Writing about the music I compose is difficult for me to do. I feel that the music I compose should express beauty without rhetoric, and that the music I compose isn't mine, even though I composed it - explaining it as if it were mine seems foolish to me. However, I can give some insight as to my thoughts about music as a whole which may help flutists understand the flute music I compose....

Both as Flute Focus Business Manager and through my professional experience, I am well aware of the enormous stress individuals exert on themselves when going into business, quite apart from those stresses imposed on them by external factors. Some time ago I was asked to comment on the stresses that result from blurred lines between one’s personal and business life, i.e. when you go into business with your spouse/partner, family or friends. When business is good, all’s well, but huge problems can occur as soon as business difficulties arise.

As part of an ongoing series on New Zealand music, Flute Focus would like to offer the opportunity for New Zealand composers to present their talents to the world.

Receiving any kind of grant, scholarship, fellowship or award can be an excellent way to achieve your artistic dreams which otherwise may be difficult if not impossible. Receiving a grant can also be a form of recognition for your contribution to your community and/or your art form. Grants can offer financial support for a range of projects (individual or group) or allow artists to take up exciting professional development opportunities locally or overseas.

This is the first in a series of three articles devoted to exploring the world of headjoints with a goal of arming you with knowledge to overcome (or at least reduce) the stress and confusion of finding a new headjoint. This article discusses preliminaries and includes general advice about preparation for the hunt, an overview of the headjoint market, and an overview of influences on headjoint design. The second article will explore in detail the various qualities of sound that can be affected by different headjoints, such as projection, loudness, tuning, color, and responsiveness. The final article will discuss the effects of different materials, such as gold, silver, platinum, and wood, and the effects of alterations in the design of parts such as crown and stopper assemblies and risers; it will conclude with a brief discussion of how to learn more and what to do next....

Maria is a 67-year-old amateur flute player who has been in love with music all her life. Brent is an intelligent 51-year-old businessman, a capable and responsible executive who runs a medium-sized company. Kathy is a talented college student who majors in voice. While Maria, Brent and Kathy all perform confidently as soloists and in their ensembles, they have one anxiety in common: they get nervous about going to a music lesson.

If you spend some time researching, as I did recently, the top 10 fears of human beings, you’ll see that the fear of public speaking, which is similar to the musician’s fear of performing on an instrument on stage, is high on the list.

Nadine couldn’t attend concerts. She’d sit in the audience and get too anxious for whomever was performing. “What if that were me?” She’d imagine herself on the stage making mistakes, being hypercritical, and feeling terrified. “Sometimes I felt like I needed an oxygen tank,” she stated. Nadine lived in a big city with a plethora of concerts, but she deprived herself of hearing the live music she loved because it was such a painful experience.

One of the first things you can do to reduce your performance fears is to use positive self-talk in the form of ‘affirmations’... Facing your fears takes courage. Keep a notebook with you, and every time you notice a mental fear, write it down. These fears will become the rich, fertile soil where the solution to confident performing is already beginning to bloom.

To fully prepare for an audition, you need from 3 to 6 weeks, depending on whether you have previous knowledge of the standard excerpts – ideally 6 weeks to accommodate the physical and mental preparation. Set out a time-frame like the one below.

Trevor Wye was a freelance orchestral and chamber music player on the London scene for many years and has made several solo recordings, but it is his teaching for which he is best known.Formerly a professor at the Guildhall School of Music in London, and for 21 years at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, he now runs his own Flute Studio in Kent, offering a seven-month postgraduate course with the theme ‘the flute and nothing but the flute’. Trevor’s famous Practice Books have sold around one million copies, not only in English, but ten other languages as well.

At 15, I remember wondering which of these paths I should follow: fine art school, a tool and die making apprenticeship with Air New Zealand, or continuing with my flute. I was reasonably good at drawing/painting, I loved crafty things like sewing, I enjoyed tinkering with gadgets and working on flutes, and I loved playing. The flute won out, mostly because I understood that success as an instrumentalist is somewhat related to building on one’s connections with other musicians. I was doing well enough in that aspect that it made sense to keep trying that path first.

As a musician and flutist, I have been fortunate to have enjoyed the wide variety of careers that music offers. I had the honor of studying with Murray Panitz while obtaining the Master of Music degree from Temple University. At that time I was a frequent substitute in the Philadelphia Orchestra and an active freelance flutist in the Mid Atlantic region.

My interest in photography began while I was still at school – my father had always been a keen amateur, and when, at the age of 16 or 17, I had the opportunity to do a year’s dark room course, I jumped at it. ended up setting up a dark room at home and spent many hours with my hands in the chemicals creating prints. At that time, I was particularly focussed on working towards a career as a flute player, so photography was never more than a hobby. However, I loved it, and went out to take pictures as often as I could.

Finally, you have a finished master with great repertoire that represents your playing well, and is packaged in a way that reflects your personality and professionalism. Now what?.....

However, understanding costs and your budget is usually the first step of the recording process. There are many factors involved, so we will have to examine a typical scenario. Please understand that these figures are merely estimates and averages – there are exceptions which are too numerous to describe.

There are a few key things to think about for the day of the flute recording session. The first is environment. Remember that during a session, almost all heating/cooling systems are turned off for noise reasons. Thus, the venue might be very hot…or very cold. Please dress accordingly, or wear layers so that you can adjust as necessary. Generally, recording sessions are about the furthest things from fashion shows that you can imagine, so your favourite old t-shirt and some comfortable pants will work great.

In the last issue, we discussed several topics including repertoire choices and selecting your team of collaborators. Once you have accomplished this, we enter the “pre-production” phase, during which time several important decisions will need to be made, including venue selection and your own musical preparation. Most of these decisions should be made in consultation with your producer who will be best suited to help you select the proper venue. In a perfect world, you and your musical collaborators will travel to a concert hall that is familiar to the producer and recording engineer – this is the best way to ensure that all variables are under control. However...

Making a commercial quality recording is likely one of the most difficult endeavors that a musician will undertake. The process is rife with variables, opinions, and potential hazards: superstar heavy-metal band Metallica famously engaged a therapist to help them through the making of “Some Kind of Monster”. Beach Boys legend, Brian Wilson, abandoned the production of the album “Smile” after 72 hours of recording sessions - this unfinished record is considered a major contributing factor to his ensuing mental breakdown. Finally released 37 years after production began, Mr. Wilson is said to be in better mental health…

Musical sound is governed by the movement that produces it; and the quality of that movement is determined by the accuracy of the ‘body map’, the neuronal representation of our movement developed in the brain. Therefore, musicians who have mapped their movement accurately will always be free to play expressively. ‘Body mapping’ is a self-enquiry method that teaches clear and accurate information about the body in movement, and advocates freedom of movement through accurate mind-body connections. This results in a poised and balanced body usage, the prevention of injury and promotion of facility. The ultimate goal is complete freedom of expression through poised, dynamic, musical movement.

“... music links with our innermost emotional, spiritual and most private selves. Music makes us feel more human. It brings us into very close and immediate contact with the people around us and at the same time connects us both with images from the past and predictions of the immediate future.”
I first learned of the profession of Music Therapy whilst studying a degree in Music at Manchester University, UK. More specifically, it was during one clarinet lesson where my teacher, a professional orchestral musician, declared with a curious tone that she had recently been “looking into Music Therapy,” and announced, “It may be just your thing.”

Joseph Schwantner studied guitar with Robert Stein. Schwantner described Stein as an amazing teacher and told many anecdotes about his lessons. He explained how compassionate his teacher was when Schwantner added ‘filigree’ to the assigned music, or when he brought in his own compositions to play instead of what his teacher assigned. Recognizing that Schwantner had a talent for composition, Stein introduced music theory into his lessons. In one lesson Schwantner told his teacher that he would love to play Dvorak’s New World Symphony on guitar; to his amazement, in the next lesson Stein had arranged all the major themes from the symphony for guitar...

For many of us, we find the musical world divided into a well established series of genres and, for the most part, these categories work fairly well on their own. It is, therefore, a gifted individual who can take the worlds of Jazz, Classical and native Venezuelan music and fuse them together so seamlessly that they might never have been apart...

Mathematics and music are inescapably tied. What is music if not the arrangement of patterns of sounds, and the composers score not much more than a formula used to represent an abstract idea? It may not take a mathematician to create a thing of beauty, but, as Ian Clarke discovered, it certainly helps...

It is difficult to classify Robert Dick - musician, or inventor? Ask him, and he is just a guy who did what had to be done, taking the next logical step in a series of movements. His fans have a different story to tell, one of a man who has taken fluting techniques further than anyone could have imagined and made his findings so readily available that anyone can benefit from his work

"It is a mystery where or when I first heard the flute, but it was the instrument I knew I would play from the very beginning. Really, my early life felt like a waiting process until I could begin flute”. Raised in Montana, USA, Rhonda Larson nurtured an appreciation for music from an early age, starting out under her grandmother’s tutelage on the piano at age seven. A quick learner and accomplished musician though she was, Rhonda had her heart set elsewhere. At age ten she began to learn the flute and, as she fondly remembers, “I began my life”.