The Versatile Flute Family
By Thomas Wolf
A typical orchestra score shows the flute part at the top. If there is a piccolo part, it is listed above the flute.
The flute and its progeny (piccolo, alto flute, and bass flute) may not be considered the most important instrumental family in a symphony orchestra; but it is certainly one of the most versatile.
When I was an elementary school student studying the flute, I remember looking over the shoulders of two musician relatives who were examining an orchestral score. Imagine my thrill when I saw the flute part printed on the very top line of almost every page, except where there was a piccolo part printed even above that!
Look at all those violinists. They often outnumber the flutists in a symphony orchestra by thirty to four. (Photo by Samuel Sianipar.)
I pointed out to my grandmother, Lea Luboshutz, who was a renowned violinist, that the part for her instrument was way down at the middle of the page. She smiled when I claimed that the flute part must be far more important than hers. I was disappointed when I first attended orchestra concerts and witnessed more than thirty violinists playing most of the time and only three or four flutists playing far less often.
Worse still, sometimes, when the flutists were playing, I couldn’t hear them. Even in my uncle Boris Goldovsky’s smaller opera company orchestra, the violins far outnumbered the flutes. Later I would console myself that on many occasions when one or more of those flutists was playing, their parts really seemed to matter. Indeed, that was Uncle Boris’s view when years later I joined his opera orchestra as principal flutist: “Don’t vorry,” he joked, with his thick Russian accent. “You veel be plenty beezie.” And of course he was right.
The flute is often assigned the character of birds with the nightingale being especially popular, as in Beethoven’s sixth symphony and Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale.” (Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons.)
It has been seventy years since those childhood ruminations and the beginning of my love affair with the flute. But even now I continue to believe that some of my first impressions of the importance of the flute in orchestral repertory were correct. Flutists may play less often than string players, their instruments may not be as loud as the brass or percussion, and they may have to defer to other woodwinds who carry important lines, but the flute offers some of the most beautiful and poignant music in the entire orchestral repertoire. In this blog, I mention a few excerpts that show the tremendous versatility of the flute family and its ability to convey mood, images, and feelings. In some cases, I provide a YouTube link to help make the point, though all the works mentioned can be found for free on the internet.
Most obviously the flute can suggest birds. Beethoven famously used the flute to give musical renditions of a nightingale near the end of the second movement of his “Pastoral” Symphony Number 6, Opus 68.[1] Igor Stravinsky did so again more than a century later in his “Song of the Nightingale” (using flute along with piccolo).
Later Gustav Mahler used the flute to suggest birds in the final movement of his orchestral song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, while Ravel in 1922 used flutes and piccolo to render the “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” in his 1884 transcription of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
The chirping flutes beautifully illustrate in music this image of the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks in Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” (Source: Institute of Russian Literature [Pushkin House], Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.)
Many children will recognize the flute as the bird character in Sergei Prokofiev’s symphonic tale, “Peter and the Wolf” (1936) (listen 47 seconds into this video), as well as the birds in the “Aviary” movement of Camille Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals (1886).
But Saint-Saëns didn’t stop at birds. Calling on the versatility of the instrument, he used the flute to suggest fish swimming in water in the Aquarium movement of the same work. Water is also suggested by the flute in the tone poem “Oceanides” by Jean Sibelius and “The Moldau” by Bedřich Smetana (from his suite Má vlast [My Country]). Using flutes and piccolo, the music imaginatively depicts the flow of the Moldau river.
The flute can conjure up the spirit world, too, as in the magnificent “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Euridice (1762). It can convey insanity, as in the Mad Scene from Gaetano Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) or sensuality, as in the “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Strauss’ opera Salome, whose explicit eroticism led to its banishment in certain opera houses.
While band piccolos are generally made of metal, orchestral piccolos, like those above, are made of wood giving them a more mellow sound. Even so, they are often used by classical composers like Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony to simulate fifes and piccolos in military bands. (Source: Jean-Paul Wright.)
Then there is the piccolo—essentially like a flute except much smaller and playing an octave higher. The orchestra piccolo is generally made of wood to give it a more mellow sound than the metal instruments in bands. Nevertheless, many classical composers have used the orchestra piccolo to conjure up military bands (as in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). It is again used to depict birds (as in the opening of the second suite of Daphnis & Chloe by Maurice Ravel, as well as the opening of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite), wind storms and lightening (as in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony), ghosts and fairies as in the two piccolo and flute Minuet of the Will-o-the Wisps from the Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, and even the Devil (Mephistopheles), as in vocal works based on the Faust story by both Gounod and Berlioz.
In my performing career, I primarily played the flute. However, on occasion I was required to play the piccolo in an opera orchestra. On these occasions, the piccolo might provide the music for a military band on stage (as at the end of the second act of Puccini’s La Bohème), an effect earlier used by Mozart with cymbals and side drums to announce the Turkish miliary in The Abduction of the Seraglio and by Gluck in Iphigénie en Tauride.
The piccolo simulates the fifes of the military band at the end of Act II of Puccini’s La Boheme. (Source: metopera.org.)
As for lightening, my favorite passages occur near the end of the final act of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville during a storm that rages immediately prior to the moment when the hero, Count Almaviva, along with his servant, Figaro, climb a ladder to enter the room of the heroine, Rosina, whom they plan to whisk away.
Another instrument in the flute family is the alto flute. It looks similar to a conventional instrument though it is larger and plays lower notes (for those musically inclined, it is pitched a fourth lower). Its sound is more mellow and darker, especially in its lowest register. Of relatively recent invention (it was introduced in the mid-19th century), it has been used by certain composers since that time including Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky, with an especially important part in Ravel’s Daphnis & Chloe mentioned earlier. In my performing career, I was only required to play an alto flute during a single opera tour when we performed the eponymous opera “Albert Herring” by Benjamin Britten. It was great fun. The title character comes home after getting drunk for the first time and tries to illuminate the gas lights with matches. In a humorous tenor aria supported by an alto flute and a bass clarinet, the music simulates the flashes of gas light as Albert repeatedly fails to get the lamps lit.
The weird looking instrument is an upright bass flute, a relatively modern invention. It is rarely used in orchestral classical music in part because it does not produce much volume.
Perhaps the weirdest looking instrument in the flute family is the bass flute, the tube of which sometimes curves around on itself. In other cases, when it is played in an upright position, the top of the tube crosses the main body of the instrument at right angles.
It is rarely used in orchestral classical music in part because it does not produce much volume but it can be heard in a supportive role in The Planets by Gustav Holst, “Boléro” by Maurice Ravel, and Petrushka by Igor Stravinsky. Rare as it is in classical symphonic music, the instrument is ubiquitous in movie and television scores where it is used in lugubrious quiet solos to convey mystery, death, and solitude. My brother and I used to joke that when a TV western was about to show a graveyard, we should listen for a bass flute—and we were rarely disappointed. For example, the Boot Hill Cemetery in Dodge City, Kansas was often featured in the TV Western Gunsmoke. The marshal would walk around the graveyard pointing out the graves of lawless people buried there. It was not unusual for “Boot Hill” background music to include a solo for a bass flute to convey the loneliness of death on the western prairie for those who defied the law.
The grave of Toothless Nell in Boot Hill Cemetery in Dodge City, Kansas. The graveyard was often featured in the TV Western “Gunsmoke.” “Boot Hill” background music sometimes included bass flute to convey the loneliness of death on the western prairie for those who defied the law. (Source: Digital Commonwealth.)
An early recording of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” in which the flutist is Marcel Moyse who had earlier played the piece under the composer’s direction.
If one were to choose the most famous orchestral work featuring the flute, it would probably be the “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” by Claude Debussy. It is a ten-minute symphonic work originally written in 1894, inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. Debussy described his work as a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of a faun in the heat of an afternoon. “Faun” begins with the flute playing a very long, suggestive, and chromatically-inflected passage completely by itself (the narrator of Mallarmé’s poem refers to the faun’s flute). Some conductors require the flutist to play the entire passage on one breath, though most flutists prefer not to do so. Nevertheless, the famous French flutist Michel Dubost was once asked how he approached that long solo which requires incredible breath control. The flutist must take a very large breath and then let the air out very slowly in order to play very quietly. Debost answered jokingly, “I take in the largest pool of air… and then I use none of it.” By using less wind and finding the right sonorities, the sound becomes hauntingly effective.
This iconic recording of “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” from 1959 features the legendary flutist, William Kincaid, at a time that I was studying with him.. It was one of several he recorded with the orchestra. In the first version, under conductor Leopold Stokowski, the flute sound was intentionally muffled by placing a handkerchief over the fingers to achieve the mystical quality that the conductor was after.
Two giants of the flute with whom I studied, Marcel Moyse and William Kincaid, helped make “Faun” famous through their performances and recordings.
Moyse had played the work under the composer’s direction and so had a unique perspective on how it should sound. Another teacher of mine, William Kincaid, recorded “Faun” on numerous occasions with the Philadelphia Orchestra[2]. In the first of these recordings, the conductor Leopold Stokowski, after much experimentation, insisted that Kincaid muffle the sound by placing a handkerchief over his fingers to achieve the mystical quality that the conductor was after.
There are countless recordings of “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” For those who like to follow the score, you can access this one. But since the work was made famous in part by a ballet in which the great dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, began dancing the part of the faun in 1912 for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in Paris, you may want to watch a modern version of the ballet based on the original choreography.
Vaslav Nijinsky helped make “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” famous when he began dancing the part of the faun in 1912 for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in Paris. (Source: Adolf de Meyer.)
[1] One can find the solo at 10:30 into this video, Beethoven: Symphony No. 6, 2nd movement | Paavo Järvi & the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, as the flute, playing the nightingale, is answered by the clarinet playing the cuckoo.
[2] For my in-depth article about William Kincaid and Marcel Moyse, go to William Kincaid and Marcel Moyse - Joffe Woodwinds.