The unZen of Whistling

Whistle
1

I’m afraid I’m still a pretty terrible whistler, but I had a significant breakthrough toward increased musicality this spring (conclude what you will about my previous efforts). At first, I’d only dared hope it might be true, but my roommate made an observation to that effect out of the blue, which had me whistling with great good cheer for quite a while.

But now I think I’m starting to plateau again, or even degenerate. My fingers feel incredibly clumsy to me, giving me the feeling of having only extremely blunt instruments with which to express the music I hear in my head. Yet sometimes when I completely space out with my whistle in my hands, I’ll absentmindedly play one of the tunes I’ve been working on, and it comes out way better than when I actually have my mind on what I’m doing. But as soon as I notice what’s happening, that musicality evaporates, and my playing becomes stilted and turgid again. Ugh!

Is it impossibly involuted to fall apart under one’s own scrutiny? Am I in danger of being ingested by my own navel if I seek the answer in my head? Or should I simply cultivate the habit of spacing out with whistle in hand?

2

Hmmmmm… :confused:


Hmmmmm…

Keep on playing. :thumbsup:

3

Squid, do you play with other people, in sessions or elsewhere?

In my experience - with any instrument - public performance is absolutely essential to any self-assessment of level. Small gatherings of friends or concert halls - it doesn’t matter. You can noodle all you want to the walls and furniture. But unless you know your capability when faced with the discipline and demands of actual playing, there’s no way to know what you really need to work on. No stopping for flubbed notes, missed breathing, forgotten tune parts, etc.

I know there are excellent sessions in Portland. Have you been?

Absent that, recording your playing is a fair substitute, if you can listen critically.

As for progress plateaus, that’s perfectly normal: https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/progress/63647/8

4

I definitely know where you are coming from…except my plateau has been going on for like a month or three… :wink:

5

Your conscious mind can play a few notes for you, and is a good thing when you are learning a new passage, but to get to actual music you do have to develop a direct connection between your subconscious and your fingers. Can you read e-mails or C&F while you play? To achieve what MT suggests - playing for others - and being able to observe their reactions and move out of the way of the salad cart, or devise a means of getting out of the musical box you’ve painted yourself in with that last tune change, etc. requires that your playing be more akin to humming than something you have to think about. In my book spacing out is good. Concentrating on my playing is bad. What I have to concentrate on is not concentrating on my playing. But sometimes if I get too engrossed in whatever else I’m thinking I can flub some bits too.

There was a time when if I noticed I was not noticing the wheels would come off the my playing. I got the sense that my conscious mind was like “HEY! I’m in charge here, what do you think you are doing?” and take back the controls from the autopilot. However the conscious mind can’t process the input from the ears and tell the fingers what to do quickly enough to make music. It needs to get out of the way and let be music happen.

So yeah, space out. Learn to space out at will. Use the force…

6

Or not…
Sometimes I find that if I step away from an instrument and don’t play it for a week or two, I come back to it fresh and some of the old blockages to progress have melted away.

7

I know the feeling squid, I sometimes notice the same with my playing. So, in the end what I do is to concentrate when i’m learning a new tune (which might not be fun in some occasions) but when I’m playing I just “let it flow”, and things sound definitly better!

I happen to notice that when I don’t have the time to play on a particular day, between the time it takes to decide which t-shirt to wear, I grab the whistle and play one or two tunes (since they last pretty much less than a minute), and those ones always sound much better than when I’m exclusively playing fully body and mind concentrated.

And now because of you and your evil thread, I’m at work and I feel like whistlinggggggggggggggg!

You are mean! :sniffle:

8

Thanks for your refreshing honesty, Squidgirl.
I think everybody has flat periods in their playing, sometimes long ones. But the movement is always forward. Think a graph for a successful business. The “sales” lines go up and down, month by month, but the trend is always up.
For myself, I space out a lot when I play. But I play best when I am concentrating on timing, timing alone and nothing else. Ornaments, breathing pauses, everything else is secondary. And my tape recorder, that unrelenting, merciless critic, ruthlessly exposes what I need to work on next.
Of course, a session would be fun, but the one near to me happens on an impossible day for me to attend.
Keep on whistlin’ and your friends will be amazed!

9

I wanted to pop in to say thanks for the thoughtful replies, and to say that I’m currently suffering a technical glitch in which all attempted replies mutate into journal entries. Will report back when I get that one ironed out.

10

I agree, I study music at school, and therefore play my clarinet alot, and I have days where its just not going to happen, so usually cut practises short, maybe just play something I enjoy and know really well then leave it give it some time then its better when I go back to it, so maybe take a day or so off and try again and you’ll feel back to normal

11

I agree. I may get shot for this, but I feel you can overdo it with the whistle. Sometimes I play for an hour and still don’t want to quit–and sometimes a half hour is too much. I’m not enjoying myself anymore. I think it’s better to sound like a pro in 8, 10, 15 years than to sound like a pro in 3 years and not enjoy the journey.
Sometimes I just don’t have time to whistle. And it’s such a forgiving instrument that I can come right back in a very short time.

12

I get the same thing sometimes…I will go to play at a Session or even in front of my teacher…and just do terrible or even blank out and not remember how the tune goes. Yet if I am home, and either not really paying attention or just decide to play a tune (the same one that I would blank out on) it just comes out nice and clear with no problem.

There is a good book about this, it is called “The Inner Game of Music” and it helps you reach your true potential on any musical instrument and not allowing thoughts like “I wonder what they think about my playing” or “uh-oh…here comes the part that is tricky” take over your playing.

Rob

13

This is part of why recording yourself on a regular basis can be useful. It requires the same sort of mental displine and “gaming” as playing for an audience - but without all those eyes staring at you and hanging on your every mistake … Aaaiiiiiieeee! :astonished: :laughing:

14

Arnold Jacobs, who was the tubist with the Chicago Symphony and a marvelous teacher, used to talk about playing two instruments. He said that there is the instrument in your hands and the instrument in your head. If you make music with the instrument in your head, the instrument in your hands will take care of itself. Certainly there is technique involved, but in the end you are trying to make music, not notes. Another way to look at the issue is presented in this master class video from another fine tubist and teacher, Roger Bobo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NRQ3wRZETA

By the way, if you think tubists just do oom-pahs, check out this video of Roger from the days when he was playing with the LA Philharmonic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyJkyi0BKPk

Finally, since Tia mentioned clarinet, I’ll give one more related story. Back in the 1930’s Reginall Kell attended a party. Someone introduced him and mentioned that he played with the London Philharmonic. When asked what he played, Kell responded, “I play music on the clarinet.” I can’t think of a simpler way to express what our priorities really ought to be.

15

I know this now really has nothing to do with the origninal post, however I love that thought of playing music through a certain instrument, because its true, thank you for sharing that Mike

16

I’m still left wondering if Squidgirl has attended Portland sessions, played in public, and/or recorded herself.

17

Drat you, MT, you would be good at follow-up…

I do nab my friends and subject them to mini-performances, mostly to stress myself out and see what happens. Sometimes having an audience will motivate me to pull it all together and play better than usual, but other times I have a meltdown and fall apart entirely (this perhaps not so much a musical thing as a generalized personality disorder, as I generally kinda vacillate between friendly extroversion and inarticulate shyness).

This spring I’ve gotten braver about playing publicly, and when a sunny day makes me feel expansive, I’ll sit out on the apartment balcony and whistle for children playing and pedestrians passing by. The children don’t bother me, but the adult passers-by really stress me out, so I think it’s a good discipline.

I do also tape myself at intervals, and should probably do it more often. It’s definitely a nice, safe way to stress myself out. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of listening to the tapes only when I’m already feeling morose about my whistling skills, so I have trouble assessing them in a balanced and sane way.

The word on the street (or at least in my community college whistling class) is that the leader of the main local session glowers alarmingly at out-of-tune tinwhistles. My ear is still in training, so my motivation to go be glowered at is low. I do keep meaning to go just to listen, but I’ve had trouble convincing anyone to go with me, plus my wheels are public transit and/or bike, which makes getting around at night a nuisance. So the local sessions tend to be perennial entries on my good intentions list.

Overall, I’m pretty shy about playing publicly, because I am still much more of a beginner than you would expect given my join date. My pattern has been to play for a few months in the spring, and then be overcome by self-consciousness at my awfulness, usually as we enter the season where everyone in the apartment complex has their windows open all the time, and we are all constantly immersed in one another’s sonic overflow.

I think there’s a certain imperviousness to that kind of self-consciousness that a successful musician needs to cultivate, and which I am still chronically struggling with. It’s exacerbated by my starting to play music later in life, with minimal musical background and no signs of any particular talent, so I tend to feel like an interloper on the whole musical scene.

18

Wow…all those big words hurt my head. You speak MT talk squid!!

Rob

19

Aaugh, I don’t do it on purpose; I just get sucked in my the challenge of matching word to idea. The terrible thing is that I’m afraid I talk that way too. :blush:

20

You have a whistling class? Heck, squid, that ought to count for something.