As Boston-based Irish music duo Matt & Shannon Heaton, we perform updated and traditional music around the globe. We’ve got four duo CDs to date.
We’re raising money to help record our fifth duo album, “Tell You in Earnest” and then to do our first CD Release concert for the album in... Suphanburi, Thailand.
CDs of unaccompanied music are, unfortunately, a small minority of releases these days. But here's a new one from flute player Peter Horan and fiddler Gerry Herrington. Writing in The Irish Times, Siobhán Long says this of the release:
Horan wears his 81 years lightly, and what he might occasionally lack in lung-power, he more than compensates for in spirit and verve, particularly on the Donegal hornpipe The High Level. Horan's flute revels in ducking and diving between the notes of the tune, while Harrington's meticulously researched sleeve notes and understated presence pay their dues to Pádraig O'Keeffe's revered Sliabh Luachra style.
You can hear two sample excerpts from the album or order the CD online at the Cló Iar-Chonnachta site.
First-rate flute player Harry Bradley is now offering flute lessons over the Internet, by exchanging MP3s. Interesting idea, as it opens the door to those who can't make it to Ireland to get lessons from Harry in person.
It might at first seem like such lessons would be necessarily limited — the teacher won't be able to see your grip, embouchure, etc. But we're producing music, not visual art, here, and the audio carries a heck of a lot of information, especially for a skilled listener. Studying with June McCormack's excellent tutor Fliúit has really sold me on the virtues of having well-played slow audio of the tunes I study. Without seeing her play or talking to her, I feel like I'm getting formal instruction just by listening and playing along to her tracks. I'm sure that having tutorial recordings made just for you and having your audio heard by a teacher would be even more beneficial.
With all that said, I don't think I'll be signing up just yet, for the same reason I haven't booked tickets for the Frankie Kennedy Winter School: I'm still new to this instrument and I feel like I have a lot more of the basics to learn from my teacher here in town before I start working with folks from overseas. But I really, really look forward to the day when I'll be good enough to make such efforts worthwhile.
Speaking of the Frankie Kennedy Winter School, Bradley teaches there, too, and you can get several MP3s for study (albeit not slow ones) from him, Téada, Robbie Hannan & Dermot McLaughlin from the Winter School site.
I don't know if this is great reading or not, but here are some tunes I'm learning right now and the recordings I'm using as references:
). O'Donnell plays it together with The Blackthorn Stick; the two sound great together. This one is hard for me to play on the flute since it goes from first-octave A to low D to second-octave E, necessitating changes in embouchure.
as Frieze Britches (where it's incorrectly identified as a slip jig in the liner notes, which confused me for some time when I first bought the album!), but his version is too fast/complicated for me to keep up with, though very nice for pure listening! Bingham's recording is slower and less heavily improvised. Liam O'Flynn plays it on Come West Along the Road.Nova Scotian flute player Chris Norman came to the Ohio State University this past April as part of the Johnstone Woodwind Master Series in conjunction with the Central Ohio Flute Association. He and guitar player Andy Thurston played a rather unusual show on the night of 21 April. The first half was an informal concert featuring mostly traditional Scottish tunes, with some Irish, Cape Breton, and original compositions as well. He was joined, at times, by Robert Aitken on piccolo and a local woman named Casey (I didn't catch her last name) on piano. Chris said that he had met Casey at a Kinko's the day before. The concert became even less formal in the second half of the show as he invited the conference attendees to get out their instruments and play along with some tunes. There were perhaps 50 or so Boehm system flute players, a couple guitarists, a pianist, one other simple-system flute player besides Chris and myself, and one bassoonist!
The photo above shows Chris playing the Scottish smallpipes. Although they're fingered like the GHBs, Chris said they originate in the music of the Scottish Travellers rather than the mainstream Scottish music tradition.
Here's Chris, Andy, Casey, and Robert playing a tune together.
The photo above is from the second half of the show. Chris projected the scores for the tunes, played them through a couple times, had everyone play along, and then gave some feedback to the audience, mostly on rhythm.
The show wasn't particularly well-publicized outside of OSU. I was lucky to hear about it, because it was a great concert.
For me, learning how to breathe without breaking the rhythm of a tune is not easy. I've written about this before, but in the months since I wrote that post I've changed my conclusions.
I've explicitly discarded an assumption which I didn't write about at the time and might not even have been conscious of when I wrote the previous post. As a beginner, my instinct was to try and make breaths as inconspicuous as possible. The trouble with that notion is that "as inconspicuous as possible" is still pretty conspicuous!
I don't think there's any way to play a quick tune (or at least most tunes) in such a way that the listener can't tell when you breathe. Certainly, it isn't difficult for me to hear very good whistlers taking breaths when I listen to CDs. Circular breathing is for didgeridoos. So if we accept that there will always be an audible gap in the music when we breathe (unlike, say, the fiddle or the pipes), then instead of hiding the gap in the tune altogether we must make the gap appropriate for the tune. Turning lemons into lemonade, as it were. A well-placed gap for a breath, in other words, is an ornament, a variation in the tune which adds musical interest.
One good way to learn about using this form of ornamentation is to listen to recordings of Irish music on the flute. Flutes require a lot more air than (soprano) whistles, so the players have to breathe more. Hence, you have a lot more opportunities to listen for this in a flute passage.
There's an ornament I've always liked that I hear most prominently on flute recordings, but you can hear in whistle recordings as well, where a player shortens a note and skips one or two notes which follow. I'm embarassed to say that it didn't occur to me until recently that this was not merely done for style but that the player was breathing as well! In case it's not clear what I'm referring to, consider the following two score fragments:
The first score is an unornamented bit of a tune. Although notating ornamentations is an approximation at best, I've attempted to express in the second version what I'm hearing on the recordings — a note is shortened but emphasized, the following note is gone altogether, and then the tune picks up after a rest.
If you're following along at home, now would be a good time to put on your favorite Irish flute CD, as it will probably give you a better impression of what I'm discussing than my clunky notation above.
Well, it's all fine and good to assert that breathing is an ornament, but it doesn't make it any easier to do, does it? After all, I can choose not to practice rolls until I get the fundamental rhythm of a tune right, but I can't choose not to breathe. It's a difficult thing, biology.
But maybe it does help. Because it suggests that what I said I found helpful last time:
So here's something which may seem obvious to folks who have played for a while, but took me a bit to realize: You can continue to finger the note as usual even though you don't blow it while you breathe. This way you're not disrupting the normal movement of your fingers during the breath.
...is profoundly wrong. There's a nugget of truth in what I wrote, I think: The reason I was losing the rhythm was that what was going through my head and what I was doing physically were different. But I picked the wrong solution. Instead of attempting to avoid changing what I was doing — and as I noted above, you can't avoid breathing — I should have been trying to change what I expected to play. I can play a tune better when I have an expressive version in my head.
It's not a magic bullet, though. I can do this well when I'm playing quite slowly, or if I practice breathing in a particular passage, but it's going to take some practice to be able to do it at will when playing quickly.
So the lengthy post above boils down to this:
