I read the posts, everyone here seems to be against the tongue. I listen to my favorite whistle and flute players and the tongue is all over the place. What am I missing?
My guess is that many associate “tonguing” with how a recorder is played, usually tonguing every note. Most people tongue to either “start” the whistle on a phrase, or to emphasize a cut. (Some are of the opinion that every cut should be tongued, but I like to pick and choose which I tongue for emphasis). I don’t think people are against tonguing three or for times in a section, but tonguing every (or almost every) note isn’t using everything the whistle has to offer.
Two things strike me:
-
It seems to me that there is much more tonguing amongst the whistlers than the fluters. Think of someone like Sean Ryan and the whole school of whistlers who emulate him. Fluters tend to huff instead. (I think.)
-
I think it can be hard, especially when listening to fluters, to hear whether they’re using tonguing or some other form of articulation. Some that I could have sworn were using tonguing loads turn out to be just very adept at breath pulsing or what people call the glottal stop. I’d be more keen on the pulsing than the stops, personally, but that’s another matter.
It’s like any other technique-- it needs to be used judiciously. On some whistles it’s virtually essential in order to get the higher notes to “speak” without cracking.
I’m not up on what the modern guys are doing nowadays. What I know, the style I learned, is how the older guys played back in the 1970s when I was first learning flute and whistle. With these guys little or no tonguing was done on the flute, loads of tonguing was done on the whistle.
The same guy could play the same tune on flute, then on whistle, and on the flute no tonguing and on the whistle loads of tonguing.
The old-style fluteplayers did lots of “pushing” but this was done with the diaphragm not the tongue.
On the whistle, and this is the hardest thing for people coming from “classical” flute or recorder to learn, despite the fact that there is quite a bit of tonguing the underlying style is legato. I might say that it’s a legato style that’s accentuated with tonguing.
“Classical” fluteplayers and recorder players, when they approach Irish flute or whistle, seem to always use a detached style. What they’re trying to do is create each note as a complete entity with a beautiful attack, core, and decay. Irish reels and jigs aren’t like that! The individual notes don’t have that sort of value but are just parts of a stream of sound.
The difference is like reading a sentence as it would be spoken with the words all flowing together and reading… a… sentence… with… each… word… having… a… separate… beginning… and… end.
At Irish flute workshops I’ve even had to resort to asking some of the “classical” people to play with their tongues held against the roof of their mouths: there are people who, unless they do that, are simply incapable of playing legato.
Did anybody other than me get a juvenile chuckle out of this topic and the uncontrollable urge to respond : “That’s what she said…”
Nobody? 
Yeah. I wanted to do the whole ‘aversity versus adversity’ lecture, too, but I guess not enough of us care about any of that these days. At least they tried to spell it out. (OMG!!!).
That’s for people who’ve been to unaversity.
It’s “aversion”.
Best wishes
from my 5th grade English Teacher, Edna Brown
Shouldn’t that be: Grammer Police? As in: Badge’s? We don’t need no steenkin’ badge’s. 
Speaking only for myself, a newbie, tonguing can be a crutch to cover up for what the fingers are lacking in technique. After some recent re-reading of sections of Bill Ochs’ tutorial and Brother Steve’s page, I’ve been trying to strip the tonguing out (except for starting a tune or sometimes after a breath) to force myself to rely on the fingers for articulation and ornamentation. For one thing: it has really shown that cutting with T1 needs some work, and I’m making slow and steady progress with it.
Good for you! Down with tongue’s.
We sanction tonguing, but impose sanctions on toungeing and tounging.
Is that the name of a bar? Tongue’s lounge…
Where you can relax on a chaise longue … er, lounge.
for people who’ve been to unaversity.
… it can be rough, ploughing through these mis-spellings, he coughed 
who was it who said “two great nations divided by a common language”
Gotcha. That makes sense.
Another good point. Thanks.
Some people’s kids!! 
!!
The woman who led the first whistle workshop I ever attended (effectively my first whistle lesson) justified her aversion to tonguing (and her total ban on our tonguing) by saying that a piper can’t tongue, and has to use fingers to separate notes. She didn’t say why a whistler has to employ the same technique as a piper, but in the context of that festival, where the workshops were mainly for local kids, kids who were pipers had far greater prestige than mere whistlers, so kids might well start on whistle and aspire to progress to pipes, and her argument probably had force in their eyes. (I don’t think the woman played pipes herself).
A few years later, at the same festival, the whistle workshop leader (who was himself primarily a piper) was happily discussing with us different tonguing techniques for separating clusters of the same note (dadala versus takata), and his take on it was the sensible one that you want to develop as wide a range of techniques as possible, to select from according to your purposes at any one time.
On this forum, my guess is that the people who have an aversion to tonuguing include many of the same people who seem to think that the only reason to pick up a whistle is to make totally authentic-sounding Irish Traditional Music; you’ll have noted the prevalence of the abbreviation ITM, coupled with the rarity of ETM, STM, FTM, WTM, GTM, JTM, BTM, PTM, TTM etc, all of which might be equally good reasons for picking up a whistle.
That’s a valid point and completely true in my case: I picked up the “Irish” whistle specifically to learn ITM, and have always viewed good traditional Irish players as the do-all and end-all of whistledom. To me Mary Bergin is the Poster Child for whistle playing, the player I would point to and say “that’s how a whistle is supposed to be played”.
Somebody doing pop music or jazz or whatever on a whistle only makes me think “why don’t they use a Boehm flute? It’s a far superior instrument for that music.”
Somebody playing a whistle using the full scope of technique they brought with them from their years of playing Baroque Recorder only makes me think “why not go back to the recorder? The recorder is far superior to the Irish whistle for playing in that style.”
Boehm flute technique/style was developed for and from that instrument, and Recorder technique/style was developed for and from that instrument. The Irish whistle has its own. Why insist on transferring the technique and style from a foreign instrument to the Irish whistle?
About a whistle teacher saying “don’t tongue because pipers can’t tongue” sounds silly when worded like that and with no context given, but the underlying notion in ITM is valid: the uilleann pipes, wooden flute with six open holes, and whistle all share a certain amount of technique and style and have influenced each other over the last couple hundred years. Nevertheless whistle players, as far as I can tell, have always tongued quite a bit and I wouldn’t tell a whistle class not to tongue. (I might tell them when not to tongue, and to not tongue too much.)
Not sure if someone mentioned it but from what I understand tonguing is heavily used in Scottish traditional music. I use it a lot more in tunes such as Behind the Bush, and it sounds much better!
I hate to hijack a thread but since it’s mine and I don’t want to start a new one for what seems to be a simple question, here goes:
Does an original Clarke with the wooden fipple need to be broken in? I just got one and in a search I didn’t see anything on this topic. If it does can anyone recommend a procedure?
-Thanks