This past weekend at the Oh My Ears New Music Festival there was a lot of great new music – and particularly a lot of great new FLUTE music. I’m a flute player and composer so this was double exiting and invigorating. I wanted to make a playlist of old and new faves for the flute. Enjoy!!
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I give this playlist a Difficult Listening Hour rating of 7/10.
Study No. 12 by Jessica Shand. Album: Transmutations. “With influences ranging from the pioneering sound design experiments of Suzanne Ciani to the futuristic minimalism of SOPHIE, Jessica Shand’s debut release leverages flutes as a laboratory for sound, unraveling one-second-or-less samples of flute sound into vast perceptual landscapes across 12 vignettes.”
2. I Will Not Be Sad in this World by Eve Beglarian performed by Mayra Martin (Spotify) and Nina Assimakopoulos (YouTube). “Originally written for alto (or bass) flute, I will not be sad in this world is based on the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova’s song Ashkharumes Akh Chim Kashil. The piece is often played on the duduk, and your flute playing should respond to the ornamentation, intonation, and vibrato of traditional duduk playing.”
3. Mirrors by Kaija Saariaho performed by Alexis Descharmes and Jérémie Fèvre. Album: Saariaho: L’oeuvre pour violoncelle – Complete Cello Works – Musiikkia sellolle. “Mirrors is a piece written originally for the CD-Rom Prisma dedicated to my music. In the context of the CD-Rom, the user can build and play his own versions of Mirrors, by combining pre-defined fragments. The existing score is my own versions of Mirrors, but musicians are welcome to construct their versions of it. They should, anyway, try to follow the ideas I had about musical mirrors: there should be always a mirror in one or several of the following musical dimensions: rhythm, pitch, instrumental gesture or timbre.”-Kaija Saariaho
4. Unmeasured by Briggs Kennedy. Album: Sonic Flux. This piece is actually a duet – I took the baseline of an unmeasured prelude and wrote a new melody for it. There has always been this connection between very old and very new music – a time before the printing press and a time so far after we started to write away from those confines.
5. Daybreak by Tristan Coelho performed by Ensemble Offspring. Album: Songbirds. “This piece, Daybreak, for flute and electronics is based on this idea of birdsong mimicry and weaves in experiences I’ve had exploring and appreciating the sounds of nature. Transcribed birdsong is weaved into the piece as well as additional song-like musical ideas inspired directly from the lines conjured up by birds. The electronics takes snapshots of the live flute sounds and manipulates them in real-time to create an evolving and immersive sound world. What emerges is a dialogue between the flute and electronics as the sounds work in imitation and swirl around the listener; the parts effectively mimicking each other. The music begins with a sense of peace and quiet focusing on a spaciousness of sound with occasional soft utterances. This gradually gives rise to joyous, dance-like sections evoking the busy dawn chorus.”
6. The Colour of Pomegranates by Julian Anderson performed by Ian Brown and Philipa Davies. Album: Poetry Nearing Silence. Julian Anderson was born in London in 1967 and studied composition with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail. Anderson was Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music from 1996 and was Head of Composition there from 1999 to 2004. From 2004 to 2007 he was Fanny Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. He returned to the UK permanently in September 2007 to work as a freelance composer and take up a newly devised post at the Guildhall School of Professor of Composition and Composer in Residence.
7. Bioluminescence by Liza Lim performed by Alessandra Rombolà (Sporitfy) and Emi Ferguson (YouTube). Album: Reflections III. “Liza Lim’s music centres collaboration and transcultural ideas. The roots of beauty, time effects in the Anthropocene and the sensoria of ecological connection are ongoing concerns in her art practice.”
8. fAt: fAt by Donnacha Dennehy performed by William Dowdall. Album: Works for Solo Flute. I could not find a thing about this piece – all I know is that it is fun.
9. Emergent by George E. Lewis performed by Claire Chase. Album: The Recombinant Trilogy. “Pioneering composer George Lewis releases “The Recombinant Trilogy,” an album consisting of three works for solo instrument and electronics that use interactive digital delays, spatialization and timbre transformation to transform the acoustic sounds of the instrument into multiple digitally created sonic personalities that follow diverse yet intersecting spatial trajectories. Featuring virtuosic soloists flutist Claire Chase, cellist Seth Parker Woods, and bassoonist Dana Jessen, doppelgängers are created that blur the boundaries between original and copy, while shrouding their origin in processes of repetition.”
10. Lookout by Robert Dick. Album: Ladder 5 of Escape. “Commissioned for the 1989 National Flute Association’s High School Flute Soloist Competition, Lookout is a tonal, melodic rock solo for flute that uses singing and playing and easy multiphonics. Lookout has been played by over a thousand flutists all over the world. Inspired by 1960s and 70s rock, Lookout is the first in Robert’s series of solo flute pieces inspired by American popular musics”
11. And for you, castles by Victoria Cheah performed by Roberta Michel. Album: Hush. “Victoria Cheah is a composer whose work concerns boundaries, transitions, sustained effort, and intimacies within social-performance rituals. Her work has been commissioned and/or featured by ensembles and presenters including Talujon, Either/Or, Non-Event, Switch Ensemble, Line Upon Line, Han Chen, andPlay, Yarn/Wire, Wavefield Ensemble, MATA Festival, Guerilla Opera, Ensemble Dal Niente, Vertixe Sonora, Marilyn Nonken, PRISM Quartet, and performed by others. Recordings of their music can be found on Dinzu Artefacts, New Focus Recordings, and XAS Records. Cheah currently serves as Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory, as well as Director of Production of Talea Ensemble.”
12. Her Pockets Full of Inertia by Cat Hope performed by Lamorna Nightingale. Album: Other Voices. “The piece is named after a poem by Melbourne poet Claire Gaskin, and some of the words from it feature in the score to share a little of the poem with the players whilst they play. The work treats the poem as an inspiration for a sonic world, creating an eerie atmosphere of stasis and clouded sounds. The solo part provides a more literal use of the poem with some words even spoken through the flute, and draws thematic material from the choir parts.”