Cut 'n' roll

Whistle
1

Mightily confused about cuts and, therefore, rolls.

Hope someone can understand and explain.

I first thought a cut was a grace note like a piano grace note where you slide briefly from a tone or semitone above to the main note.

I went to a whistle website and looked at ornamentation. The cut to the G was represented, as I expected, by a tiny A before the main G. No worries. I practised. Then I played the MP3 and lo and behold. The guy is playing not A/G but B flat/G.

When I scroll down to look at the fingering, he’s raising left 2 to make B flat just before the G. I figure a cut is the FINGER above the note then, not the tone or semitone according to key.

Sadly, it’s not that simple. In a new piece (same site) they have someone cutting to F#. But the fingering chart shows the player keeping the F# fingers down but just raising left 2 to make A# for the cut. The explanation talks about the A note, not the A sharp and the notation shows A and not A#. Is this an idiosyncracy of whistle music?

I draw the following conclusions:

  1. cuts can be from any note above the main note
  2. the ‘grace’ note shown in tiny notation is not the note to be played but signifies the hole to be uncovered - A means just the 2nd hole, G means just the third

But am I right? And what on earth would happen with a cut to main note C?

Does anyone understand what I’m saying? Am I a lone voice in the wilderness?

Thanks!

:boggle:

2

A cut is NOT a grace note. Forget all about gracenotes
when talking about cuts. It’s confusing because some
people use gracenote notation to show where a cut or
a tap is expected, but they’re not the same.

A cut is percussive. You lift one of the fingers above the
lowest closed hole very briefly and put it back down. You
do this so quickly that no other note is heard. Instead,
you should hear the note you’re playing separated as if
you had tongued the note in the middle.

Because the cut itself has no tonal value, it shouldn’t
matter which finger you cut a note with, but it turns out
that some are easier than others, and on some whistles
different cutting fingers might make the cut sound cleaner,
so it takes some experimentation to find your best cutting
finger for each note. And you’re right, you can’t really cut
C#, you have to tap it (strike the B hole very quickly to
separate the C#).

Brother Steve explains it very extensively on his site:
http://www.rogermillington.com/siamsa/brosteve/twiddlybits1.html

3

Yep. What you tell me is exactly what I understand a cut to be - it’s just that the musical notation I’ve seen on sites like Whistle Workshop gives the wrong impression. I imagine if it sounds and feels right, then you go for it.

Better to have the twiddly symbol (I would have said mordent, but fear use of classical terminology!) than to try to represent by using the grace note notation as it gives the wrong impression entirely.

No offence to the workshop, which is a good site in IMHO, but if you’ve learnt classically then you find you’re a slave to the music.

As opposed to Grace Jones, who was a slave to the rhythm, obviously…and no relation to Grace note… :smiley:

4

Ryan Duns also demonstrates cuts and rolls somewhere in his video tutorials:
http://www.youtube.com/user/RyanDunsSJ
Seeing him doing it might help clarify…

5

The mordant and/or turn symbol is usually used
for rolls. Grey Larson proposes his own notation
for cuts, taps, and rolls in his books, but I lost
my copy and can’t remember. It’s tough because
if we want to use ABC or other programs which
are limited to a standard set of musical notation
symbols, you have to overload them. And that
does tend to confuse people coming from a
classical background.

And if you’re going to learn ITM, you’re going to
be told many times by many people to free your-
self from written music as much as possible.

6

Have a look at this http://www.rogermillington.com/siamsa/brosteve/

7

Yep. Already been there - and every other whistle site in the universe.

Addictive, isn’t it!

And all the YouTube whistlers… :thumbsup:

8

This is exactly why Gray Larson (and I swear I’m not trying to promote his book in my recent posts, but it is an exhaustive treatment of whistle and ornaments) has developed and championed a different notation for cuts to eliminate the intuitive notion that it’s a grace note.

9

You’re not confused at all. :wink:

10

you know there seems to be a myth that classical music is played as written - sort of true sometimes but certainly not always - for example Baroque music was often written without slurs and certainly was not meant to be played with all the notes tongued or bowed, you have to know the accepted way (which probably changes just like fashions) Of course editors have added marks and ornamentation to the music most read but it was often not there in the original manuscript.

To play any music it helps to listen to it played well so you can get the style. Even the most carefully written down music is open to some interpretation.

Also dots can be useful, I sat in a session the other day that I had not been to for a couple years - they asked me to start a tune, so I did, one that I had learned from O’Neill’s 1001 (spelling?) and no one knew it though several thought it was quite beautiful. The dots can help preserve the the tradition not by themselves of course.

I’m still trying to get into learning a bunch of tunes and wish I had learned to play by ear at a younger age as well as learning to sight read well

just my 2cents

11

What this ought to tell you, Sadie, is that the dots are unreliable at best. Go get some lessons from expert whistlers, and learn your irish traditional tunes by ear. Dots are only a sketch of how the tune might be played at best.

12

1. cuts can be from any note above the main note

Well, it can’t be any note above…just any note that sounds “right” to a traditional player.

Remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The PI suddenly realises that Roger Rabbit has slipped his hands out of the handcuffs. We in the audience all saw when he did it, and we laughed because it was a funny situation. The PI says “So you could have slipped out of the cuffs at any time?”

“Not at any time” Roger explains… “Any time that’s funny.”

Likewise in New Orleans style jazz you can’t play anything during your solo. You are limited by the traditional restraints, the very things which define the style.

So anyhow when I began playing whistle in the 1970’s all the traditional players I was exposed to used the ring finger of the upper hand to “cut” all the lower-hand notes. I learned to do it that way simply because all the players I played with and listened to did it that way. There’s nothing inherently “better” about it, just like there’s nothing inherently “better” about any aspect of traditional Irish playing. It is what it is. But the rationale was told to me by one player that doing the cuts that way “divided the work of doing rolls between the two hands” which has a certain logic to it.

This obviously doesn’t apply to A which can be cut by either remaining digit and B which can only be cut one way.


2. the ‘grace’ note shown in tiny notation is not the note to be played but signifies the hole to be uncovered…

True, or put another way, gracenotes are produced by the action of a single finger and ignore the usual fingerings.

But now you have the issue of “pats”…

a Pandora’s Box in itself, as you can do one-finger pats, and two-finger pats, and three-finger pats…

Another thing to keep in mind is that many traditional players do a lot of “false fingering”.

For example, in passages which involve a lot of Ds, Gs, and Bs, or put another way passages which involve a G Major chord, I tend to keep my top and bottom fingers on the whistle thus

xoo oox

and move the remaining two upper-hand digits as one unit and the two lower-hand digits as a second unit. This could be called laziness but “economy of motion” sounds a lot better.

So the arpeggio D G B d g b is fingered

xxx xxx

xxx oox

xoo oox

xxx xxx

xxx oox

xoo oox

likewise in D Major situations I tend to leave the lower-hand index finger on the whistle so that the arpeggio D F# A d f# a is fingered:

xxx xxx

xxx xoo

xxo xoo

xxx xxx

xxx xoo

xxo xoo

once again moving only two units.

I actually didn’t realise I was doing all this stuff until I noticed other players doing it and somebody pointed out that I was doing it too.

13

Oh you’re all just trying to blind me with science now! :smiley:

The original question has largely been answered, which was - is the notation shown the actual note to be played or just an indication. And can the ‘grace’ note be anywhere (suitable) above the main note.

I agree about classical music and interpretation, although you do normally learn classical from standard music notation and if you vary from actual notes would be marked down as playing the wrong ones.

Thanks for everyone’s contribution. It’s all really interesting. I’m really just starting out on this although I’m a recorder player (yes, yes, it’s not the same…) and it’s interesting to find differences you don’t expect.

Best wishes

14

Different whistles–also true for flutes–respond differently, and what sounds just right to you on one instrument may not on another.

It’s best to be flexible and be able to cut with any finger above the note. For taps, sometimes you’ll just want to use one finger, but sometimes you may want to use two or even three. You can get a really nice sounding G-roll on some whistles this way:

xxx|ooo
oxx|ooo (cut)
xxx|ooo
xxx|xxx (tap)
xxx|ooo

fearfaoin makes a point worth restating: cuts (and taps) are percussive. They are really fingered articulations rather than grace notes. They are not actually a “note” themselves and don’t play any role in the melody except as an articulation on the note on which they fall.

–James