From the Publisher

All the tools the beginner, novice, and intermediate tin whistle player needs in order to progress to a high level of competence in Irish music. Includes an "Orientation to Traditional Irish Music", which puts the music in context, with information on scales and modes, dance tune types, the historical roots of whistle playing, and advice for learning by ear. The book is full of thorough instruction, exercises, and musical examples: from holding, fingering, breathing, and blowing, on up to advanced ornamentation, phrasing, and variations. Features a simple and penetrating new approach to understanding and notating ornamentation that goes beyond any previous method. Also includes history and theory of traditional Irish tin whistle music. For those who don't read music, almost all the exercises and examples appear on the companion CD.

About the Author

Grey Larsen was born in 1955 in New York City. His family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, the following year. He began piano lessons at the age of four and enjoyed a childhood and youth full of music exploration, his inner world filled with the keyboard music of Bach and Mozart, the rock, R & B, and Motown sounds on the radio, the songs of contemporary folk music interpreters, and traditional Appalachian and Irish music. From 1970 to 1972, he studied composition and early music at the Cincinnati College - Conservatory of Music before moving on, in 1973, to continue at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio. While pursuing early and modern classical music on the one hand, he came ever more deeply under the spell of traditional music on the other, and for several years he followed both streams with equal energy and dedication. In these and later years, he spend a great deal of time learning traditional Irish music from elder musicians, especially immigrant Irishmen Michael J. Kennedy (1900-1978), Tom Byrne (1920-2001), and Tom McCafferty (born 1916), in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio. Upon completing his Bachelor of Music degree at Oberlin in 1976, the streams forked. He bid a fond farewell to the academic side of music and set a course following his love of traditional music, exploring other waterways that would branch, cross, and rejoin over the decades. He leads a varied and rich musical life as a performer, teacher, author, recording artist, record producer, mastering engineer, and as the Music Editor of Sing Out! magazine. Since the early 1970s, he has also devoted himself to the traditional fiddle music of his native Midwest and Appalachia. But that's another story. He has three children and lives in Bloomington, Indiana, USA.

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