Tin Whistles in Schools & School Tin Whistle Bands

Whistle
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Dear friends,

This is the first week of school here in New York and in other places around the U.S. But in this time of budget cutbacks and austerity, many kids will not have the opportunity to learn music or to play an instrument. Arts and music education are often the first things to go when school districts cut back.

I have a proposal to keep music education alive in the schools in these belt-tightening times. I’ve started a new website called Pennywhistles for Schools — http://www.pennywhistlesforschools.com — where I offer to provide schools with a Clarke Meg tin whistle and an instruction book for just $5 per student. I am throwing in a 44-minute instruction CD for free as a download. All schools have to do is make some homemade drums from found objects and they can have a real marching band that will bring joy to their students and to their communities.

A teacher named Kathy Clyne started a tin whistle marching band called The Golden Eagles at P.S. 192 in Harlem in the '90s. You can watch a video clip of the Golden Eagles Tin Whistle Band my new site’s home page at http://www.pennywhistlesforschools.com.

It would be great to see little tin whistle bands like this spring up all around the country and all around the world. I hope you will visit the site and then help me spread the word to parents, people in education, and leaders of scout troops and other community groups.

You don’t have to be a whistle virtuoso to get this started and teach kids the basics. Any adult with some musical ability, an aptitude for teaching, and patience can lead a children’s tin whistle band. The instructions in my book Pennywhistle for Beginners* are very clear and easy to follow. I’ve also got a teachers’ guide in preparation, and will give anyone who does this all the support I possibly can.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer in spreading the word about this project.

Sincerely,

Bill Ochs
The Pennywhistler’s Press

*P.S. Pennywhistle for Beginners is a 32-page abridged version of my book The Clarke Tin Whistle. I still recommend The Clarke Tin Whistle for adult beginners. But school budgets are so tight that using the original 80-page book would be out of the question. So I created the 32-page Pennywhistle for Beginners to address this budgetary issue. The abridged book has all the beginning lessons from the Clarke book, plus a handful of the simpler tunes — 29 pieces in all. The Clarke book has 83 tunes total.

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Bill, this is awesome, and a great idea at the right time. All the best for this project, and I hope you’ll get some good responses. Let me know if I can help.

I remember seeing the tin whistle marching band clips at your place some time ago, what joy.

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Bill-- this is a wonderful idea. The chance to introduce kids to playing a real musical instrument at an early age is too good to pass up. I’m going to post your site on Facebook in hopes of attracting some teachers to program. Good luck with it!

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I will pass this along to 3 young women I know teaching in a special program in inner City Baltimore schools.

Philo

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as a music teacher, this excites me! great ideas, especially as i see our local districts here in Ohio and Michigan losing music programs…

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That’s fantastic. We’ve done similar things here with putting on workshops that show primary school teachers how to teach their kids the tin whistle, and in a way that helps them to meet state standards. We have been buying $5 meg whistles for the workshops but your initiative is great because now they can go back to the classroom with a book too, and for the same price.

I will definitely help spread the word!

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Bill, this sounds exciting. I was planning to do recorders, but I’ve been playing my whistle for my students, and one of them found me to ask if we could please play whistles in class instead!

Can you tell me if you offer your classroom deal to Canadian schools? I hope so!

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First, thanks so much to everyone for your good wishes and encouragement.

Straycat82 wrote: We’ve done similar things here with putting on workshops that show primary school teachers how to teach their kids the tin whistle, and in a way that helps them to meet state standards. We have been buying $5 meg whistles for the workshops but your initiative is great because now they can go back to the classroom with a book too, and for the same price.

I’d love to hear more about your tin whistle workshops for primary school teachers in AZ. That’s a wonderful idea. I plan to do similar events here in NY for classroom teachers. When I was a kid, we had a music specialist who came to our school occasionally, but our classroom teacher also taught us music. Small tin whistle bands could be organized on a class-by-class basis. Children who don’t pick up the whistle so quickly could play homemade percussion instruments. Others could carry banners and flags, as in The Golden Eagles video on the pennywhistlesforschools.com home page. We have a page on the site with a collection of YouTube videos dedicated to making percussion instruments from found objects.

The tin whistle is not very well known in this part of the world, so we wanted to make the package as attractive as possible as an incentive for schools to give this a try, especially now that budgets are so tight. So it’s not only a whistle and book for $5 wholesale, but also a free CD that teachers and students can download from the website.

I want to share something that happened here in NYC on June 14, 1990. It was a holiday that we call Flag Day. But I will always remember it as “The Day The Golden Eagles Took Wall Street.”

Kathy Clyne’s Golden Eagles Tin Whistle Band from P.S. 192 in Harlem had caused such a stir in their district that word of them had drifted all the way downtown to Mayor Dinkins’ office. And so they were invited to march in New York City’s annual Flag Day Parade.

When the kids from P.S. 192 got downtown they mustered near City Hall. There were all sorts of bands there, including groups from the suburbs with fancy uniforms and “real” instruments. The P.S. 192 kids just had their tin whistles and little drums and were dressed in their school clothes. But when they stepped off, boy, it was something to see!

The Golden Eagles marched proudly and tall through the canyons of Lower Manhattan with the sound of their tin whistles and drums reverberating off the big buildings. It was lunch break in the Financial District and a lot of office workers had come out to see what was going on. The P.S. 192 kids got a nice round of applause as they marched down Wall Street, but when they broke into the Irish tune “Roddy McCorley” — aka “Sean South of Garryowen” — the crowd went wild!

A lot of Irish emigrants and Irish-Americans work in those offices and they had recognized the tune. The P.S. 192 kids were mostly from the Dominican Republic or of Dominican background. It was one of those New York moments that you never forget.

So I want to encourage folks out there to give this a try. Start a kids tin whistle band. Make some magic in your community. It can be done, and I will help in any way I can.


Bill Ochs
http://www.pennywhistlesforschools.com

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Absolutely, Anne. Please contact me at schoolsales [at] pennywhistle.com and we can discuss further. Or you can fill out the contact form at the Pennywhistles for Schools site.

Bill

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Great idea!

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Bill-- I just had another idea. You might approach the Cub Scouts with the idea of using this program as a merit badge thing.

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Paul, that’s a fabulous suggestion! Thanks so much!

Bill

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Hi Bill,

I’m just curious if you cover the issue of handedness (i.e., left v. right hand on top) in your program teaching materials and guidelines. Here’s the reason I ask:

The other day I was viewing a report on a whistle program somewhat similar to your proposal at a school in San Jose (CA), designed to give inner city kids a taste of instrumental music education. The instructor was a good-hearted adult volunteer with a bit of pennywhistle, and he succeeded in teaching a number of both Irish and Mexican folk tunes. It was fun to watch the kids tootle their stuff.

But it struck me that every single child was playing with right hand on top. It’s not hard to guess what happened. This is how the adult happened to play, so it’s what he automatically passed on to his charges.

Now we know that that standard of handedness is flexible when it comes to the whistle, especially in the trad context of possibly going on to play timber flute or pipes.

But it seems to me one underlying premise of this sort of program is to prime the kids for later interest in and exposure to more conventional school music programs, to the extent these might become available. And in American schools, “conventional” for winds is going to mean clarinet, saxophone, silver flute, oboe, etc.

In which case handedness becomes a major issue. RH-top students face a restart of their learning curve as one more impediment or discouragement in what is already a difficult situation. And the expense and availability of LH band instruments for disadvantaged kids is really out of the question.

So I wonder what your thoughts are in this particular pedagogical context.

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Thanks for your comments MTGuru. You raise an excellent point. In my book I direct students to play with the left hand on top for exactly the reasons that you state — namely that if a child wants to move on to a conventional woodwind instrument, she or he will have to re-learn fingering, which is a huge handicap.

The left-hand-on-top recommendation will also be spelled out in the teachers’ guide loud and clear so that no teacher misses it. I’ve taught for a long time and typically in the second or even the third class there always seems to be someone who hasn’t followed instructions and is playing with the right hand on top. I gently remind them to switch to the left hand on top so that their musical choices won’t be limited down the line.

Of course in an Irish traditional music context the choice of top hand doesn’t matter that much, as you point out. But in a school music program it is crucial not to introduce an obstacle that would prevent a child from easily moving on to play a conventional woodwind instrument.

Bill
http://www.pennywhistlesforschools.com

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Thanks, Bill, sounds like you have this well thought-out. All the best with the effort!

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I have started Bill’s program at my school in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia. I teach music to seven classes of grade 4 and grade 5, and they are all (180 students) playing the Clarke Meg pennywhistle from Bill’s beginner book. There’s a huge level of enthusiasm and involvement, and it’s a joy for me to teach. :smiley:

I have insisted that they must play with the left hand on top, and there are a few who say it feels funny or whatever, but we’ve had three lessons so far and I don’t have to ask too many to switch hands any more.

Bill has been wonderfully helpful with questions or problems. I hope this program takes off, because it’s a pleasure for the students and for the teacher. I told a group of my friends about it today and they want to try it too (after they asked me what a pennywhistle is!) :laughing:

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This sounds like a great idea. Best wishes for it’s success.

I especially enjoyed reading about the Golden Eagles in NY. Hopefully this program will make more moments like that happen around the world.

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I enjoyed the video of the Golden Eagles marching band. That was great!

I have downloaded the CD for use with my own children, as a supplement to the tin whistle lessons they have in their weekly tutorial sessions. We played “Merrily We Roll Along” together today and they are sounding great! Thank you!

It sounds like homeschoolers would have to band together in larger groups to get the discount. In our case, since the children are getting the music theory from another source, we are doing fine with just the CD dowload. Unfortunately, our tutorial program already sells tin whistles (they are Clarke whistles, though–“Mel Bay by Clarke”) through their “official” bookstore, and our director can’t share deals that would compete with the program’s earnings, even though this is much better since it comes with an instructional booklet, and at a better price. I’m kind of bummed. Next year, I will share this with families new to the program unofficially and tell them about the group discount by word of mouth. Thank you for offering it!

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Thanks so much for your post. I am glad that you and your children are finding the CD download useful. If you are interested in the Pennywhistle for Beginners book, it is available here: http://bit.ly/cyyJbY

I’d be very open to working with groups of homeschoolers, so thanks in advance for your willingness to spread the word. My original Clarke Tin Whistle book, published in 1988, had a following amongst homeschoolers in the early '90s when it was featured in a number of mail order catalogs.

One of the most remarkable unsolicited testimonials I’ve ever received was a handwritten letter that came one day in the winter of 1991 from a homeschooling mom in Supply, Virginia:

“My son J. has taught himself to play the Clarke Tin Whistle using Bill Ochs’ handbook and tape…J. is home schooled and the prospect of providing music education was quite daunting until this remarkable little instrument arrived…At different times, he attempted lessons in trumpet and drums, but failed even to learn to read music…That is what makes his progress with your whistle book and tape so remarkable to me…He is reading music and can execute the trills & furbellows quite well.” — E.K.W.

One reason for starting the Pennywhistles for Schools website is that a lot of children are falling through the cracks in the music education system, just like that young homeschooler. He got a tin whistle and there was an almost magical transformation. I am glad that your children are learning to play the instrument. And it is wonderful to see that more music educators are considering the tin whistle as an alternative to the recorder.

Bill Ochs