Can you tell me if it makes sense to play whistles by more than 20 people in a kind of “whistle orchestra” ?
I did that for 5 years with about 50 recorders – it worked because they play exact sheet music without individual improvisation and interpretation ……any experiance ?
On saturday I was at a concert for the local children learning the whistle (and a few other instruments)., they played in groups, beginners some 35, intermediate 27, more advanced 5-15 and a finale with 140 (think jingle bells and carols there). While some of it was good (and especially the higher groups were seriously good)and useful in this context, it is a bit much to have large groups of whistles playing.
I’ve played in a lot of recorder consorts, large and small and it’s a huge amount of fun. However, it works because the recorder literature (or the music that the recorder has borrowed) is polyphonic, with lots of beautiful harmony, counterpoint, etc. If you’re thinking of a whistle orchestra playing Celtic music, I don’t think it would be as successful. Everyone playing the same thing would be boring at best and painful at worst: playing true, clean unison is VERY difficult. At a session, the music is usually pretty monophonic, but there are often guitars, banjos, etc supplying a bit of harmony in the form of chords, plus fiddles, mandolins, whistles, flutes etc playing the melody for variety.
That said, I’d still be willing to sit in if you decided to try it!
If you could pull it off, I’d go for it!
Sexy idea hahahaha
I think it’d sound like a whistlin’ (of course) ceili band. 
Sounds fun though.
Speaking of painful, I have two words for which I apologize in advance: Flute choir. I do not know who came up with the idea, nor why people insist on continuing it, but it sounds absolutely awful. (My wife has played in a few flute choirs, and she agrees with me, BTW.) The whistle idea might be a little more tolerable because you can get a half-dozen whistles that have very different timbre from one another.
For a great example of unison working with subtly different instruments, listen to Telemann’s concerto for transverse flute and recorder. The unison parts in that work because the two instruments can still sound different playing the same notes. I don’t think it would work with two flutes or two recorders.
As an aside, I’ve read that one reason unison on the same instrument (or dubbing one’s own singing in unison) doesn’t work because the sonic flaws are accentuated. On the other hand, unison with two different instruments or voices tends to cancel the flaws in sound (while still accentuating the flaws in playing).
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