G'day all...

Barbara: I suspect that what your friend was enthusing about was getting hold of a diatonic whistle tuned in the older untempered scales with perfect intervals. When an instrument doesn't have to match the compromises of the tempered scale it has beautiful intervals and can produce perfect harmonies with another instrument pitched the same.

The loss of these pure harmonies is the price we pay for the ability to play lots of instruments together in all keys - or even play the one instrument in another distant key ... you win some ... you lose some! (As Charlie Brown then said, in a strip many years back: "Wouldn't ,that be nice!")

Alison: I really enjoy the big whistles. I have an aluminium low 'F' that is an early prototype by Bernard Overton, of Rugby. It is a little tighter than the final models but I bought it from Graham Seal when he came back from doing his doctorate at Leeds University and I have got quite used to its vagaries.

I later bought a low 'G' in his final design and it works very well - both have that distinctive overtone of drainpipe. I love characteristic timbre in a whistle and have bought many different types over the decades, particularly eastern bamboo ones, which bring in interesting micro-rattles in the background. I have somewhat more than 120 small flutes and whistles stacked away and sometimes played.

Christiaan Dolislager's 'Dolang' whistles were a side product of my efforts to get someone making a distinctive Australian large whistle ... unfortunately most of my ideas got lost by the wayside. I wanted to combine aspects of the Overton with some characteristics of metal whistles I made in an old smithy in Tasmania, in the mid 1960s.

One thing I would like to see is a whistle/flute in light metal, with interchangeable heads to give a choice of cross-blown flute, whistle and true flageolet, which has a balancing chamber before the fipple, blown into by a narrow tube. This would allow three quite different sounds from basically the same instrumment fingering and also provide paths for crossing over in instrument types.

Metal whistle/flutes with such interchangeable heads were available in the last century and even supplied a 'cheating' fife head ... cross-blown position but with a small whistle mounted where the embouchure would normally be! The true flageolet instrument appears to have been referred to as a 'Shepherd's Pipe'.

Ah well, one of these days!

Regards,

Bob Bolton