The flute player IS a bagpipe

Irish Flute
1

I thought I’d share an interesting discussion I had with my amazing PDX flute teacher, Jan Deweese, yesterday. We were talking about the structure and technique of Celtic, and speficially Irish, music. (Remembering that I’m relatively new to this music) I told him that I was listening to Seamus Ennis on bagpipe and it struct me that all the rolls and cuts were there because, well, you can’t actually stop a bagpipe. Once you start, you gotta ride that train to the end! So you need to punctuate the song with articulation where elsewhere you’d punctuate with, perhaps, silence.

Right, not news to you, but a pretty damn cool discovery for me!

I asked if that’s why we play the flute the way we do- because we’re playing music that was made for the bagpipe. His response was even more than that. We’re not only playing music made for the bagpipe, we are, in essence, trying to be a bagpipe- at least as close to a bagpipe as possible.

Our flute is the chanteur, our lungs are the bag, our diaphragm is the bellows.

Of course, we have to breath, and breathing breaks the rhythm of the bagpipe, it can halt that train. So our job as flute players is to find places where breathing doesn’t stop the rhythm, but rather helps to propel it. To keep that train rolling to the end. We have a responsibility to find places where our breath is no more than a cut, a rhythmic addition, rather than just a disconnected biological necessity.

Well, let me say that this has completely blown my mind! I’ve been playing flutes (mostly end blown) nearly my whole life, and my approach to this instrument was the same as the others- to play a flute. Now I know why that was so frustrating with this music, and this instrument. I’ve been speaking the wrong language. Now I’m listening differently to people like Conal O’Grada, Michael McGoldrick, and even Mary Bergin. I’m seeing that the really great flute/whistle players suddenly speak differently to me.

Again, this might not be news to anyone else, but I thought I’d share it since it was so powerful to me. I’m now approaching my flute, and my practice, from that perspective. I’m trying to be a bagpipe- and listening to both flute and bagpipe music much differently.

-John

2

I hate to burst this part of your bubble, but you most definitely can stop a bagpipe, at least the uilleann pipe chanter, the kind of pipes that Ennis played. Every good piper, even the ones who play in a mostly open legato style, stops the chanter during tunes – it’s the way you do staccato tripets, for example, and it’s one important way of separating notes – you don’t necessarily need to use cuts, taps, etc. to separate notes on the uilleann pipes. The great Highland bagpipes and most other pipes are a different story.

Listen to Ennis again, more closely (listening to Ennis is always a good idea; I’ve been listening to him for 30 years and haven’t gotten tired of it yet!). The drones are always going, but the chanter stops and starts. Listen for the silences, the spaces between notes. He’s stopping the chanter.

I agree that the flute is the chanter, the lungs are the bag. I’d argue that the diaphragm isn’t really the bellows, it’s the arm that’s squeezing the bag…in fact it’s not really your diaphragm that’s involved at all, it’s your abdominal muscles. They’re squeezing the “bag” and supporting the air column.

Breathing can be part of your ornamentation/articulation, but I mostly like to think of breathing as an element of phrasing. You wouldn’t say “Darling, I …[breath]…love you!” You’d say “Darling, I love you!” and then take your breath. Similarly, tunes have natural phrases, and you want to take your breath if possible at the end of one of those phrases so it makes musical sense PLUS you want to make sure it doesn’t disrupt the flow and rhythm of the music.

3

I might if I were lying. :wink:

4

Haha, Nano.

A couple of other things I should have brought up:

  1. Most Irish music was not in fact composed for the bagpipe – there are zillions of tunes that sit best on the fiddle and take advantage of the fiddle’s greater range. So I don’t think you want to get hung up on the idea that Irish music is bagpipe music.

  2. What is a PDX flute teacher anyway? :wink:

5
  1. Portland, OR

it’s like
SEA = Seattle, WA
LAX = Los Angeles, CA

6

I agree with Brad. While there’s no question that there are a lot of ornamentation goals and methods in common with pipes, and these techniques may have been in some ways directly informed by them - and this also goes for whistles and fiddles noticeably, I think - there’s a school of thought that GHB piping ornamentation, at least, may have likely come directly out of the old Gaelic harp tradition, so… Sort of a chicken-or-egg scenario, though; historically they’d both been around a long time together and not each in a vacuum. What we can be sure of is that Irish traditional playing has certain general ornamental charateristics and ways availably common to all. But then there’s individual style, and all that.

At the end of the day, a flute’s a flute, a whistle’s a whistle, and a fiddle’s a fiddle. You don’t have to specifically emulate pipes of any kind unless that’s what trips your trigger. Some ITM flute players absolutely detest cranns, for example.

7

Curious about something. My impression is that bagpipers were typically the folks who first started
playing flutes too, when the old flutes became affordable after the Boehm revolution. And whistle.
So that bagpipe techniques were transferred to the flute as a consequence. Is this
accurate?

Also even though you can stop the pipe you don’t have to. That is, if you’re not doing stacotto
triplets you can sail along because you don’t have to breathe. Of course breathing routinely
is unavoidable on the flute and so must be integrated into playing in a new way.
Or are pipers often stopping the pipe outside of ornaments?

Anyhow I’ve long known that breaths need to be integrated into playing so as to complement the
phrasing, but I didn’t know what it really meant till I took a workshop from
Catherine McEvoy, who started showing us alternative ways to do it in the same phrase.
Then I realized this is a serious art and needs more attention than I’ve
given it.

Also she wanted glottals, not tonguing, and showed us how. The idea was simple but I never understood
glottals till someone sat down and showed me. Anyhow I think the use of glottals
helps one learn how to use the breath in phrasing.

8

Yep, it’s part of the bag of piperly tricks. Some pipers will stop the chanter to accentuate phrasing as the tune moves along to make things interesting and for rhythmic emphasis, according to where and if they like it. It’s an effect quite similar to the pause when a fluter takes a quick breath. Could it be said, then, that such uilleann pipers are emulating the flute? Depends on the player; one fellow mentioned flutelike breath stops as an inspiration.

There’s a lot of cross-pollination going on, here.

9

the singer came first…

most of 'em breathe :smiley:
well, the one’s I’ve known…

10

Hammy Hamilton has written some interesting papers on the history of flute in Irish music; I don’t have his latest one handy otherwise I’d check, but I don’t remember seeing that. More likely what happened is this: many people (myself included) who wanted to learn pipes started on the whistle, as much of the ornamentation used on the whistle can be transferred (in concept at least, and to some extent through the same or similar fingering) over to the pipes. And the flute can be fingered just like a whistle, so it was a natural segue from whistle to flute or pipes to flute, even though the scale on the uilleann pipes chanter is fingered quite a bit differently from the whistle or flute.

Yes, many pipers will stop the chanter for effect, just as many fiddlers will lift the bow. An unbroken stream of music without any phrase breaks can get pretty monotonous, and so many pipers and fiddlers will insert breaks in the music deliberately – almost imitating the effect of taking a breath on the flute. And in airs, in my opinion at least, some silence adds a lot to the music, esp. when doing song airs where you’re trying to play it the way a singer would sing it.

11

Yes, there’s the argument that a conscientious uilleann piper certainly ought to emulate this when playing airs. Gotta know the song, gotta have heard it being sung to do it up right.

Oops, Brad already said it. :slight_smile:

12

A few random thoughts, echoing Brad.

  1. Of course you can stop the pipes. Many uilleann pipers would consider the closed style the unique essence of uilleann piping.

  2. Analogies are fun, but they’re only conceptual tools that illuminate selectively. Don’t confuse the analogy with the need to face the specific capabilities and demands of your instrument. For example, the use of breath pulsing or “honking” on flute is much more akin to bowing on fiddle than to anything on the pipes. Draw your insights from the totality of Irish music instrumentation and style.

  3. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was: Keep it going. In other words, always think about the flow. But that’s a general aesthetic of the music, independent of instrument, though pipes and fiddle may be the primary models.

  4. As Brad implies, the best analogy for fluting may actually be singing. Think about singing the tunes as if they had words and phrases. And listen to singers.

  1. I’d argue that the ornaments are there not a substitute for silence, but because the pipes lack a discrete secondary articulation. Whistle and flute have tongue and throat, fiddle has the bow, concertina and box have the bellows and button portamento. On pipes, closed technique and other ornamentation is the secondary articulation.

  2. Tunes are tunes, and songs are songs. :slight_smile:

Glad you’re enjoying the adventure!

13

Thanks. Did pipes precede widespread availability of flutes and whistles? I thought it went like this.
Mass produced whistles became available (hence widely available) in the 1840s or 50s or so.
Flutes became affordable as a folk instrument when the old wooden concert flutes went into pawn shops because
flautists were shifting to the Boehm–this about 1870 or later.

If that’s right there was, when whistles became available, no Irish way of playing whistle that got transferred to the pipes. There wasn’t much of a wood wind tradition except for pipes. However pipers would pretty naturally
have picked up whistles, which weren’t expensive, and were (by all appearances) a lot more
easily playable than pipes. As an additional instrument. And they would have played them like pipes, as that’s how
they already played. Then flutes became affordable 30 some years later and were played like
whistles/pipes.

So, on this account, piping techniques preceded and informed whistling and fluting, not vice versa, generally.

14

I dunno about whistles, but Hammy puts the flute’s first wide appearance in Ireland around the end of the 19th century, roughly in line with what you’re saying there, and the uilleann pipes (then called union pipes) appeared about a century before that. Hammy says that the only two melody instruments used in Ireland during the 18th century were most likely the fiddle and the pipes.

That sounds right to me. So yes, piping techniques and concepts got transferred to the whistle – not just ornamentation but also the stopping of sound (by tonguing on the whistle, as opposed to closing all holes on the chanter), and the whistle ultimately became viewed as a first step toward playing the pipes: when I was first looking into playing the pipes in the 1970s, I was practically ordered to learn the whistle first, so that’s what I did. And then those whistle techniques got transferred to the flute.

But I still wouldn’t call Irish music “piping music,” as the piping repertoire is a relatively small part of it, and many many tunes were composed on other instruments or with other instruments in mind. And there are plenty of tunes that just don’t sit well on the pipes.

15

From this website:

The earliest bone flutes in Ireland date from the Viking era but there can be no doubt that bone instruments were common in Ireland much earlier and were probably introduced with the first human habitation after the Ice Age. The simple tin or penny whistle, which is played so proficiently in Irish traditional music has its origins in a bone ancestor.

And this anecdotal info echoes the assertion of the archaeological finding of Viking-era whistles:

…in Ireland there is evidence of whistle players in the early literature and on the medieval High Crosses. Bird-bone whistles survive from twelfth-century Viking Dublin, and there are references to homemade whistles of straw or wood being played in later years.

No sources cited, but he’s really just selling stuff, anyway, and conjectures are conjectures. I haven’t yet been able to find actual records I can hang my hat on, but I’m finding plenty of reference to bird bone whistles being dug up out of Viking-era Dublin. I’ve read translations of old accounts where it is not exactly clear if by playing “a tube” a reeded pipe or fipple flute is meant, but one IS tempted to imagine that the whistle, old as it is in human history, could not possibly have been unknown on Irish soil in antiquity or at least up to the point where the English started mass-producing them (which event really only tells us that whistles had now finally become plentiful, cheap, and you didn’t have to make your own). People were trading, raiding, and invading all the time, back and forth.

Another link on an old whistle:

the Tusculum whistle in the Museum of Scotland made of brass or bronze, found with pottery dating from the 14th and 15th centuries (the Tusculum whistle, excavated in North Berwick in 1907, is 14cm long and has six finger holes).

The Irish and Scots were musically intertwined for centuries. What is most interesting to me is that this particular one is made of metal. So, on the presence and timespan of archaeological evidence alone (what there is of it) between Ireland and Scotland, I’m not willing to presume that there was no pre-existing whistling tradition in Ireland BC (Before Clarke).

16

I would point out that the largest single difference between pipes and the flute would be the relative absence of any true dynamic range for the pipes. With the Uilleann pipes you can try to artfully simulate a “swell” by the use of the reg’s or starting and stopping the drones, but truly your ‘palette’ in this regard is limited. You are also limited in the range of “tone colors” available on the pipes. . .while you can achieve a wide range of tonal effects by altering your reeds. . .you can’t do this on the fly as you can with the flute. . .or the human voice.
Just my farthingsworth :party:
Bob

17

Are you not putting an artificial distinction here between the influence of UP and Warpipes on the early tradition. It was my impression that a substantial proportion of the early pipers played both. (As I believe Ennis did as well).

David

18

I don’t think anyone’s arguing that many of the basic ornaments used in Irish music (cut, tap, etc.) didn’t originally come from pipes – I think the distinctions being made are that uilleann pipes have unique capabilities (two-octave range, ability to stop the chanter, regulators, etc.) that allow them to do things that warpipes can’t do, just as flutes have unique capabilities that allow them to do things that uilleann pipes chanters can’t. And I think it’s good to exploit those capabilities and take advantage of what your instrument has to offer. I imagine the first players of union/uilleann pipes played them much like warpipes, but gradually discovered that they could do more.

Matt Molloy showed us that the flute can be played like the pipes, and more recently Harry Bradley reminded us that the flute can be played like a flute.

19

Excactly! Imagine the beginner’s (me) conundrum listening to both Molloy and Bradley/Clarkson and trying to define how I play a particular tune. At least I’m getting a well-rounded education.

20

I imagine the first players of union/uilleann pipes played them much like warpipes, but gradually discovered that they could do more.

Surely this is backwards; the various adaptations that changed mouth blown, limited range, but portable and playable on the move bagpipes into the bellows driven, 2 octave, chromatic, but sedentary pastoral or uilleann pipes were all undertaken for the purpose of expanding the capacity in a particular direction. People didn’t hook up a bellows and then discover that they had an extra mouth, although they might have added a bellows and then discovered that a dry reed can do things that wet reeds can’t.