October 16, 2004

• Hee hee hee . . . this reminds me of going to high school with the 1996 national whistling champion. I didn't really know him, but my friends did, and you could always hear him coming. I believe he won with a piece by Bach.
• Thank you, thank you, thank you! This is great stuff. When I was at university studying music I didn't study a specific instrument (I focussed on theory and compostion) so I decided that I would work for four years at whistling. It is hard and takes as much discipline, practice and technique as any wind instrument. Though I got pretty good at it back then - and discovered that a good whistler is indeed the life of any party! - I have since lost the required breath and lip control. I also worked out a few ideas for a piece for "lip quartet" and your post has inspired me to to pull out those sketches and have another look. Good stuff. :-)
• This is great, Plegmund, many thanks. One summer as a kid I was sent to stay with a great-aunt whom my family usually referred to as Mary Margaret the Poor Dear. She'd been widowed during the Great War when my great-uncle Ian the Fine Stoop was killed at Gallipolli, and had never remarried. I was expecting to be met by an old white-haired lady in a black dress, but her red hair was barely tinged with roan then, and she wore slacks and a bright yellow sweater to meet me. She had a house I found utterly delightful, for it was full of the canaries and finches she bred and trained. A bird cage hung in almost every room, and along one of the house a veranda had been glassed in, to make a place for her breeding birds. She taught the birds to sing by whistling to them, over and over, from shortly before the time they hatched. Before the summer was out, I'd learned a lot about birds, and to my great-aunt's delight also learned many of the long trills and birdsongs she worked with. (My family were less delighted, for she was a loud and powerful whistler, and with her encouragement, I turned out to be, too.) My great-aunt enjoyed the outdoors, and so did I, so we got on very well indeed. If the weather was decent, we'd go to the woods or fields for a picnic lunch. She taught me to be aware of the wild birds and to recognize and repeat a number of their calls. She told me how, after she was widowed, she participated in chautauquas and then vaudeville, where she whistled, not only imitating bird calls, but also whistling some of the old traditional airs from Scotland and Ireland. She had some recordings of whistling and bird calls, but did not use them with her birds, maintaining the birds could tell the difference between a record and a live performance, and she belived were far more responsive to a living voice.