in terms of speed, I have a very hard time playing the f’-d’/a’-d’/f’-d’ sequences in the ‘b’ part of this tune. When I hear the tune - played by foinn seisun 2 comhaltas recording, for example - i don’t really hear the ‘d’ notes, i’m just hearing the f’ a’ f’ melodic sequence.
wondering how flute players address this issue in terms of actual notes played. i’d like to get this tune up to speed in the ‘b’ part.
thanks!
Whistle player here, not flute, but …
Try using lazy fingering for the A’s: xxo xoo or xxo oox. On some whistles I can even get away with xxo xxx. Keeping at least part of the right hand anchored like that helps.
I’m as likely to play the A’s in the first octave as in the second, but the fingering is the same.
Another trick is to overblow the xxx xxx to the second octave a’, if your flute allows you to do that cleanly.
All the notes are there in the Comhaltas recording, including the D’s: http://media.comhaltas.ie/audio/fs2/1-11JennysWedding.mp3
Hey Maria,
I would actually encourage you not to try and rely on shortcuts here. This kind of phrase is really common and you will have to figure out how to play it sooner or later up to speed. If you try and fake it, it will just sound muddy. What can be faked on a whistle really doesn’t apply here on a flute.
The only way to learn how to play it cleanly is just to practice that figure over and over. Start out playing it slowly and make sure you are hitting the notes cleanly. You are right that you want to make the f and a notes pop compared to the d. It’s kind of an audio illusion where it almost sounds like the f and a are being separated, but it’s really just the d creating that illusion.
Just stick with it. Give yourself a week of practicing it and I promise it will become second nature.
Good luck
Brendan
Brendan, it’s hard not to agree with your sound advice to practice, practice, and make it clean. 
But economy of fingering is hardly “faking it”. Maybe it’s less common on flute, I don’t know. I’m sure others will chime in. Mastering multiple fingering possibilities on one’s instrument is usually good technique. Is that not the case here?
I’m kinda with both Brendan and MTG here, on the principles of mastering one’s instrument, at least… As for how I actually play the phrase of Jenny’s Wedding in question - I play it with the orthodox fingerings (except this is one place I don’t usually vent an F key for the F#), including venting the D with L1. Same on flute and whistle. I do cut at least some of the F#s with R1 which makes them crisper. I don’t think there’s anything “difficult” about it - beyond the effort to practice and crack accurate execution of the sequence, as Brendan says.
I cannot in this context see any need whatever to use “fudge” or “fake” fingerings/sequences - I don’t think any such which might be feasible here actually offer any advantage. You gotta do the grunt, and a couple of weeks on you’ll be wondering what you thought was so tricky about it, plus you’ll have that “lick” or “chop” anchored for use in other contexts. This kind of thing is pretty basic and should be conquered with the standard fingerings - no good reason not to! It may help to think of the D as being kinda continuous - you are actually trying to fake a drone (“implied polyphony”!!!) - and the upper(/other) notes which you visit are just blips in/over it, a bit like cuts, though a touch more substantial. Use that approach when practising it - don’t tongue anything, play the D and mentally carry it through as a held note, then (slowly, as in well-spaced at first) make a brief visit-and-back to the F#, with or without an accentuating cut, then to the A, and so on, then narrow the spacing of “visits” elsewhere and build the speed and flow of the sequence as your fingers learn to do it cleanly.
FWIW, as variations, I sometimes break the crotchet D that opens the phrase by dropping to the open C#, so the sequence becomes (in ABC) d/^c/d ^fd ad ^fd, or shift the whole pedal effect to 1st 8ve A: dA ^fA aA ^fA (nice slurred octave As!). In any case, some versions of the tune have: d2 ^fd Ad ^d with a 1st 8ve rather than 2nd 8ve A, which is another variation you can throw in too - actually, that’s how I learned and tend to play this tune, only putting the higher A in as a variation. The fingering is exactly the same, of course, but the embouchure/breath control is different…not a bad idea to practice both!
“Lazy” fingering is indeed standard practice among traditional Irish flute players, you aim for economy of fingering just as good dancers aim for economy of motion. But as Brendan and Jem said, this particular passage doesn’t warrant it.
For me, this entire passage is best played with the notes cleanly separated from each other rather than slurred together. I cut the first f# and stop each note by cutting off the air with my throat – you want that separation to be subtle so it doesn’t sound too choppy, but I find it sounds really lame if those notes are all slurred. Liam O’Flynn’s setting of this tune on one of the Planxty albums is my point of reference; it’s brilliant and full of life.
Mine too - that’s my “mind’s ear” version, pretty much. It’s on “The Well Below The Valley”, BTW.
thanks so much for everyone’s responses, they are very helpful and provide me with the guidance i need.
Yes, interesting, guys.
Thanks, Brad. Thinking about this thread, I realized that I actually wasn’t 100% sure about that.
On examination (and again, on whistle), I find that I play the passage with lazy fingering if I drop to the lower A, but non-lazy fingering for the upper a. It’s funny, the reflexes one develops.
I agree that the mental image of a continuing D is a good approach but, just in case someone might misinterpret, I just wanted to emphasise that the F’s and A carry the rhythm and on no account should they be played with less than their full time allocation (the A in particular!). This is one of most common errors because people do have trouble with these sequences. It’s particularly common on d2 ad bdab and most obvious on c2 ec gcec. Apart from spoiling the rhythm at that point, playing those notes quickly tends to leave a long-standing legacy of arhythmicity because the player can be subconsciously correcting for an early arrival at the following phrase in the tune.
Also, while a very good player can get away with it, I would never recommend putting stops in these sequences. That usually sounds twee and underlines that somebody can’t manage.
And most of all, Irish flute players do not use lazy fingering as standard.
Jim
As I said, those stops (if you use them) need to be subtle. This is the kind of thing I’m referring to:
http://homepage.mac.com/bhurley/.Public/Jennys2.mp3
Here’s what that passage sounds like “smooth” with everything slurred together and no articulation, which to me has less lift:
http://homepage.mac.com/bhurley/.Public/JennysWedding.mp3
Hmmm, I can certainly think of exceptions: Mike Rafferty, Jack Coen, and Harry Bradley come to mind because they told us to use lazy fingering in certain passages when I had classes with them. The basic idea is that if leaving a finger down doesn’t affect the tuning enough to notice and makes the fingering easier, then there’s no reason to avoid it. The classic example is rolls and a few other ornaments on A, where a lot of players (Tansey for example) raise just the left index finger for a cut on A while leaving the middle finger down, then tap with the ring finger.
Hi, Brad,
Thanks for the reply.
How to say this without sounding superior (nothing could be less true!)? I agree that the passage with no stops is lacking (a little!) in lift but to me the stops emphasise this rather than improving/masking it. If I were to be asked how to improve the lift I’d attack the timing in the phrase with no stops and, then, when the lift was cool, I’d say put in the stops if you want them. There’s no reason why slurring everything together should be lacking in lift (maybe lacking interest to some ears) as this is primarily a timing issue. This used to come up a lot in teaching. In 99% of cases, people would be better off to learn how to play the music with no ornamentation/articulation at all until that the rhythm is right. But, of course, nobody sees the benefit in that when they’re starting out! And then, later, they’re uniformly unwilling to strip the playing down to fix it.
On lazy fingering, I can think of exceptions too. But exceptions don’t make a general rule and what one person calls no effect on tuning can drive another bonkers. There are sequences where fingers don’t have to be lifted but Jem made excellent points before about enforcing standards from the beginning. It’s much easier to relax standards later, if needed.
Ah! posted the first version of this before your edit! I absolutely go with making life as easy as possible. Perhaps we should define lazy fingering. Your note about the roll has nothing to do with my definition of lazy fingering which is moving the minimum number of fingers in any sequence. That roll is 100% correct.
Jim
Jim – yes, I realized this morning on re-reading my post that we might be misunderstanding each other on “lazy fingering” so I edited my examples to clarify. Really, what I meant is that it’s standard practice among Irish flute players for certain specific elements (like the A rolls I mentioned), not that it’s standard practice for every note!
And on the slurring versus stopping, I agree…I am so unused to slurring in that passage these days that I probably exaggerated the effect and agree that it could be done better without resorting to stops…in fact I’m sure I did it better back when I played with a more flowing style than I do now. 
I wouldn’t use stops in that passage, though I do use rhythmic breath pushes on the on-beats to some extent to give it that accent and lift - kinda a half-way house between Brad’s two takes. I’ve got a cold at the moment and don’t feel up to doing a clip to demonstrate, sorry…
As for “lazy” or “fudged” fingering, I wouldn’t count the cut described above as such - that’s just a L1 cut (myself, I cut As with L2, but that’s not really relevant). Cuts aren’t really pitch-specific and don’t use standard note fingerings per se.
As an example of a real but I think acceptable fudge fingering: I sometimes finger a C natural in a fast E minor arpeggio type figure or similar context with oxo xxo +Eb key or oxx xxo + Eb key as going to the full, normal (for me - I only use oxx ooo for C nat on a few specific instruments that it is best on) oxo xxx +Eb or to the keyed C natural are both rather awkward in that context (EG=ce). The weaker/sharper C nat doesn’t really show at speed and one is less likely to tie ones fingers in knots with opposed motions or to miss the note.
Thus, with “,” representing the Eb key open:-
E xxx xxo,
G xxx ooo,
=c oxo xxo, or oxx xxo, (not oxo xxx,)
e xxx xxo,
In the pedal point passage that is the theme of this thread, I still think what I said before - there is no fundamental difficulty in using the normal, correct fingerings which you should master and be able to use anyway - you just need to practice them until you can do them. There are no useful/worthwhile fudges.
I do think there is a small place in the scheme of things for “lazy” fingerings, but in general it is best to do the work to become fully competent with the standard ways of doing things, from which one should only derogate by conscious choice in specific contexts, not by default because you can’t do something due to low competence. I don’t think many good Irish players of either flute or whistle do a lot of fudging - they can mostly do what they want by Route 1! But they can and do fudge occasionally…
But just note that everyone’s anatomy is different and there are some people who, no matter how many decades of practice they put into it, physically cannot make their fingers do certain things that are a cinch for others. So it doesn’t always boil down to low competence, sometimes people also fudge due to physical constraints or injuries. Not talking about myself here, but over the years I’ve run into a surprising number of flute players, whistle players, fiddlers, and pipers who have had to adapt their way of playing to work around physical constraints. And in every case, the listener would never detect a problem.
Fair comment, Brad: my wording specifically said “can’t do something due to low competence” - and didn’t mention the kinds of constraints you refer to. I wouldn’t count work-arounds for those kinds of specific physical problems as indicative of “low competence”. Someone who has overcome that kind of limitation may well be very competent, as you say, and for them such tricks wouldn’t really be “fudging” but fundamental adaptation. I think I was clearly enough aiming at “copping out”, not at special circumstances.
yes it appears the fluteworld seems the same as whistledome. i use both open and closed fingering and have played a wide variety of top notch flutes, both new and old. i believe it’s hard to generalize when it comes to technique… for instance, closed fingering works quite well on my hamilton flute - as in playing the ‘b’ part of jenny’s wedding. it has large holes and an internal tuning optimized for modern itm and can handle both open and closed fingering better than most (well vented). very efficient and flexible design in that sense. whereas the smaller holed antique rudalls that i played seemingly required alot of venting and therefore more reliant on an open fingering system; consequently being somewhat less efficient and flexible, comparatively speaking. so ‘fudging’, ‘shortcutting’, ‘copping out’ , ‘lazy’ seem in this context inadequate descriptions of what to me have been in reality effective/efficient technique; but those opinions are probably based on some form of limited experience/ understanding etc…salty as usual…