I was wondering if there are well known respected whistle players that don’t read music or understand the theories of music?
Perhaps some of you started playing whistle without understanding music, and perhaps learnt many years later. Does it open new doors being able to understand what you actually are doing?
Any thoughts on this ?
Chris
There are plenty. I don’t think Kevin (Crawford) has a background in music notation and theory for example. Correct me if I’m wrong Kevin.
Does learning human anatomy help one become an effective surgeon?
Sure it does and it keeps nasty cut marks off the operating table.
Folks that play music well with no understanding of it do so in spite of not because of it.
If you want to be a musician you might want to study music a little.
It will only help you.
That doesn’t take the place of becoming a effective listener and learning to play by ear though.
That’s what Kevin told us at Swannanoa when I was there a couple years back. Any notation he uses for tunes he gives out is his own ABC system.
John Skelton also once told me that he didn’t learn to read music until he started teaching other people how to play.
They’re independent skills. You can be eloquent without knowing how to read letters, and musical without reading notes.
In these days of communication though, I don’t think that’s going to be a realistic option unless one lives a life of purposeful seclusion. And who knows when they’re a kid what they’re going to be when they grow up, much less a talent, to avoid that particular field of study. And whose parents are going to opt for that.
Ask those people who can’t read music if they would have liked to have learned. After they answer that question, ask them if they would like if their children learned how to read music.
The ability to sight-read music can be useful in a number of ways, but it’s necessary only for one task: playing reasonably complex, un-improvised music you’re not familiar with in company with other musicians. This describes being in an orchestra perfectly, but doesn’t describe any situation common to traditional music.
And since the advent of tape, good workarounds are becoming more and more available. I’ve recently downloaded a couple of very interesting interviews with Joni Mitchell. She’s candid about not being able to read a note, but that has not stopped her from writing and recording some of the most complex of popular music. She gets huge professional respect from her peers. The only occasion in which this limited her, at least in terms of stories she told in these interviews, was when Jazz bassist/pianist/composer Charles Mingus, dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, approached Mitchell with a project idea. He had written some music for orchestra and jazz band, and for some reason decided that he wanted Joni to be the vocallist. She had to say that this wasn’t going to work because she didn’t read music, but they did find another way to create the project and get Mingus’ vision out.
I tend to see them as interrelated rather than independent.
Although I’ve known a number of folks that are quite fluent in the technical aspects of music but are god awful musicians.
I think you may have missed my point.
I said it helps or can help. I believe it does.
By the way, I’ve not seen a great trending over time for eloquent illiterates.
Perhaps this could be proven true had someone written all these wonderful speeches down for them.
I find it difficult to understand the consistent tendency to promote musical illiteracy and shun the study of music theory when connected with traditional music.
Why is that?
In whistling icon Packie Manus Byrnes’ memoir, Recollections of a Donegal Man (which he wrote with our own SteveJ), he tells of coming to england in the forties (I think) and getting a gig playing saxaphone in a dance band. Not being a reader, he never bothered changing the score he had on the music stand in front of him. It didn’t matter; he had great ears and if he could hear his part played once, he had it.
However, one night during a gig his music stand fell down and the score went flying. A member of the audience helped retrieve it, but not before the guy noticed that it wasn’t what the band was playing. He said so, audibly.
Joni Mitchell, as much as I love her and grew up with her, is an example of times gone by. Try coming up with someone more contemporary.
And I agree with Anvil. Why promote music illiteracy? Would we ever promote such a thing as regular illiteracy?
Depends how you define literacy.
There are different ways of being music literate.
Let’s not make Western sheet notation some sort of imperially dominant paradigm for literacy..
Being able to verbalise things is excellent for COMMUNICATING things in teaching and sharing but one needs to have a broad enough grasp to recognise that there are always limitations within any given “literacy system”. Otherwise we end up with dogma fights.
Your own argument mentions not limiting oneself. I never said to limit oneself to western musical notation. Why exclude any option, including learning by ear, music notation or any of the other methods of learning music?
this is an interesting thread. usually, when i post in a thread it seems to die almost immediately. i hope that isn’t the case this time… (maybe it’s my toothpaste?)…
anyway… to the original question… i am sure there are many well known and greatly respected traditional musicians (current and historical) that don’t read or give a tuppence for being able to read. it does not make them any less a musician. they played and became well known or respected because of their love for the music, i suppose. their passion for the music they played helped them to become very good representatives of their particular style, flavor or genre of the music they played…
as for theory… is it good to know? i believe so. it can certainly add to one’s kit. i’m sure there are many examples, though (as indicated above,) of musicians who possess a wealth of theoretical knowledge and remain unable to play well. i am equally sure there are a great many examples of musicians who know nothing of theory, and remain excellent musicians even with this lack of knowledge. i tend to agree with Aanvil’s statement that great musicians who possess no knowledge of theory are not necessarily great because they possess no knowledge of theory… it seems to me that (to paraphrase Paul Simon) their lack of education hasn’t hurt them none. by the same token, who’s to say if they learned more theory , then it would make them better musician’s… “better” then becomes a hazy, subjective kind of thing… imo.
i also think… perhaps in error… that we, as musicians, cannot help but absorb little bits of theory here and there. if we know that different keys have different sharps and flats… we know a little theory… if a guitar player is playing along at a jam and somebody says something like “let’s do a 1-4-5 in Eb,” and the guitar player is able to play along using Eb, Ab and Bb… then he knows a little theory…maybe not a lot. but he knows some. and that is a starting point. if you can play a song by ear… seems to me that falls somewhere in the realm of “applied theory,” if you will. you hear a song… you try to play the first phrase of the song, but the first two notes you play don’t sound right… realizing it or not, you have recognized a difference in the interval between two notes. sounds like theory to me. when all the names get stripped away… we all know some theory… we just refer to it in different ways… we don’t all know the same amount… we don’t all remember everything we know off the tops of our heads… but it’s there.
personally, i know some theory… and i even know that i know it… but in all the years i have been performing, i don’t think there has been a conscious application of theory as i am playing along. i just play. i’ve learned riffs and progressions that work… i’ve stolen riffs, licks and progressions that work… so i use them. sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. when i’m scoring a piece of music, i fumble along one note at a time until it is right… i’m not fast by any means. i read music, but not well enough to sight read a complex piece in a company of musicians… i know that some notes work well with some chords, some don’t… before i looked at theory, i could only tell you that it just didn’t sound right in that particular application.
there is a place for theory… there is a place for sight reading…
i’ve read similar threads in the past and wondered something along the lines of… i wonder if the guys sitting around the fire playing a great sounding tune a couple hundred years ago were overly worried about the theory, or if they were just having a good time… i wonder if Micho Russell spent a lot of time worrying about theory, or if he just played… and i often wonder if people don’t get just a little “too wrapped around the axle” and forget the most important thing about music… joy.
be well,
jim
Not exactly ITM or whistling, but none of the Beatles could read music, write music, or understand music theory, and look where they got 
They used their curiosity to write their songs, and I’m sure many ITM players who couldn’t read/write music who wrote tunes wrote them in a way similar to the Beatles.
Ofcourse if you can’t read music, and have no understanding at all of music theory (Raises hand),
you’re at less of a disadvantage playing ITM than for instance, classical orchestra.
My completely unsupported two cents 
A good thing, don’t you think?
There are many ways of limiting oneself.
Two of them are limiting by what you don’t know and limiting by what you do.
How about Jesus?
Paul McCartney.
Best wishes,
Jerry
We can fix a lot of things with just a hammer but when it comes time to turn a screw, our toolbox feels a bit empty. You don’t need to know a lot of theory, or any at all, but even a little bit really does come in handy.
Don’t be silly.
Jesus could read and write.
It’s in the scripture.