breathing during a phrase. How did I think phrases would be created? Well, I guess by tonguing and not-tonguing, I’m not sure now. I don’t know if this makes any sense. I thought you should just breathe when you needed to, making sure you followed the idea of not breathing between notes and picking good spots, but not ones at the ends of phrases.
I mark areas of a tune to take a breath. I establish it early while learning the tune iteself. Presently, I can’t just improvise breath placement b/c I don’t know - intuitively - where to stop in the tune. When I DO attempt it on a jig, for example, I’ll end up leaving out the first note of the bar or something similarly bad. I don’t naturally know to breath on the second note in a bar of a reel or the second note in a jig. It simply doesn’t come to me naturally.
Having a rather impressively large collection of irish flute music I can definately agree w/ the sentiment that some players take more breaths than others. I’ve heard players take a TON of VERY OBVIOUS breaths w/in the tune and it sounds terrific. I’ve heard Matt Malloy play a tune all the way through two times before taking his first, small, quiet breath. I understand the differences here.
And the dot v.s. aural tradition question is another topic.
I had a specific, albeit two part question. 1. How many of you take breaths intuitively throughout the tune, w/out any specific preestablished “watering holes”? 2. Is this intuitive approach something I should be spending my time attempting to establish or is it one of those things reserved only for the masters? Or perhaps nobody really does it.
Best regards to all,
Jeff
It did not come naturally to me at all, so I had to plan it out. Leaving out a note, cutting short a note, and not breathing on the beat did not come naturally to me. As you can see from my question above, I may have some misunderstandings about the whole thing. If I did it intuitively, the breaths would be on the beat between two notes which I understood they were not supposed to be. I thought I should breath frequently (I need to breathe frequently) and quietly and then I guess if I could ever play the tune faster, some breaths would no longer be necessary.
Nope, phrasing and breathing are closely linked in good Irish flute music. A good flute player has his/her breathing spots create interesting and coherent breathing spots, just like you would use punctuation to pause when you are speaking. Or use punctuation to emphasize/frame certain phrases in poetry. This usually is not a highly cerebral activity in practice though, as most experienced players would be familiar with the tune, its structure and its conventions, that it would be all intuitive.
There is also the approach of making your breaths as inconspicuous as possible, but a fluter who uses this approach all the time should consider taking up the fiddle or box instead.
Re: not taking breaths at the end of phrases, or not taking breaths at the same places, I think it depends really. Sometimes breathing in the same place can create an emphatic effect to a musical motif or a way of phrasing, that its hardly a no no. So it all depends. Listening and then listening again is highly important in this respect.
I’d say a lot of it depends, as well, on the setting. . . in a decent-sized session, a lot of the nuances get lost (unfortunately), and if yer fluting, a few breaths repeated in the same spot (Or gaffed, as the case may be) will go completely unnoticed.
That’s not to say that we should all aim to be merely competent in sessions. (Although I’m still trying to get that far! )
I don’t see it as a mortal sin either, and as I have mentioned in previous posts it has its uses. However having beginners (which Jeff sounds like he would be) turn to it will be doing them a diservice in the long run. Sheet music tends to create a very limiting paradigm for people foreign to the music and I have seen it happen too many times to believe otherwise.
I don’t think its ever an all or nothing case. Yes, some spots in any tune would dead-obvious potential places to breathe, as reflected in the structure. Other spots might consciously or unconsciously reflect phrasings handed down by a highly influential player, or a player the fluter would have learned from. But good flute players would also be able to choose spots, play with the phrasings on the fly as well. A spirit of spontaneity and involvement is very important in the music. Its a mixture of all these I think.
The best way to learn it is to listen and listen and listen as usual. You’ll find you’ll hear more and more, until each listening is like a lesson in itself (to paraphrase Harry Bradley). It also takes time, enjoy the ride. Stay away from that sheet music too - the less you use the paper to help you make sense of the music, the more you have to use your ears. And the more you use your ears the better your listening skills will be.