Away from home - where I engage in research - my day-to-day work is carried out in a high security prison. There are many restrictions as to what one may bring into the establishment particularly objects made out of metal.
I am not allowed to bring any whistle into work that is large or has a metal body, therefore I am restricted to smaller plastic/composite or wooden instrument.
Luckily my Dixons (C & D) fit the bill perfectly & have the added advantage of not being too loud so that my clients & colleagues remain blissfully unaware of my playing during meal breaks.
Does anyone else suffer from similar restrictions?
For the last few months, I’ve been travelling a lot on business (ie, dealing with airport security). My Dixon D and Bb whistles are great for this. Though I’ve successfully carried metal-bodied whistles on airlines, they always get looked over sceptically, while I’ve never even had the screeners comment on the Dixons.
I’d imagine other plastic-bodied whistles like Susato, Serpent Polly, Water Weasel, Burke composite, Busman delrin, etc (I can see I need to buy a few more - all I have from the list are Dixons and Serpents ) would work as well. I’ll be adding at least one Serpent Polly next trip - we’ll see if they have any issues with the brass tuning slide.
If it’s noise level, rather than material, a Hoover or Oak might be a good choice.
I was just on a two-week vacation during which I had planned on playing my flute for at least 2-3 hours a day. Turned out that one of the people I was travelling with is very sensitive to sound (I brought whistles, but they’re even more obnoxious to those with sensitive ears), so I got in maybe 5 hours over two weeks.
When I’m on business and staying in hotels, I usually bring a D whistle and something like a low-G, which doesn’t carry as well. When I’m at conferences, I try to play at lunchtime, when it’s likely other people aren’t in their rooms.
I bought a chieftain low D in California, and carried it on airplanes about 10 times since then, both before and after 9/11.
I never really needed it at my destination, I just have a thing for bringing it through airport security.
Unlike other wind instruments, this low whistle really looks like a martial arts weapon barely and badly disguised as a musical instrument—not the kind of thing you’d break if you sat on. Yet nobody ever batted an eyebrow as my carry-on bag containing the conspicuous hunk of pipe went under the x-ray.
I guess nobody was thinking someone’d hijack a plane with a beatin’ stick. But I remember, I flew 7 times in 2001, the last being a flight from NY to CA in the wee hours of Sept 11; I remember thinking as I boarded that plane that I was much less confident in our security people, and much less likely to board an airplane in the future, after seeing how little attention the security people paid to anything.
) would work as well. I’ll be adding at least one Serpent Polly next trip - we’ll see if they have any issues with the brass tuning slide.