Well, I just love the way that Nathan Cole teaches! Sure it's about violin instead of flute, but since it's also about auditions, orchestras, dynamics, tempo and musical style, it's all applicable to flute, in so many ways.
He's just such a concise and thoughtful teacher and as the First Assoc. Concert Master of the LA Phil he's certainly, as he says, "battle-tested" his own musical advice.
So inspiring too; always learning, always moving the ceiling upward! :>)
Why the best players don’t always win auditions (video)
All J.S. Bach lovers, get ready to be stunned once again!!
This may be not strictly about flute playing, but boy howdy is this not one of the most riveting performances of Brandenberg 2 I've heard in a long time.
Feast your ears!!
The Netherlands Bach Society performs Brandenberg Concerto no. 2 (video)
And two short documentaries as well:
1. The musicians speak about experiencing this performance of Bach (video)
2. Mark Geelen, trumpet player of the Netherlands Bach Society, builds his own instruments and explains the differences between the various sorts of trumpets including the addition of finger holes and why.(video)
A new flute film to enjoy! Hot off the presses! Flutist Carol Wincenc interviewed by Christopher Caliendo (video)
Carol Wincenc, the American flutist, has a full and varied career as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral musician, and currently teaches at Juilliard and Stoneybrook.
She speaks from a life full of incredible flute experiences from hanging out with Jean Pierre Rampal to debuting works composed especially for her, to performing with The New York Woodwind Quintet, to studying with Marcel Moyse!
Timestamps will take you to youtube to the exact location in the film:
This week the two flute email groups I belong to seemed to spring back to life!
Perhaps we can again begin to think of whistling while we work now! :>)
One interesting flute question email came from a 78 yr. old amateur flutist asking about how to keep your lips loose while on stage in a solo recital. Previously they had studied to a higher level of playing than currently, and now they were making a return after a decade or more of only a tiny amount of playing. They were at the point where they had just conquered finding their low register again after playing in the high register (it tended to disappear when they descended). Wanting to whip themselves into shape again for the new year, they had planned a challenging program of Bach's Unaccompanied A minor Sonata and Hindemith's Acht Stucke with another recitalist performing in between. (several of us also said: "Hey why such a tough programme? Take it easy!"). They were several months away yet.
But their question was about lip tension. During practice, if they became tense in the lips, they'd trill them like a horse saying "Brrrrrrrrrr" or make those "motorboat" sounds. This relaxing lip noise is a loose blowing lip-flapping motion such as shown here in this "Lip Trill" video.
But of course a noisy "lip trill" like that was not going to be a good thing to do with an audience present. (grin!)
What should they do between movements if they tightened up in the lips?
One short-term* answer to tense lips caused by stage-nerves is to learn one or two easy whistle-tones and just play a very very relaxed whistle tone when you're backstage. Personally I find just getting a single whistle tone while fingering high A3 is fine for me. It tells me where my lips are. The idea is that whistle tones require such extremely loose lip centers that they therefore give instant feedback that your lips are in fact non-tense.
This can be like a "centering moment" for you backstage that gives you the confidence to relax further, because you know you are centered.
Since the person asking the question about tense lips said they didn't have the ability to visualize images (aphantasia; learn more: 1,2,3) I went hunting for a good illustrative video on youtube, and found these two quite amazingly comprehensive videos below.
The first one shows some interesting superimposed graphics for how the sound is being created inside the bowl of the headjoint's embouchure hole, and the second one explains all the uses of whistle tones from beginning to end.
Very well worth viewing!
Egor Egorkin of The Berlin Philharmonic; Whistle tones on piccolo for quiet warmup onstage (video)
April Clayton; All the uses of whistletones from warmups to the composer's writing of them in pieces of music (video).
*Longer term answers to "tense lips" or "tense jaw" are, of course, a completely different topic and would be dealt with as a separate issue to "planning a recital with too difficult repertoire" and "coming back to the flute after a hiatus" (or very long break from playing where you might be flabby). There's also entering your eighties, which I haven't yet had any experience, but others have! :>)
In my opinion, non-tense embouchure has to do with using the natural open hanging of the jaw hinge and the natural floppiness of the lip tissue to form the most natural embouchure opening possible. This also works together with rolling the flute down and outward on the chin and uncovering more blow-hole (if you were too rolled in before), moving the lips forward off the teeth, and gradually releasing unnecessary facial tensions over time. These topics are covered in "Embouchure - Volume 2" of the Roger Mather "Art of Playing the Flute" book.
And of course, let us not forget the biggest flute reality of all:
If you are playing with a flabby air stream, the lips and throat will attempt to assist by over-tightening. So beef up your abdominal involvement in your blowing to speed up a full and flexible airstream. This might need a whole new approach or a flute coach.
If it were me, I would choose less demanding repertoire, I would add a flute piece that has accompaniment as one of my selections , and I would begin to use self-recording as part of the preparation so that I'm building up my endurance, relaxation and having a reality check for exactly what the audience will be hearing.
More suggestions welcome as this topic is an interesting one. :>)
Recently the great Hollywood soundtrack flutist and teacher Sheridon Stokes passed away, and I posted about a superb audio podcast that had some thrilling recordings of his work with John Williams and other famous composers. As the result of that blog post, composer Christopher Caliendo reached out to me with a newly compiled film of Sheridon Stokes. The two men had known each other and worked together for thirty years and had grown to be friends. The footage was taken six years ago, when Sheridon was 84 years old.
The interview and discussion covers some great modern flute history and pedagogy. Thankyou to Christopher for offering the film a debut here on this blog!
Sheridon's best advice? "Never play a phrase of music the same way twice."
Here is: Sheridon Stokes WEB TV interview: Beyond the Flute (video)
If you wish to view a particular topic, the timestamps are below and if you click on them the video will start at that topic over on youtube.
15. Book: Special Effects for Flute: 52:41 Key Vibrato, QuarterTone Trill, Hollow Tone, Strongest Multiphonics, Special Accents, (book is no longer at Fluteworld)
____________________end timestamps
Some of the Hollywood history that Sheridon talks about is shown in some excellent still photos in this biography video too:
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Christopher Caliendo writes:
Sheridon Stokes was a UCLA faculty member for decades when I first met him as an MBA student studying under the Henry Mancini Film Award.
During the 1990’s Sheridan performed in many of my ensembles, CD recordings, and Hollywood soundtracks. Performing with him was in itself, a master class. He taught me to listen, to never play the same melody the same, to alter my sound, and to constantly reinvent my performance.
In 2017 I created the 2t Academy with the mission of coaching classical musicians in business skills. The Academy’s online faculty which included Sheridon Stokes, aims to transform a musician’s career and lead them to success as well as promote a healthier work-life balance. Academy members have access to our WEB TV series which features one-hour documentary interviews with outstanding flutists who have gained significant prestige and notoriety. The WEB TV series delves deep into the choices the featured musicians made after graduating college that culminated and helped shape their unique success.
We would like to offer Jennifer Cluff’s viewers the opportunity to be the first to access Sheridon’s documentary. Thankyou for keeping his legacy alive.
For those of your viewers, Jennifer, who wish to take advantage of it, I'm having a sheetmusic sale of my own compositions. Just click on these links to learn about a lifetime Two for One Saleif you register (a how to video is here) at mywebsite when purchasing the arrangements in the instrumentation of your choice.
New music for flute from Slovenia!! I just love how smart this is. The composers are performing, the flutist is making a professional recording in a live concert, and they are offering the sheetmusic all in one filmed event. Brilliant! Interesting new music too! I'll let the performer tell you about them. Comments welcome!
I would like to share with you 8 FUNtasies for flute and piano by Slovenian composers from our Concert which happened on Nov.11th, 2022.
Some of FUNtasies are more melodic, some are more rhythmic. It was a great privilege that 6 of the composers were accompanying me at the piano for LIVE performance.
If you would like to purchase the sheet music for each piece there are links and further information in the description boxes below each Video recording on YouTube.
Eleven years ago ago I re-wrote the final movement of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony op. 25, for both flute players to switch to piccolos and play all the high Ds and all the difficult intersecting slurry eighth note bits onpiccolo, instead of maiming themselves for months trying to play it the way it is actually written.
The audible flute solos in the Finale are still on Flute, but the rest is quite relaxing to play comparatively.
And over the years I've received quite a few emails* that say "Whew!! Thanks for saving us HOURS of work Jen!" from grateful amateur players who feel that I've 'saved their bacon' with this easier re-write.
So I am pleased that it has worked out! And thanks to the eagle eyes of one player, who emailed today, I even found a bar missing from my original pdf of the parts, and so now have updated the score and parts with several small corrections and my Flute1&2/piccolo pdfs are all new and worth trying out in your own living room! Play along with the videos below and compare and contrast!
In the emails and comments with thanks* that I've received from flutists trying out this Prokofiev piccolo re-write in performance, apparently, not once has a conductor yet noticed that the flute players were switching instruments. So you never know, the focus may not be on the flutes after all, but on the strings ha ha.
So try it. Just get your piccolo and flute out and learn how to do fast switches in cut time (hint: use your lap) and try out my free pdf parts:
This is the tempo it does go at, so be ready with your quick picc switches: (video starts at fourth mvmt.)
If you want to compare how all this works, and you don't have the parts that Prokofiev originally wrote, here are the original flute parts at IMSLP (you may have to wait 15 second for the free pdf at imslp's Prokofiev op.25 parts library).
We should all be able to focus on the gorgeous flute parts in the first three movements, and be able to have a fun piccolo time in the Finale, at least that's my theory for non-panic-making playing. I mean, what's with pianists-who-avoid-piccolo-switches-in-their-first-symphony-EVER anyway? Don't they know how super-fast we can do it? (see my photo of Prokofiev at the top of the blogpost to see what I think he's thinking. :>)
My original post was from 2009 with more positive player-feedback in the comments there, and a bit more info. about how and why I did this. And the pdf parts and score links there are all updated too. So help yourselves.
Now to update the REST of my website, hahahaha. Wow that'll take all winter if I start now! (Some of it is from 2001!! Eeek.)
A thousand thanks for your excellent transformation of the Flute 1 and Flute 2 parts in the Finale of Prokofiev’s 1st Symphony. You have saved me and my colleague hours and weeks of work which then in the end would only have produced a less than satisfactory result. We’ve both taken out our piccolos and used the parts at our last two rehearsals and unless I’m much mistaken, I seem to recall the conductor said “Flutes – Brilliant!” at the end of the movement, having not even noticed that we were playing piccolos. Now we can relax a little and enjoy the wonderful music, thank you so much.
