For a normal gigging musician, it may seem rare that you’d encounter the need to play a folk/traditional flute. Sure, most cities lucky enough to have an Irish pub will often have live music or session nights for trad musicians to join in, but that’s not always accessible to everyone. It can also feel incredibly daunting if you’re just learning – but that could also be where you find some of the best help in getting off the ground. Most of the best advice I’ve ever received has come directly from people who grew up playing traditional style music on “folk” instruments.
I’ve also had some varied experience playing whistles on freelance gigs – at weddings, funerals, or even a marriage proposal, once! Occasionally, touring shows will call for whistle parts. I was once playing a Christmas show with the magnificent The Irish Tenors, and I was booked to play flute and piccolo. When I arrived, I was delighted to see that there was a whistle part included for a couple songs!
Taking a look into pit orchestra requirements for Broadway musicals, however, will show that there can often be quite a need for doublers who can cover whistles, Irish flutes, bamboo flutes, and more. Unfortunately, it’s all too often that local theatre companies, music directors, and pit musicians are perfectly comfortable with casting off the composers intentions and covering the written parts on an alternate instrument, trying to approximate the sound. I propose that those involved in these productions should insist on honoring the composer’s art and performing the work as intended. Musicians should embrace the challenge, expand their arsenal, and strive to play their book as it was written by the person who created it. If the composer wrote some whistle doubling into a Reed 1 book, it’s specifically because they wanted a different sound for that moment – otherwise they would have called it a piccolo part! Even a cheap whistle from Amazon will do more for the production than approximating and faking the sound on a piccolo, just by virtue of being a different instrument and providing a new tone color.
My first “run-in” with a whistle part in a pit orchestra book was the Reed 1 book for The Secret Garden, which, at the time, called for flute, piccolo, alto flute, clarinet, sopranino recorder, soprano recorder, alto recorder, pan flute, low D whistle, B-flat whistle, D whistle, and high F whistle. That’s quite a lot to take on for your first show with “non-flute” flutes! As I’ll note in my section on Transpositions and Notation, there are some particular challenges that arise (mostly due to the inconsistent notation practices for these types of instruments), but I’ll do my best to guide you through that.
After playing The Secret Garden a few times, I began to look into more opportunities to play these “other” flutes in pit orchestras for musicals. I learned that the Broadway book for The Lion King is even more involved than The Secret Garden – possibly the all-time winner for most diversity across the flute family. The Reed 1 book for The Lion King calls for piccolo, flute, Irish flute in E-flat, Irish flute in E, Irish flute in F, two different dizi in B, dizi in C, dizi in high F, bansuri in low A, pan flute in C, pan flute in F, pan flute in G, and a bass pan flute/toyo.
Other shows, like Miss Saigon and Aida also really necessitate the use of authentic bamboo flutes. Aida calls for flute, alto flute, and three different keys of bansuri. Miss Saigon’s original book calls for flute, piccolo, and three different keys of bansuri, as well, but was rewritten for the 2014 West End and 2017 Broadway productions to include five different keys of bansuri and a single dizi.
Another wonderful musical that shows off some really authentic Irish flutes and whistles is a lesser-known show called A Man of No Importance. Calling for piccolo, flute, alto flute, Irish flutes in a number of keys, and Irish whistles in a number of keys, it’s a really nice opportunity to focus on one particular type of traditional instrument and play some really authentic Irish sounding parts that blend really well into the Broadway style.
Newest on the scene, though, is an absolutely fantastic musical called Come From Away, which tells the story of a small town in Newfoundland, Canada, their heartwarming response to 37 planes diverting to their small town on 9/11, along with the stories of many of the passengers. The flute book for this show consists of entirely folk/trad flutes, with no call whatsoever for a Boehm flute or piccolo. This show calls for high whistles in the keys of F, E, D, and C; mid-range whistles in the keys of B-flat, A, G, F-sharp, and F; low whistles in the keys of E, E-flat, and D; bass whistles in the keys of C-sharp, C, and A; Irish flutes in the keys of D and B-flat; and, just to keep things interesting, uilleann pipes, a bellows-blown style of Irish bagpipes.