Please indulge this silly question. What is it about rrs that we so revile here at chiff & fipple?
Is it the tacky plasticity of the things? Is about the nasty kid who sat behind you in music class in first grade using it to fire spitballs? Is it merely that it’s NOT a whistle, beloved conduit of traditional tunes? Of course, it is important that I state, with all the vehemence of a 2nd grader denying any remaining glimmer of fondness for Barney the Dinosaur (Me, watch Barney? No way! I hate Barney! I spit on Barney! Ptooey!) that I neither own nor play a rr. (actually, my 1968 model got left behind at my parents years ago, where it’s become a toy for the grandtoddlers to toodle on.)
Now I’ll stand back and watch what manner of poo hits the fan…
I personally have nothing against recorders other than I can’t play it and the whistle…my fingers and brain don’t swap back and forth. But the recorder is emphatically not the right sound for Irish/Scottish/Morris/English, etc.
I think the annoying thing is that other people don’t recognize the difference, and we get tired telling them, its not a recorder, its a whistle. Kind of like people with Bichon Frise trying to explain that it isn’t a Poodle.
I actually like my recorders - for some things, like baroque and some early English music. And though it takes me a couple of minutes, I can make the switch back and forth.
But playing folk/trad music, though possible, just seems . . . wrong. Kind of like playing it on the piano would be. Or Bach on the accordion.
And I’m awfully tired of having folks ask me what I’m playing, explaining what it is, and that it is NOT a recorder, then hearing them describe me as “that guy over there playing recorder” not two minutes later. Same sort of irritation a highlander feels about having someone call his kilt a “skirt”.
Everything in its own place, IMO. Recorders sound great with Baroque or Tudor-style music, for example. I think a whistle would sound rather out of place at such times, myself.
What do you have with a truckload of recorders at the bottom of a river? A good start.
I have deep emotional scars from elementary school. From second through fifth grade each year of “music class” featured at least a month of shrieking out “Hot Cross Buns” on plastic Y@m@h@ rec*rders, causing deep headaches to the students, instructors, and parents. This class was intended to teach the love of music to kids, but the majority of students would afterward swear to never again take up an instrument.
I think the rec*rder is at least partially to blame for the horrible taste in music that so many young people now have.
Yeah, they may look similar to the uninitiated, then you pick one up(whistle/bichon) and you immediately KNOW you don’t have hold of a(recorder/poodle).
I think the disgust comes from hearing badly played recorders, often by classrooms filled with disinterested kids playing them.
Well played, the recorder is a serious, wonderful instrument capable of truly virtuoso music.
Handmade wooden ones are gorgeous, but some of the good plastics are truly amazingly good. I have a Yamaha plastic alto which rivals my fine Von Huene wood. Really.
I share air space weekly with a boxwood Mollenhauer r*rr and it’s owner. Although technically competent and, as others have said excellent for Baroque/medieval/similar, it is not a ceilidh session instrument and emotion isn’t projected either it seems. Sadly, it’s owner has a fear of whistle fingerings…
Trisha
ps I own a Moech wooden r*rr. Good for the right sort of music - horses for courses as they say in England…
Personally, I don’t care for their sound very much - to my ears, it’s an effete, pretentious, overly pleased with itself kind of sound, like the Niles Crane of woodwinds.
They are fine for Baroque and renaissance music, though they get annoying in their tooti-ness.
All the rest is a gag. But remember, their intonation is so different that it will be very unlikely to play them together with whistle. I learned the hard way while camping at Kings Canyon last summer. A fella who just had to join in, showed up with a recorder. It was WAY more painful on the high notes than even our West Coast whistlefest the other night. The notes just beat against each other.
What’s hard about “add a finger to go down the scale, lift one to go up?”
The only real problem I have is going the other way - it only takes me the time to play a scale or two to adjust to the recorder. But if I’ve been playing recorder a lot it might take me - oh, a minute or two - to adjust back. At most.
Anyway, except for F#, (and one variant of C#), the first octave on a D whistle is identical to the first octave in D major on a C whistle. And the differences on the second octave are . . . that on the whistle it’s fingered identically to first.
And the whistle’s most commonly used Cnat is a forked fingering very similar to the recorder’s.
This all sounds much more complicated when written then it is when I’m playing.
)
