I do hope ya don’t feel lonely
http://www.nigelgatherer.com/whistle/hist.html
…the Tusculum whistle in the Museum of Scotland made of brass or bronze, found with pottery dating from the 14th and 15th centuries…
lonely? just me and my whistle… its a twosome
well, thanks for clearing that up, what about the rest of it? ITM
This might be a deficiency in my logic or a lack of music history, but while things like the low whistle are relatively new to ITM, it would seem to me that ITM came out of folk music and folk instruments like the fiddle and whistle. The fact that someone wanted to mass produce whistles in the 1840’s suggests to me that there might have been a large market before then, and who knows how long people were pounding out brass whistles before then. Kind of the reason why I asked when ITM began.
sorry if i am (a little bit) off topic
but cause it was mentioned here
can you people recomend Norman Dannatt`s book about the clarke history?
or is there something else/better about the whistle history, not ITM or other music, just whistles?
as i said a little off topic but related enough i hope
To my understanding, different traditions do cross over heavily, but there are some tunes that don’t cross over, some ornamentation that is played differently between the four and just different styles. You could play The Moreen as a fifer on the march, a piper at a funeral, or a whistler as an air and have entirely different approaches to the tune.
Of course, one could just call it all folk music…
I think there is a good point here. When traditional music was truly in the “folk” mode, people would play mostly anything they could get their hands on, and wildly borrow from any source of material they did find interesting. Violins were introduced from the outside, and the same goes for flutes, concertinas, accordions, mandolins etc. If electric guitars had been around in the 19th century, they would be a traditional Irish instrument by now.
It is only later that “tradition” gets codified, as academic interest develops, often with a nationalist backdrop, and some elements are accepted as belonging to the pure tradition, while others are rejected.
Thus it seems to me that the tin whistle most likely predates any concept of ITM. The more relevant question would be: when did the current tin whistle – six hole fipple flute – become popular with the people who would later be viewed as ITM players? Did it start only with the mass production in the mid 1800’s – was it a modern industrialist invention that happened to catch on as a novel, cheap and very playable instrument? Or was there a significant number of whistles produced by hand before that, so many that they might merit the description of a popular instrument of the day – and consequently a traditional instrument in our view?
Wouldn’t it be nice to find a nice old C# whistle.. 
First of all, I had that bit about old whistles being a semi tone flat arseways, they’re in fact a semitone sharp.
So, a number of old whistles I have stamped ‘C’ are effectively C# whistles. And they’re not particularly difficult to find either.
I had a lovely one during the early eighties, a French one that was a C# as well. Micho Russell got on my case for that one and nagged until I gave it to him. Ah well, so it goes.
So as I understand it most ITM started as contemporary/popular music elsewhere and
traveled to Ireland where it was concurently popular.
It really only became Traditional Irish when it stopped being popular in its place or origin?
Are you suggesting that ITM is really nothing more than unpopular French or Belgian music? 
Oh, the shame and heresy !!!
Best wishes.
Steve
Nah. It’s mostly unpopular Scottish, Italian and Polish music. 
Did traditional Irish music actually start? Surely it developed into a recognisable form - the same as other traditional musics. Cross-pollination and all that, which is why folk can try and describe it as much as they like but to little avail. Nothing stays the same no matter how much you want it to.
Ah, you mean U-SIP…
Best wishes.
Steve
Yes, exactly. I think there’s a popular (mis)conception of tradition as something necessarily old, even “ancient”. Where the functional view is that tradition is no different from any other aspect of culture, of which it is a part, connecting past and present. Tradition - both the living thing itself and our perceptions of it - is re-created every day in the hands and minds of those who bear it.
True… but I think some would argue that real tradition adheres to certains principles and forms, to the extent that, at some point in any given culture’s history, certain practices became “tradition” - not because said practices were deemed neccessary by the peoples to establish their cultural identities, but because these practices were built on their particular morals, ethics, religions, and circumstances of living, and as such, they became considered as “the way things are done.” So it is at such point in a peoples’ history where these practices become widely accepted and widespread that “tradition” is established, modified, or even re-established. Certainly these customs can be imitated by descendants or even by outsiders, but unless these attempts at customary forms can bear out the true spirit in which they were created, are they really extending traditions? Or are they just creating copies of imitations? I think that, because many “traditions” were born in ages much different from the one we live in now, the idea that “tradition” means a return to something “old” or “ancient”, especially in spirit, isn’t that far-fetched. Many, if not most, cultures built the idea of honoring their ancestors into or around their traditions. In this respect, many traditions really are a celebration and remembrance of the past - of the time when a people became a “people”, and of the persons who were responsible for making that happen and those whose lives helped it to endure to the present time; and also to their God(s).
Those who lack respect for the traditions of their forebearers, typically lack respect for most other people and things as well. It comes as no surprise to me when I witness this in someone… they have lost “the way,” after all…
I very much respect the whole idea of sticking to the tradition, but I find searching for the “original” tradition a difficult if not impossible process. I always remember two stories:
First, the pronouncement by some ethnomusicologists that traditional fiddle tunes were often accompanied by a guitar playing the tonic chord and never changing it. They arrived at that conclusion by studying the early recordings of fiddle players from the 1920s. What they failed to realize is the studio decided the fiddler should have a back up player and brought in a guitarist. The guitarist didn’t know the tunes and fell back on vamping on the tonic chord…hence…
Second the class who spent a week studying the fiddle style of a particular old fiddler. On the last day they brought the old fiddler in to play his tunes…only to discover he didn’t play them at all like the transcriptions they had learned. And when they asked him to play the tunes a second time he played them differently again! At some point he commented he didn’t understand why they were trying so hard to duplicate his playing because, he said, his arthritis and age had made him play entirely different. “I played a lot better 40 years ago,” he said.
I think there is a paradox here, namely that anybody who becomes conscious of operating within a tradition has actually lost the way things were traditionally done, which is not to give a hoot about any “tradition”.
The truly traditional players did not play to uphold a tradition, they just did what was the thing to do according to the culture in which they were immersed. If you go to an isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea and ask them, “Is the music you play your traditional music?” the will most likely answer, “Why, our stuff is just regular music, what do you mean?” The same way you will answer when asked, “Are your Facebook status updates traditional European FB status updates?”
Had the 18th century Irish bought into the idea of ITM, the fiddle would never had a chance – they would just have said: “No, Mr. Stradivari and others, that’s not a traditional instrument, we will stick to our harps and bagpipes, thank you very much.”
I like to see ‘tradition’ as a handed down and shared aesthetic.
Instruments are not rejected because they’re not ‘traditional’ but because their output (tone, scale volume, whatever) doesn’t suit the shared aesthetic of the music. Whistles, flutes, concertinas and accordions were all taken up and accepted when they became available and proved they served their particular purpose well.
Certain approaches will not be rejected because they are not ‘traditional’ but because they don’t fit the aesthetic framework.
This isn’t really true at all, and it’s a variation on a complaint I have often heard from people who don’t really know how to play irish traditional music. It’s often people who are outside of the “tradition”* who complain loudest that the tradition should welcome people who don’t give a hoot about the tradition and just learn what they like.
*Mr. Gumby’s description of it as a shared aesthetic is a perfect way to describe it - I didn’t learn it from my parents, but I’ve definitely had it shared with me in a, pardon the word, traditional way. I’ve heard stories (from people like Mr. Gumby, some of them from experiencing them first-hand, and other places) of how particular the older players are about how to play the music right. Read some of O’Neill’s writings, such as in Minstrel’s and Musicians, and you’ll see that there were definitely right and wrong ways to play. One of the more famous amongst musicians my age right now is the Neil Boyle rant about jazz influencing (negatively) irish music.
Uilleann (or union) pipes are younger than fiddles. One of the earliest union pipe music collections clearly labels when tunes are irish, scottish, or recently composed, among some other labels.