I agree with Tunborough here… even allowing for historically evolving recorder bores, e.g. medieval, renaissance, baroque etc.
I also thought Narzog’s ‘bagpipe or whistle?’ question quite apposite. Far from suggesting we might call that instrument a bagpipe, the intentional absurdity of the question observes that it’s clearly not. I’m quite happy to accept that a recorder-fingered whistle is not simply a recorder.
I’ve owned them, and I’m not quite sure either.
Here on this video jump to 4:01 to hear me demonstrate playing C natural both with the crossfingering and with the thumbhole.
(It’s a Low Eb whistle so the sounding note is Db.)
You’re not contradicting anything I wrote, you’re simply expanding upon the point I was making. Evidently the instrument envisaged successfully uses a recorder fingering system … or what would be the point in mentioning it and calling it a recorder?
A while back on Redditt there was someone who was asking about the availability of a “tin whistle with recorder fingerings.” What could be said other than they should be looking for a recorder? What kind of recorder, Baroque, Renaissance, modern, by or after some maker? Maybe they wanted a recorder that looked externally more like a tin whistle, maybe made out of aluminium or something? I don’t know.
Point is, that there is no such thing as a tin whistle with recorder fingerings and no recorder/whistle hybrids. Just fipple flutes that successfully (did that really need to be said?) use a recorder fingering pattern and are called “recorders.”
If it doesn’t sound like a recorder, then it isn’t one. Putting a Porsche steering wheel on a Volkswagen doesn’t make it a 911.
Personally I think the popularity of the C natural thumbhole is driven by Boehm flute people taking up the whistle, rather than a Recorder connexion.
Really the Boehm flute has only two fundamental changes vis-a-vis the whistle, having C natural worked by the thumb, and having
xxx xoo
sound F natural.
This being the case I’m a bit surprised that there’s not a demand for whistles with
xxx xoo
giving F natural, and F# being sounded by a lower-hand thumb-hole, or by crossfingering
xx oxx
as is encountered with Baroque fluteplaying.
Honestly, I haven’t heard any differences in frequency either: in my ear the two sounds are homophones. But, what does the electronic tuner… say?
The basic distinctive criteria seem to me to be three: the absence of a slow air chamber, the presence of the open whistle (i.e. windway, labium and its open window) in the headboard, the tonal holes (i.e. that can be closed by the fingertips). This criterion should suffice to identify straight whistle flutes but perhaps not a British Isles whistle. I have a rigid view of this classification: if the upper tonal holes are 7, then the instrument is an Italian whistle (zufolo), if there are 6 upper tonal holes in the same zone, then it is a British whistle, if there are tonal holesat the bottom of the instrument, in number of one for octave jumps, then it is a recorder, for tone adjustment, then it is an experimental (non-traditional) whistle; think, for example, of the Clover whistles: they have a side vent hole that is not used.
And I think that’s a mistake!
You’re probably right but I’d like you to motivate it.
Probably this fact is produced by a kind of traditionalist purism (reverence for history and traditions rather than for technological experimentation outside the box) present in Europe even in lovers of folk music.
An unfamiliar use of ‘motivate’ partially cleared up by Google, but let’s give this a shot…
You are, by your own admission, a relative newcomer to whistles asking questions about them (purpose of thumb holes, narrow bore etc.). But still defining them rigidly as British, Italian, recorders or experimental. Whereas I, having played recorder for some 48 years, studied it abroad 35 years ago and treated whistle seriously for nearly as long (let’s say 32), just can’t see things compartmentalised like this. I’ve never heard anyone (bar you) playing a standard six-holed whistle say they play the ‘British’ whistle or suggest the addition of another hole makes it ‘Italian’, and think real life is both more complex and more of a continuum than this. Yes, there are fipple flutes of which whistles and recorders are both sub-types, but I just can’t see or agree with your rigid, hole-and-country-based classification of them. This is not to say that there aren’t distinct national types, but just that it’s not that simple!
Just to add that a local fluter/whistler plays an Abell, I think it is, with a C thumbhole, and has done for donkey’s years. We’ve also had a recorder player sitting in at sessions on occasion. None of us ever thought of the Abell as being a recorder in the slightest, and primarily because it doesn’t sound remotely like a recorder. It’s just a whistle with a tweak.
So the fact that the musical instrument is chromatic or diatonic is not decisive for you for the purposes of classification as a recorder or as a whistle? Why?
Well, then, scientifically, where exactly is the essential peculiarity of a whistle?
How many changes can you make to a whistle without it turning into something else?
This strikes me as more a question for the philosophers. One thumbhole does not by definition make a whistle into a recorder; while they are both duct flutes, their construction and tone are different enough to retain their fundamental identities. People have made keyed chromatic whistles, but that doesn’t make them clarinets.
“Open upright flutes, without slow air chamber, with open whistle, and passage to the high register by overblowing”. So would it work?
No philosophy: only the will to arrive at a precise dictionary definition (a description that leaves no doubt). The manufacturer Generation calls its whistles “flagiolets”. Curt Sachs wrote (in “History of Musical Instruments”) that the flagiolet is a small recorder with six tonal holes and that the first flagiolet was built in Paris around 1581. This, Sachs wrote, is the French flagiolet, while the English flagiolet “it’s an amateur instrument” of the early nineteenth century. So, for Sachs, the whistle is a subspecies of recorder. Definition that, I think, you will not share, despite the fact that it comes from the great Curt Sachs. So, if this discussion aims to clearly define the essential characteristics of the “english flagiolet” to the point of eliminating any doubts, I hope that it achieves its purpose.
I’m of the suspicion that Sachs used the term “recorder” only out of convenience, since even his least-informed readers would have grasped the general concept. I’m quite certain he would have known and recognized the better accuracy of the terms “duct flute” or “fipple flute”, but then he would have had to spend more ink explaining that. It’s like calling a zebra a type of horse, which it is not. Both are equines, but that’s where the kinship ends. Earlier on, the modern whistle was alternatively termed a flageolet because it developed out of the English flageolet. But time moves on, and now whistles and flageolets are considered different things.
Beware of relying on dictionary definitions as canonical: they are sometimes contradictory, and as I have discovered, can even be grossly wrong.
Thank you for these valuable considerations of yours (which I really appreciate very much): I consider them a further step towards solving the problem, not a surrender to the current uncertain state of the definitions.