But the vast majority of players serious (which doesn’t = poe-faced) about irish music will play whistle. That isn’t to say that someone primarily interested in Irish (or scottish etc) music might not be a recorder player. The nuances of eacvh tradition are glossed over. Nothing wrong with that if that’s your bag, but more often than not such a muscian sounds like a dabbler in many traditions rather than someone immersed in one particular style. I think moany people have their doubts when they see a recorder because 95% or more of the time the player will be a generic folky with eclectic tastes in music from around the world. Your opinions may vary and be equally valid ? I’ve never been convinced by the recorder, it never sounds quite right to me, but I wouldn’t stop someone from playing one in a session if they were making the effort to fit in. The physical differences between the whistle and the recorder may be small, but the effect is audible, and that is what the people referring to Greensleeves (and Telemann) are hearing.Īnd "the noise of cultural stereotypes" could almost be seen as a definition of traditional music.ĭo you have a view about how the recorder fits into our kind of music? Your idea that we only need one word for recorders and whistles implies that they are not distinct and yet you’ve explained how they are distinct. We’re interested in the place of the recorder in the music, and so we’re primarily interested in the sound. In Hungarian there is only one word for both "recorder" and "whistle" - "furulya" does for both.
They aren’t hearing anything much at all through the noise their cultural stereotypes are making in their heads. The sort of boneheads who trot out cliches about Greensleeves certainly aren’t hearing anything like that.
"But the physical differences between are all at that level of subtlety. Re: The recorder and recorder players in our music. Which is a neat effect a whistle won’t give you.īut the physical differences between the two are all at that level of subtlety. So if you play a tune on a recorder that cadences on a rising semitone, you often get a brightening of the timbre on the final note. (Professional-grade handmade recorders are often made to heighten this unevenness of tone colour). For common keys, that means that harmonically more remote notes from the tonic are de-emphasized a bit - the scale is less uniform than a whistle. And a recorder can play in a wider range of keys than a whistle, using crossfingerings, and for those extra crossfingered notes the timbre will also be different - sounds a bit "muted". The notes where this makes a difference are the mid-range D and C sharp, and the F sharps - other notes common to recorder and whistle are fingered the same and have exactly the same timbre. In fact a recorder sounds LESS clean than a whistle - when doing crossfingered notes, more of the energy goes into higher partials.