Hello all,
I’m a classically trained flutist coming to ITM primarily as an Irish flute player, but I play the whistle as well. I realize there is probably no easy answer to this, but I was wondering: what are the main stylistic differences between flute and whistle playing?
Moved to Whistle Forum, where you’ll get better (or at least more) answers. 
Hmm, I doubt it can be said too easily. Some flute players do the same kind of tricks as whistle players, while others play in a different style.
I’d say - don’t talk, just listen and understand. It will be almost certainly more fruitful.
I’m primarily a flute player myself, but also play whistle. I think there is really one primary difference:
You can tongue notes on whistle with impunity…but you’ll get slapped silly for doing the same on flute if you do it too often (use cuts, taps, and glottal stops instead on the flute). Now despite that, I play whistle essentially the same as I do flute - I don’t tongue very often.
Other than that, the advice to listen to lots of flute and whistle players is very good. I think you’ll find more differences than hard and fast rules (other than the one I list above). Also, coming from the classical world…has anyone yet told you to try and drop the notes and learn from ear? That was a big adjustment for me (I’m also from a classical & jazz background), but it makes a huge difference.
Eric
jayhawk wrote;
You can tongue notes on whistle with impunity…but you’ll get slapped silly for doing the same on flute if you do it too often
I would suggest that you would get slapped silly for tonguing on the whistle with impunity just as easilly as if you had done it on the flute.
Depends what type of music you are playing. irish there is little tonguing, Scottish there is a lot more tonguing although a specific Scottish style is gradually being consumed by the dominance of Irish music.
Maybe saying tonguing with impunity was a bit strong, but there is much, much more tonguing in Irish whistle playing than on flute playing.
Coming from a flute background, it’s rampant in whistle playing.
My flute teacher, who also plays a pretty mean whistle, once told me to not be afraid to tongue on whistle.
Eric
Exactly. In playing of Paddy Moloney, Mary Bergin, Willie Clancy etc. there’s a lot of tonguing. I think that tongued cuts, for example are great sounding thing. And it sure helps to bring some musicality into a tune.
Yes there is no one easy simple answer to this, but it’s true that though it’s possible to play the Irish flute and whistle in the same manner, usually a quite different playing style is associated with each.
I would suggest that you spend a lot of time listening to older players of each instrument, older recordings, of genuine Irish traditional players, to get a feel for the stylistic parameters traditionally associated with each instrument. I say this because nowadays there are loads of neo-traditional players (especially Americans it seems) who have decided to not follow the traditional styling and instead re-invent Irish flute and whistle playing along the lines of jazz/pop music styling.
For the briefest possible aural connection to the traditional stylistic approaches, give a listen to Conal O Grada on flute and Mary Bergin on whistle.
Mary Bergin’s Feadoga Stain album in a way encapsulates or defines the usual traditional approach to the whistle. I’ve run into loads of Irish whistle players (actual Irish people, not Americans) who not only play in that style but also have every tune memorised.
Conal O Grada’s CD is really the only one I’ve come across where you can hear a current living player who plays in the older manner. Another player who did the older strongly rythmic pulsing breath-driven style is Michael Tubridy.
Now this may stir some controversy here, but when I started playing Irish flute in the 1970’s it seemed to me that the flute was in a way a “poor relation” amongst ITM instruments, in that while the fiddle and uilleann pipes each had their own distinct style and technique, the flute did not, as the flute-players I was listening to seemed to be taking their stylistic cues from other instruments.
So, many of the flute-players were playing regularly with fiddles and accordions in dance bands and their goal seemed to be to sound like a fiddle as much as possible.
Then Matt Molloy blew onto the Irish flute scene with his revolutionary style based upon uilleann pipe technique.
But what a revelation it was to hear Morrison and other early-20th-century flute players! Here was the flute standing on its own two feet with a strongly differentiated style as strong and as specialised as fiddle styling is from uilleann pipe styling. The flute doing flutey things!
So if you can listen to old Morrison recordings as much as possible and to Conal O Grada, who plays a lot like that.
I’ve taught many Irish flute workshops over the last 30 years and these are often attended by people with a “classical” Boehm-flute background.
I tell them that for one thing they don’t have to abandon the Boehm flute in order to play ITM in a traditional way: there are players like Joannie Madden and Paddy O Donahue and Paddy Carty who play(ed) great traditional flute styling on the mechanised flute (Boehm system for Madden and O Donahue, Radcliffe system for Carty).
Because the main things that a Boehm flute player must learn/unlearn when trying to play ITM in a traditional flute style are not about the instrument but rather about the approach to tonguing, breathing, phrasing, and the role of the fingers in articulation. A Boehm player playing in a Boehm style upon a wood Irish flute still is just a Boehm player.
If you search on these forums you’ll find old threads where I tell in detail the struggles that people coming from a Boehm/classical backgrounds have had in learning to play in the Irish style. Bottom line is: try to deactivate your tongue and get your fingers to do all the articulation which your tongue has hitherto been doing.
There is one old album of an Irish fluteplayer where he uses his tongue to seperate two notes exactly ONCE in an entire album and boy does that jump out at you.
Yes yes there was an old “fifing style” on the Irish flute and yes you’ll find modern neo-Irish players tonguing all over the place but I think someone coming into Irish flute as a newbie is well served by first learning the older digitally articulated breath-push style where the fingers and diaphragm do a lot more and the tongue does a lot less.
On the high whistle (which was the ONLY whistle in the old days) the style was quite different and highly tongued, but still the tonguing approach was very different from the Boehm flute/Baroque recorder approach where the tongue is used to attack each note. The traditional whistle approach was overall a legato approach with the tongue used to add rythm here and there. (You can always immediately spot a Recorder player who has taken up the Irish whistle…)
One of the main obstacles to people coming from a “classical” background to ITM is the lack of correctly written music. Irish tradtional music is always written in a shorthand simplified style which most definately does not convey how the music is actually played.
Even in Irish flute tutor books the tunes are written in a generic simplified manner. No Irish fluteplayer would play like that.
I’ve never seen Irish flute music written with the sort of specificity which would allow a “classical” player unfamiliar with the Irish style to sightread it and get anywhere close to the correct sound. It could be done, and I’ve done such transcriptions myself for Irish flute workshops, but I’ve never seen anything like that published.
So you’ll have to do a lot of listening. Forget about how things are written in Irish books. Get together with a good player who will show you all the ropes: most traditional techniques are not correctly written in any book I’ve seen.
Cheers! Richard
pancelticpiper: What do you think of Micho Russell’s flute playing? And a lot more is on the CD of Russell family… I don’t know anything about flute, so I just wonder
By the way, what do you mean by Matt Molloy playing in Uilleann piping style? I think that the very nature of those instruments makes them absolutely different…
Malloy was the first to bring in uillean piping techniques such as crans to the fluting tradition. His style is, at least to my ears, influenced by the piping tradition. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not pure imitation but rather a unique style using the piping influences.
I appreciated Richard’s historical perspective on fluting styles. Since I’ve only been fluting since 2001, and only after finding this site, I was aware of Coleman and the other huffers and puffers out there from the start. It’s interesting to learn that there was a time when flute players were more imitative of other instruments.
Speaking of tonguing with impunity … and as long as it was just mentioned in [u]another thread[/u] …
Check out this clip of Donncha O’Briain, courtesy of Nico Moreno:
http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~nlbrown/Clips/MapleLeafManofAran-DonnchaOBriain.mp3
Lovely playing, for those of us who like our whistles to sound like whistles, not flutes.
Thanks for the replies! I’m trying to go cold-turkey on the notes, but sometimes it’s tricky to tell what’s going on when listening to recordings. I do have the Amazing Slow-Downer, which is fantastic, but as someone pointed out it does distort what’s happening a little at really slow tempos.
Meaghan, what is your impression of the Donncha O’Briain clip?
I really think that the tonguing suits the whistle (this is something I had noticed before, but I didn’t realize it was quite so taboo for flutists to tongue!). I’m not sure what else to comment on; I’m under a bit of ITM sensory overload at the moment, having just downloaded about 85 songs from iTunes (which is probably a conservative number…but I’ve got to start somewhere!), so until I spend some time listening carefully and really trying to work out what they’re doing, it all sounds the same! (Well, very similar, anyway ). Was there something else you were expecting to “impress” upon me?
No, you’ve got the main point, the tonguing and finger articulation.
Well, plus the phrasing and breathing. Where Donncha chooses his breath points, and the way he carries the phrasing across the imaginary bar lines, and across and into the 4-note groups, and how he pulses the different beats.
IMO, one of the hardest classical things to unlearn is thinking in terms of bar lines and pick-up notes.
Meghan,
As a lifelong dot reader, I would suggest that you maynot necessarily wish to completely eschew standard notation. When I am first learning a tune, I do find it helpful, when the notes are available, to use them to quickly get the “skeleton” of the tune. They are also helpful when you start to learn lots and lots of tunes, and cannot exactly remember how “Marvin O’Shaughnessy No. 53” starts out…
Another way to really learn a tune solidly is to use the slow downer to transcribe the tune. I find that by the time I have listened to the tune enough to transcribe it, I know it pretty well. Though somewhat controversial in some circles, I would suggest that you obtain a copy of Grey Larsen’s book; he has very clear, user friendly notation for articulation, ornamentation and breathing.
Good luck and welcome to the dark side!
Clinton
The stylistic differences for me are that for one I can’t push the whistle as hard as I can push the flute. The flute I play can be pushed harder on the bottom octave notes making it easy to play ‘on the edge’. By that I mean a style of playing where the aim is to play most of the notes right to the edge of where they want to jump the octave. This can be done to a limited extent on the whistle but it can sound really bad on some whistles because of the ease in overblowing into the next octave, which can give the whistle a shrill squeaky sound. A lot of whistle learners in the beginning tend to overblow and get this squeaky sound in their playing and may often think that it is the whistle which is to blame, when in fact it is poor breath control which leads to the overblow.
The other difference is that the whistle takes so little air that it is more difficult to get the extremes of breath control that are possible on the flute. By that I mean that the flute can be played (for want of a better word) ‘clean’, that is; with a quieter, smooth even tone, then it can be really pushed hard to give that reedy, edgy sound which is something that is lacking in the whistle.
There are some finger movements and ornamentations (for me anyway, in some phrases of some tunes) that are easier on flute than on whistle, and vice versa.
Has the brain’s music filtering system gone into meltdown yet MeaghanEryn? 
Ceilidh Whistle Man brings up a crucial point which I overlooked: that of playing “on the edge” as he calls it, or “playing between the octaves” as I call it.
On a properly set up flute you can play G in the low octave, then slowly introduce the octave G (what Irish flute players would call the upper octave or high octave but what to Boehm players is the middle octave) so that gradually more upper G is sounding and less of the lower G until you’re entirely in the upper register.
That middle note, having the two octaves sounding together in more or less equal amounts, is often used by older-style Irish flute players but is usually not possible on high whistles. (I like the Susato Low D precisely because this is possible on it.)
This approach is completely contrary to “classical” flute playing in which the note must be very clear as to octave and pure in tone.
Traditional-style flute players often have little regard for the proprieties of octaves in their playing. For example I have hours of tape of one old guy, a traditional player from Co Clare, who only played the low register. Somehow all his tunes, though compressed into a single octave, sounded “right”.
Let me stick my oar in here.
Surely there is no one style of playing?
There is no one historical style to copy and because its a folk tradition its always evolving.
“Roots” music or “folk” music is not like classical music with a set down playing technique, it is the music of ordinary people.
Therefore it will keep changing.
Also, there is not the great division between Irish, Scottish and even Manx music (I live in Scotland but am of Manx origin) that people think there is because of the proximity of these countries and because of all the emigration and immigration over the centuries. There is no geographical point where one tradition begins and the other ends.
What I see in the USA is a sort of synthesised “Irish Music” derived from the folk revival of the 60’s and some contemporary popular groups rather than the real celtic folk tradition, which (lets face it) in Ireland also includes things like flute bands.