Who are your non-whistler influences, if you have them? Or is there an instrument in general that you emulate, or would like to?
Lately I’ve really enjoyed listening to the concertina. There’s something about how the rhythm comes through with that instrument that makes me take notice. In some tunes it sounds like the back beat is getting a little emphasis. Not sure how to even go about that, but it does sound nice!
Not having much music featuring the instrument right now, I watch YouTube. (Yeah, I know.)
Here’s a channel that has some mighty fine concertina playing: https://www.youtube.com/user/Kilfarboy2
HaHaHa! Wasn’t expecting that one. Too early in the morning I guess.
As for influences, I happen to be of the mind that we are what we listen to - a composite of all the musical stuff we’ve taken to heart over our lifetimes. I some ways all of those influences come out in our playing over time. I know that is not specific, but hey, I’m an oldish guy and I’ve listened to and played a lot of music over the decades. It’s all in there. So I could not say how Jaco Pastorius’ bass playing, as just one example, influences my whistle playing but I suspect it does somehow.
“And the road goes on forever and the party never ends.”
I’d like to remember to come back to this 5 years from now. Still learning the language, so to speak. If previous experience on the bass (will have to listen to the Jaco album later) and the main music tastes are an indicator: I’ll end up being most influenced by the more sparse playing. A few non-Irish trad. examples would be Alison Krauss and Eric Clapton. Both have the talent, but they are great at restraint and saying more with less.
Maybe it’s a sign of growing older, but there is something about the use of silence in music that is very appealing.
I find I like listening to concertina players because I hear the tunes more clearly than with some other instruments that are more highly ornamented. And I really like Kitty Hayes and her back-up band.
A few thoughts:
Concertina can be just as (over)ornamented as other instruments, so as with any instrument, it depends on who, as much as (or more than) what.
Micho Russell had quite a lot of concertina in his life. I believe on the Brother Steve Tinwhistle Transcriptions page this was talked about a bit, possibly by Peter Laban.
Finally, and most importantly, I don’t believe we are just unthinking regurgitation machines. I firmly believe we have the power to control what influences our music.
That may be what’s happening with me also. Sometimes I can’t tell when the tunes change in a set of them because of getting lost in the twiddly bits.
I recall reading the same thing. Micho Russell also mentions the concertina before a tune or two on the Ireland’s Whistling Ambassador album and if memory serves, the Traditional Music of County Clare one, too.
Interesting that most of you refer to Irish Traditional musicians. My influences probably come from just about everywhere. Orchestra playing, concert band playing and conducting and listening, choral conducting and listening, early music…well you get the idea. Influences from everywhere. The good thing is that experience makes it possible for you to make almost any piece sound musical. The bad thing is it may be musical but nowhere near the style that that particular tradition would usually use…
Though I never played the GHB, as a child in Scotland I was overawed, terrified, and delighted by pipe bands. When I learned recorder I was fascinated by renaissance ornaments and graces. I heard pub singers, and singers like Jeannie Robertson, too. I only remember one whistle player in my youth: when I was about 18 there used to be two old guys in the Ship Inn in Melrose: one on whistle, the other on moothie, playing the pipe band/Jimmy Shand repertoire.
I didn’t really hear Irish whistle players until I was in my 20s - I was moved to take up the whistle after the first Chieftains gig in Edinburgh in '72 or '73.
It all goes into the mix, though: Sydney Bechet, Paddy Moloney, Sean Potts, anonymous whistlers in Sandy Bell’s, Frans Bruggen, Alan Stivell, Robin Williamson, Jimmy Shand, the Corries - a few names off the top of my head, people that I was listening to before I started on whistle.
I think that singers have pretty heavily influenced my 'whistle playing, particularly English and Irish styles that have minimal accompaniment. I’ve been a big fan of the Yorkshire folksinging family The Watersons since I first heard their album in the 1990s as a teen, and I play instrumental versions of a number of their songs on 'whistle.
Though I don’t claim any serious scholarly knowledge of sean-nós singing, some of the styling in sean-nós has a feel similar to what I aim for in solo 'whistle, so in some indirect fashion I’d count it an influence.
I grew up in the USA but the GHB was my first instrument and I’ve played in pipe bands for around 35 years now. “Overawed, terrified, and delighted” sums up the experience nicely! There’s a clear GHB influence in my whistleplaying, I think.
Yes indeed! So cool that you mention these very people! Add to Sydney Bechet some other New Orleans clarinet gods such as Albert Nicholas and Pete Fountain. Fountain’s approach to breathing, phrasing, and articulation are peerless.
And Frans Bruggen! And Lucius Voorhorst! And other fantastic people playing Baroque music on original flutes and recorders.
I also play uilleann pipes and Paddy Moloney doesn’t seem to get the credit he deserves, perhaps because for whatever reason he’s not done the ‘solo album’ thing. But his style is superb, the exquisite taste he uses in fluently switching between legato and detached styles, and his amazing sense of articulation and timing. Ditto Paddy Keenan and Liam O Flynn and so many other great pipers.
All of these ‘go into the mix’ but also some great Bulgarian musicians such as Kostadin Varimezov and Theodisi Spassov and Ivo Papasov (I dabbled in gaida and kaval) and also many great Bolivian and Peruvian kena and zampona players I’ve heard over the years (I’ve dabbled in that type of music too).
My first Irish whistle teacher encouraged me to listen to as wide a range of music as possible, not only Irish musicians of various instruments but also various other sorts of music. He was my first introduction to Bulgarian music.
Yes, indeed, PCP! we see eye to eye on this. Particularly on Paddy Moloney.
On a slightly different note, I have lived in China and travelled widely there, always with a whistle. Players of the xiao (vertical flute) and dizi (horizontal flute) tell me that they use just about all of the ornaments that I use - slides, cuts, taps, rolls, birls and open hole vibrato, for instance - and they are generally gobsmacked to hear them coming form a pink person like myself.
So Chinese whistlers, borrow from your own woodwind traditions: I’d love to hear a Chinese virtuoso play classical Chinese music on the whistle!
I’ve got 2 Border pipers coming over to mine for a blaw in a bit, so I’d better go and make a pipers’ lunch (whatever that might be…)
Now that I think about it, hearing the GHB could be listed as an influence. It led to me thinking, “I wonder how the Irish do it. What are the similarities? What are the differences?” And that led to exploring Irish trad., that I now listen to or play almost every day.
I had the same experience here in California, though with a different culture and a different instrument.
My family visit Yosemite regularly and I went to the Miwok village they have there. Well, there’s a small gift shop type place and they had a row of Miwok flutes there for sale.
Not the sort of instrument we think of as a “Native American flute”, which has a fipple, but a plain tube with no mouthpiece of any sort at either end, two plain ends and four or five fingerholes in the middle.
I picked one up and started tooting on it. A Native American guy came running over and said “you’re the first white guy who has ever been able to play one of those!”
The guy was the maker of the flutes, who also performs on them.
I explained that I played kaval, which instrument he hadn’t heard of. I described how a kaval was made and he was amazed. He had thought these California native flutes were unique.
So… when I got home I took a piece of PVC pipe and made my own Miwok flute!
When I was a boy(9-10 years old) learning the whistle my dad would be practicing GHBs for competition and pipe band. Since I didn’t hang out with too many whistle players at the time I learned to emulate some of the bagpipe ornamentation. I also accompanied my father to historical re-enactments(as participants) from every period in early american history. There were always fife and drum groups and various historical music geeks in camp and I also picked up a lot of influence from them. So that’s where a lot of my technique and early repertoire came from.
Stylistic non-whistle influences came mostly from uilleann and highland pipers. I was also very involved with punk rock shows as a teenager and a lot of that “hard and fast” style is a big part of my whistle playing today.
Could I ask what some of those ornaments would be? In pipe lessons the things that are taking my attention – grace notes and doublings and grips and things – I take to be punctuation rather than melodic ornaments. They often sound pretty bad played out as notes in the tune. Were you making those work, or were there other things you were picking up on?
That’s the cool thing about the so-called ‘ornaments’ in Highland pipe music and Irish trad played on uilleann pipes, whistle, or flute: they have simultaneous multiple functions, serving to articulate while at the same time adding rhythm and sounding somewhat decorative.
I’ve often said that the cuts, pats, and rolls played on Irish whistle and flute aren’t ‘ornaments’ per se, because they’re not superfluous to the melody and merely added for decoration. They’re the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the style, simultaneously articulating, adding rhythm, and also decorating.
Many of the Highland-pipe-specific ornaments sound out of place on Irish instruments IMHO; these include leumluaths, taorluaths, and birls. (You don’t have the necessary hole for birls anyhow, on the whistle.)
I, and many other players, do things on the whistle and uilleann pipes that are akin to the Highland pipe ‘doublings’, just not nearly as often as they appear in GHB tunes. I do the exact Highland “E doubling” on whistle and uilleann pipes, but it’s on the note A of course. I also do a lower-hand version of that doubling, on E.
I do do a ‘grip’, a leumluath, on C natural on the whistle sometimes, just because it falls under the fingers well, and it gives another way to ornament C natural (you can’t have enough of those).
It’s the crans and doublings I emulate I suppose. The influence was mainly derived from listening and watching Dad’s fingers flitting about. The grace notes on the sheet music certainly don’t translate well when played as written! They really only make sense on the pipes because it’s virtually necessary for them to sound right given the fingerings and the inability to tongue notes.
