Dear Flute Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce the European premiere of my Sonata for Flute and Percussion.

To help promote future performances, I have made the music available free for download on my webpage. I hope you will help me spread the word about this piece and would be delighted to learn of any plans to perform it...

In this article, I want to describe some of the different projects with which I have been involved. I hope to inspire you flutists out there to get more bang out of your playing; by encouraging you to play more, as much as you can, to keep on learning new things, and, of course, to share those treasures with the ones around you. Over the years, I have been involved in many different styles of music – it turns out, the flute is quite versatile! I have helped to form many groups, as well as found myself joining: woodwind quintets, jazz trios, a rock/rap fusion group, a Puerto-Rican Salsa Band, a Brazilian samba trio, a bluegrass group, a beatnik poetry/music fusion guerrilla street posse (San Francisco is a wild town!), and many more.

Before the long flight home from New York, there was one last flautist I had to meet. Greg Pattillo (www .pattillostyle.com or www.myspace.com/pattillostyle) literally took the flute world by storm, in quite a short space of time, since loading his home videos onto YouTube. Known as the ‘beatboxing flute player’, Greg has gone from working in a grocery store to becoming a world famous flute player and representative of BRIO! flutes.

Composer, performer and improviser Robert Dick has maintained a prominent profile as one of the flute world’s most influential innovators over the last few decades, pushing the boundaries to the point of expanding the flute’s vocabulary and technical possibilities. My week with Robert was immensely rewarding. Not only did I attend flute lessons, but also a recording session with him and his pianist partner Ursel Schlict. We discussed compositional and improvisational techniques, and he showed me his writing tool kit – I had no idea that all the fingerings in his publication The Other Flute were originally written by hand!