Flute Whistle

Flute Whistle

Q: What has thousands of buttons, weighs half a hundredweight, makes you sweat bucketfuls and helps raise thousands of pounds for charity? A: The author’s whistle and flute (suit) which he wears proudly as the Pearly King of Peckham. George Major’s story is a tough one. Abandoned in the 1940s by his mother, he expended years attempting to find her, drawn to the pearly king tradition from the age of eight which he knew was in her family. An abusive father and a genuinely terrifying maiden Auntie Hilda saw young George packed off to an approved school in Surrey. Long before David Jason immortalised the reputation of Del Boy, George became a well-known reputation in the Peckham area and his life as a costermonger on the streets of South London was hilariously interrupted by a spell in the army – including eight weeks in the glasshouse in Colchester. George’s deafness, coupled with his Norman Wisdom ‘cheeky chappie’ patter, endeared more than it annoyed, and in his twenties he was crowned Pearly King of Peckham. In this time-honoured capacity, he has fundraised tirelessly for charities far and wide and met numerous members of the royal family and dined with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Packed with Dickensian anecdotes and pearly lore, this essay is not only the inspiring story of one man’s fight versus hardships to serve his country but also a portrait of a disappearing London and a tradition that still glitters brightly on our city streets.

The current popularity of the replicas of the ancient Anasazi flute amidst members of the Native American flute community present numerous interesting challenges for the Native American flute (NAF) enthusiast. The main divergence comes from the nature of sound production of the dissimilar flutes. Traditional NAFs owe their mouthpiece structure to the European recorder or penny whistle due to the fipple which splits the air column creating the sound. As the NAF developed, a two-chamber scheme with a little air channel directing the airflow became the standard. The Anasazi flute replicas are examples of a much earlier, less technical scheme of using a mouth-guided airflow, or embouchure, as the means of sound production.

The early NAFs scale and tuning systems varied. There was a biometric method based upon boring holes matching to distances of respective points of the player’s hands, as well a heap of tunings much like the major scale of recorders and penny whistles. Sometime in the 1950s-70s the standardization of the pentatonic scale became the intimate sound that has attracted humans to the flute. The relative ease of sound production and delighting sound of the pentatonic scale ensures quick success for the musician and non-musician alike. In contrast, the Anasazi-style flutes require that a tone be formulated by training the mouth muscles to direct the sound all over the front edge of the top of the flute. This divergence is at primary difficult for a good deal of people since sound is not mechanically devised by simple blowing, but is devised much like blowing all over a soda bottle. A bit of muscle memory and trial and error (and a substantial amount of practice) is necessary before a consistent sound may be obtained.

The other divergence among the two flutes is that the basic scale pattern of the Anasazi flute is a pentatonic major scale. That is somewhat of a simplification because by utilizing other fingerings a more plaintive, minor sound may likewise be produced, but the main harmonic basis of the flute is a pentatonic major. Although the two flutes are dissimilar in construction and playing technique, the two may without doubt be played together as will be discussed in a future article.

Flute Whistle Photo

Flute Whistle Picture

Flute Whistle Picture

Flute Whistle Picture