The fate of the two types of whistles…
The people had a great need for a beautiful, clear sound in silence. It’s very difficult for people today to understand how different it must have been to live in silence, with something blaring in your ears on every street corner. This is also the reason for today’s disrespect for music, and even a reaction against it. Before the invention of electricity, transistors and sound recording, live music was a curiosity, a rarity to which most of the village was willing to gather, and it is still the case today, and to tune in with every last ounce of their being to this rare event (which is difficult for people today)..
And let’s look at this situation from the point of view of the two types of shepherd’s whistle, the plug and the half-pipe (see general description) If the shepherd makes his own instrument, he can decide what kind of whistle he wants to make. Half-blowing is a difficult technique, requiring a lot of skill and practice. The shepherd has plenty of all this, and to produce such a mystery in front of the village is a source of pride. Uncle Philip also spoke with great pride of his grandfather, who played the half-pipe.
In the old days, the flutes were mostly made by the old people themselves, and the man who lived close to animals and nature carved himself toys like this and that in his spare time. The requirement for flutes, like medieval instruments, is that they be accurate in relation to themselves. Of course, this is also a relative concept, because a flute without orchestral accompaniment has subtle variations in its sound system that are not noticeable in itself. Also the result of pastoral creativity is the tilinka, the making of which has already been discussed.
As far as my experience and what I have been able to reconstruct from what has been said, it seems that over time the making of the flute has been taken over by a few specialised villages, regions or individuals who have realised that there is a demand for the instrument they have made and have tried to ‘make money by whistling’. This is how the shepherd’s flute for sale appeared on the markets, the instrument of lazy shepherds who were not willing to learn to carve it or did not have the time to make an instrument for their children that their grandchildren would be proud of later.
Thus emerged the shepherd’s flute makers who represented a different way of life, were highly respected when they appeared in a village playing the flute, and were probably a great step forward in the tradition of the instrument. One of the advantages may have been that it was easier for the villagers to buy one-of-a-kind flutes than if everyone carved their own in the snow. When bought from one man and well rehearsed, only a single flute could come out of the same man’s models, from the same instruments. I have also observed how much a village of flute makers as a whole sticks to well proven models. One of the reasons for this is to ensure that in the long run identical flutes come off the “production line”.
Of course, this did not exclude the handyman type of people who make their own flutes at home, especially as the stubborn Szekler still won’t pay money for something he can make… There are also a lot of home-made flutes in Csángóföld, which is also the pride of the maker. A real flute maker, a flute player, sees a shepherd’s flute in a dismantled toilet pipe and saves it from damnation. However, many good flutists today are no longer shepherds, but ‘normal’ bourgeois, ‘decent’ working people, and would rather buy a good flute for money, a reliable one, to cultivate the inclinations they have inherited from childhood. This is more or less the situation of today’s respondents.
When one no longer makes it for oneself, or perhaps wants one’s children to practice it, one is more inclined to train it as a corker. Not to mention the dealers, who knew that the class of people who could not make their own instruments were also at odds with the semi-blowers. So they made instruments, if they made them, only rarely. This may be one of the reasons why this technique of blowing has been so much reduced, almost extinct. Another may be the speeding up of time, which is also affecting rural communities, and there is no time to learn difficult techniques.