Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares

OK, no Irish or Scottish content here whatsoever, but I saw a really memorable performance a few weeks back. CityMusic brought the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir to Columbus earlier this month. I first encountered this group's recordings in college, shortly after they were released. The singing is just astonishing: Filled with six part harmonies, noises, talking, pitch bending, dissonance, unusual time signatures, and a laundry list of other things which would be a train wreck if attempted by lesser performers, it's some of the most beautiful vocal music I've ever heard.

You can hear samples of the recording I have on this Amazon.com page.

The opportunity to see this ensemble live was especially nice because although the CD recording I have includes incredible feats of singing, the audio quality is not that great. I recommend the CD for the unusual and brilliant singing, but don't expect great fidelity.

The Snowy Path

I'd like to express my deep gratitude to a member of the Columbus slow sessions email list who directed my attention to the Riley School of Irish Music tunes page, where I found a slow recording of the beautiful slip jig The Snowy Path. The slow recording makes the tune almost trivial to pick up by ear; just start on F# and play in D major and if you know the tune at all you'll have it in no time.

This tune was composed by Mark Kelly of Altan; you can hear it on their album Harvest Storm, including a gorgeous flute solo by Frankie Kennedy. Click the Amazon ad on the right to hear a short sample of Altan's recording of this tune.

Whistle This!

I've been quietly following Whistle This! for a while, and now I've gone and uploaded a tune. I really like the idea of the site; sharing tunes is fundamentally more interesting to me than talking about them. So even though I'm quite new to the instrument I'll be uploading more tunes in the future and listening carefully to what others post there.

Green Fields of America at the 2006 Dublin Irish Festival

This past August I caught Mick Moloney's band Green Fields of America at the 2006 Dublin Irish Festival. The announcer noted that when the festival began 19 years ago and was held in a tennis court, there was only one band the first year: Green Fields of America. This year the festival spanned several acres and attracted 80,000+ people, plus many well-known bands, and once again Green Fields of America played.

Green Fields of America is not so much an ongoing band as it is Mick Moloney and his rotating crew of Irish music all-stars. This year the band consisted of

• Mick (guitar, mandolin, tenor banjo, and vocals)
• John Doyle (guitar, vocals)
• Billy McComiskey (box)
• Robbie O'Connell (guitar, vocals)
• Athena O'Lochlainn (fiddle)

I have heard some of Mick Moloney's recorded music before; I just bought the CD which accompanies his book Far from the Shamrock Shore a couple of months ago. But while that CD, and most of the other recordings I've heard from him, lean almost entirely towards song, the Green Fields of America performance had a roughly even mix of songs and dance tunes, and featured local, live dancers for two of the sets. Mick's albums of song aren't bad at all, but in the end I decided that I like his dance tunes even more.

Friday's performance started late due to problems with the monitor mix, which seemed not to be resolved for the whole show; John Doyle left his chair several times during the show to have a word with the monitor mixer. The front of house mix was some better, but the guitars were way too high in the mix; they frequently drowned out the other instruments. Even at the Irish festival I sometimes wonder if the mixers realize that the guitars are frequently playing accompaniment. Sunday's show seemed to be much better mixed overall.

Athena O'Lochlainn was a new name to me, but as soon as she started playing it became clear that she had more than enough talent to earn a place with such distinguished company. Her fiddle playing was simply delightful, packed with lift and cheer. It was fun to watch her face as she played; she seemed to react to the sounds coming from her instrument in much the same way as the audience did. According to her personal site she has a CD, produced by John Doyle, in the works.

Three guitarists might seem like rather a lot for an ITM group, but the performance would not have been the same without Robbie O'Connell's excellent singing. You can sample his songwriting at his web site.

I didn't recognize Billy McComiskey by sight and had missed his name during the introductions, so I didn't realize who he was at first. In retrospect, I really respect the way he held back for the better part of the performance, letting other band members take the spotlight. But when it came time for him to let loose and show the audience what he can do, I realized that he was a first-rate talent. When I finally caught his name at the end of the show all of the pieces fell in place. Like John Doyle, his talent comes not just from his ability to play his instrument really, really well, but also his ability to not overwhelm the rest of the band in every number.

At the end of Friday's show, the band was joined by bodhrán builder and player Albert Alfonso, who provided rhythmic accompaniment for the last two sets.

Green Fields of America can be an elusive band. They don't tour a lot, and as far as I can tell have only one album in current release. That's a shame, because the two sets I caught at the Irish festival showed the current lineup to be a remarkably cohesive band. The music they played wasn't what I had expected, but I have no complaints at all. The band played great dance music punctuated with occasional songs, and seemed to enjoy listening to each other.

Family obligations caused me to miss many of the other performers at the Irish festival this year, but I think I caught the best show there. This was easily the best show I've seen all year.

The Whistle Is Not a Fixed-Pitch Instrument

From time to time, one or two sentences will change the way I approach this instrument and this music. Here's an example, written by Peter Laban:

Complaining your C's are out of tune on the whistle is a bit like a beginning fiddleplayer complaining his notes are off when he puts down his fingers.
This is not a fixed pitch instrument, it's, for a good part at least, your job to play in tune.

Before I read that post this fact had never occurred to me before. But it makes a great deal of sense. Instrument designers must adjust the size and position of the tone holes in order to compromise between:

• The pitch of "regular" notes like G, A, B, etc.
• The pitch of "cross-fingered" notes like C natural
• The two octaves most commonly used, and the fact that we must over-blow to reach the second octave
• The cylindrical body of most whistles
• The fact that a whistle "embouchure" cannot change for different notes in the way a flute player's embouchure can
• The desire to have a consistent tone and volume across the scales

Despite the efforts of many talented instrument builders, and despite over 100 years of research into the subject matter in the flute trade, there is no perfect solution to all of the above.

Don't believe me? Think that this doesn't apply to those who play certain premier brands? Well, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you play any note over the first two octaves with precisely the same breath pressure?
• Can you play out of tune if you choose to?

Clearly, breath pressure has an effect on pitch!

Hence, while some whistles may be easier for some players to keep in tune, and while some whisles may be impossible for anyone to play in tune, we shouldn't consider a whistle defective because we must adjust our breath and fingerings in order to play in tune. That's the nature of the instrument. People who don't like this fact can take up the concertina.

The best way I've found to practice playing in tune so far is to play along with CDs.

Growing Pains

I'm updating this site to the new Blogger beta version, so you'll see some new features like labels ("tags") appearing on the posts. I'll be going back through my old posts and tagging them to create an index to topics I've discussed. But the new Blogger is really different than the old version, so if you see odd formatting and other problems over the next few weeks, please be patient while I get everything sorted out.

Books: Get Free Music Books from Google

Google is now offering PDF downloads of the full text of public domain books via their book search service. I did a few quick queries and found some old books of Irish and Scottish music, such as The Poems and Poetry of Munster: A Selection of Irish Songs (in English and Irish) and The Complete Works of Robert Burns.

Technique: L.E. McCullough's Presentation

Courtesy of Mike Reagan, here's L.E. McCullough's presentation from the 2006 Northeast Whistle Gathering, called "Six Ways to Break Out of Being a Beginning Whistle Player – OR – How I Became L.E. McCullough (not that you would want this to happen to you or a loved one)." It's in Microsoft Word format, but you can get a free Word viewer from Microsoft if you don't own that program. If you've been playing for a few years you probably know all this stuff, but it's a great collection of important advice for folks just getting started.

McCullough writes:

Looking back on my first couple years of playing Irish music on the whistle, these are the things I now see made a big difference in my development. I sincerely hope they prove of some benefit to you.

Photo: Burke Forest

A forest of Burke whistles at the 2006 Dublin Irish Festival.

Technique: Ear Learning

The other day I got the Jig of Slurs stuck in my head and I wanted to try and work it out by ear. Now I find two general things challenging in the area of ear learning. One is learning the tune well enough that I don't get confused about it when I make mistakes trying to play it. The second is figuring out where to start.

The second problem generally involves a good bit of trial and error for me, but this time I realized the solution was easy. The Jig of Slurs is a pipe tune, so it has to be in A mixolydian, since that's the only key the GHBs can play! This is a pretty useful shortcut if, like me, you haven't yet learned how to reliably distinguish all of the modes by ear.

Learning tunes "by ear" is something of a euphamism for me since I tend to memorize the tune first and then try to play it later, instead of playing along with a recording. One thing which has been helpful for this process is to lilt the songs instead of humming (or playing) them when learning. There are several reasons I think this is helpful:

• It divorces knowledge of the tune itself from the technical ability to play it, allowing me to focus on really learning the tune.
• Lilting is less forgiving than humming in terms of making you get the tune right. When I hum I tend to slur notes a bit, and this makes it easy to gloss over notes that I don't have right in my memory. With lilting it's harder to get away with this.

I tried to find a link about lilting, but I can't find anything. Any suggestions? The best suggestion I have is to listen to a good recording. I'm enjoying Colm O'Donnell's excellent Farewell to Evening Dances, which features lilting, singing, whistle, and flute.