This months issue: April

Suzuki flute


Suzuki Flute Musical development for young children - Pandora Bryce, Ph.D.
Most musicians are familiar with Suzuki violin, and have seen media images of tiny tots with even tinier violins. Less well known is the Suzuki Method™ applied to the flute, despite more than thirty years of international exposure. The Suzuki Flute program was created by Toshio Takahashi, and combines Suzuki's pedagogy with the flute tone and technique concepts of Marcel Moyse. I have been teaching flute using the Suzuki Method for over twenty-five years, and although I also teach in a traditional university Faculty of Music, I find the Suzuki approach especially satisfying due to its focus on musical and personal values. The purpose of Suzuki Method is the development of ability through the medium of music; the life skills students learn in a Suzuki program are invaluable whether or not the students choose post-secondary music studies. In addition, Suzuki flute has the most effective and well-planned beginner pedagogy that I have found anywhere. Mr. Takahashi has an extraordinary ability to analyze an advanced-level concept [e.g. tone colours] and break it down into small steps suitable for use with young children. For Suzuki flute teachers, it is exciting to teach a simple 'tone game' and know that it is planned as a stepping-stone to highly expressive playing. Subscribe to read the full article

Music and meditation


Music and Meditation - Jogyata Dallas
Have you ever wondered about the role of feeling and consciousness and intuition while playing or performing on the flute - and pondered on how to get in touch with that capacity more easily? It's that lovely realm that we sometimes access when we go beyond technique and mind and become one with the music itself, as though we ourselves are an instrument and some beauty that is not our own is flowing through us. Athletes call it 'being in the zone' - a rapture of pure consciousness when the mind is free of all thought, constraint, self-consciousness and everything we do flows from some deeper part of our being. The ego 'I' that separates musician from music has gone and we have become the music itself. The writer Paul Klee compared the artist-performer to a tree and wrote, "From the root, the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Overwhelmed and activated by the force of the current, he conveys his vision into his work. And yet, standing at his appointed place as the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what rises from the depths. He neither serves nor commands - he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own; it has merely passed through him." Subscribe to read the full article

Flute technique


Fingers and Phrasing - Michel Debost
Many difficult passages are lost due to poor control of the tone when we are preoccupied with the rapid succession of notes. On the other hand, faulty phrasing of slow lines can often be attributed to uncoordinated fingerings. We tend to emphasize sound as an entity unto itself, relevant in the domain of musicality, whereas fingers are the attributes of virtuosity, an unavoidable and cumbersome necessity. It is impossible for me to separate music from the instrumental means. Instrumental playing includes all the aspects of our dear flute: tone, fingers, articulation, slurring, pitch, vibrato, breath…. Not even interpretation is instinctive: it responds to thought and practical solutions. There is a technique of phrasing just as there is a musical approach to instrumental problems. Subscribe to read the full article

Fish are Jumping - Robert Dick
Fish Are Jumping is a 12 bar, Chicago style Blues for flute alone. As in much of my music, the unaccompanied flutist provides the melodies, harmonies and rhythm. When Fish Are Jumping is well played, the audience should feel it has had the experience of hearing a band, a band with a totally happening flute soloist up front. I wrote Fish Are Jumping in 1999 to continue the musical direction that my piece Lookout started ten years earlier. Both pieces are written with an original (I hope!) take on well known popular styles. Lookout is a 1960s-1970s rock solo, with a dash of Afro-Cuban Salsa. Fish Are Jumping is pure Blues. I plan to carry the series forward with a Metallica type Speed Metal solo as the next installation. Subscribe to read the full article

Other features & columns


Teaching notes - Helen M Colthart
Jim on jazz - Jim Langabeer
Irish flute - Brendyn Montgomery
Dear Cathrine - Cathrine Bowie
Piccolo notes - Nancy Luther Jara

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