The Flute

Of all the orchestra’s woodwinds, the flute is the least encumbered — no reed between the player and the air, only the lip and the edge of the embouchure hole. From this simplicity arises the instrument’s whole character: clarity, agility, and a coolness of tone that has, for two centuries, given composers their image of pastoral, of dawn, of birds.

It is an instrument of breath above all else. The lowest octave is velvety, almost husky; the middle round and singing; the upper bright and penetrating, capable of cutting through a full orchestra without apparent effort. Between these regions the flautist moves with an ease no other wind player enjoys — but the cost is a constant, considerable expense of air.

The modern flute is built of three joints — head, body, and foot — most commonly of silver, sometimes of gold or grenadilla. The body is a cylindrical tube; the head joint, more subtle, tapers in a parabolic curve toward the cork. Air strikes the far edge of the embouchure hole and splits into the column below, setting it vibrating — a mechanism the Greeks already understood, and the centuries since have only refined.

The keywork is the Boehm system, devised by Theobald Boehm in Munich in 1847 and adopted, with remarkable speed, almost everywhere. It places the tone-holes where acoustics demand rather than where fingers fall, and uses rings, levers, and rods to bring those holes within reach. The flautist of the present plays an instrument substantially as Boehm left it.

Berlioz, attentive as ever, observed that the flute is a voice “of singular character, susceptible of expressing many shades of feeling — sadness, tenderness, but also brilliance and even fury.” He thought it suited above all to scenes of antiquity, of moonlight, of pastoral repose; the nineteenth century wrote almost nothing for it that contradicts him. A flute solo at the right moment will draw the room toward stillness more reliably than any other instrument.

And yet the flute is also the orchestra’s sprinter. The Badinerie of Bach, the cadenzas of Mozart, the perpetual-motion finales of Vivaldi — all rest on its capacity for rapid, perfectly even articulation. To write for the flute is to choose, in each phrase, between the singer and the runner. The instrument will be, faithfully, whichever you ask.

“The flute is not a wind instrument — it is the wind itself, lent a shape for the duration of a phrase.”

— paraphrased, after a remark in the studio

Among the woodwinds the flute is the eldest by ancestry and the youngest by mechanism. Write for it without prejudice, and it will surprise you twice — once with what it can do, and once with how little of itself it seems to spend doing it.

The flute is generous, but it is not infinite. A few practical habits will return the favour and spare the player a great deal of grief at the desk.

• i.Account for the breath. The flute is the most air-hungry instrument in the woodwind section. Long phrases are possible, but so are choking flautists; build a place to breathe.
• ii.Beware the low register against tutti. The lowest octave is beautiful, but quiet — and easily covered. Reserve it for thin textures, or double it when scoring against weight.
• iii.Trust the agility, but justify it. The flute will play almost anything you write. That is precisely why one must take care: brilliant passagework without melodic purpose tires the listener faster than the player.
• iv.Use the upper register sparingly. Above the staff the flute carries effortlessly — and tirelessly, to the audience’s ears. Climb there when the music has earned the climb.
• v.Pair it carefully. With clarinet for warmth, with oboe for plaintiveness, with piccolo for brilliance at the octave. The flute blends with almost anything; the question is what you wish to colour.

Beyond these few rules, write with the player in mind. A flautist will tell you what is possible — and, more usefully, what is beautiful.

A short, partial list — five places to begin if one wishes to know what the flute can do, and what it has been asked to do by composers who loved it.

1. № 01

   Debussy — Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

   Opening solo

   A descending chromatic line out of stillness — the moment, by common consent, at which modern music begins.

   Listen on Spotify
2. № 02

   Bach — Suite No. 2 in B minor, BWV 1067

   Badinerie

   The instrument as quicksilver. Two minutes of perpetual motion, and a test of every flautist’s tongue.

   Listen on Spotify
3. № 03

   Ravel — Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2

   Pantomime

   A long, unhurried solo above the orchestra — the flute as Pan, calling across a clearing in the morning light.

   Listen on Spotify
4. № 04

   Prokofiev — Peter and the Wolf

   The Bird

   A small, bright character drawn in two phrases. Children remember it for life; so do most flautists.

   Listen on Spotify
5. № 05

   Brahms — Symphony No. 4

   Fourth movement, variation 12

   A solo of marked sadness, set within the great passacaglia — the flute alone, descending against the unmoved bass.

   Listen on Spotify

Further entries will be added as our study deepens.

The flute is, by ancestry, the oldest instrument the orchestra knows. Bone flutes survive from forty thousand years ago; transverse flutes of bamboo and wood are older than recorded music in nearly every culture. The instrument we know today is the European refinement of an idea that humanity discovered before it discovered metal.

By the early eighteenth century the transverse flute, or traverso, had taken its place in the orchestra alongside the recorder it was steadily displacing. Its bore was conical, its body of boxwood or grenadilla, its keywork limited — usually to a single key for D♯. Bach wrote sonatas and obbligatos for it; Telemann and Quantz wrote a great deal more. The instrument of this period was softer, breathier, and more variable in tuning than its modern descendant.

Mozart professed to dislike the flute, and wrote two concertos and a quartet for it anyway, all of them masterworks. By his time the instrument had acquired four to six keys and was settled in the Classical orchestra in pairs. It was still a wooden instrument, still gentle of voice, still, in its own way, an heirloom of the Baroque — but it was unmistakably a soloist.

In 1832, and again, decisively, in 1847, the Munich flautist and goldsmith Theobald Boehm rebuilt the instrument from the bore outward. He replaced the conical bore with a cylinder, the parabolic head joint with one tuned by acoustic principle, and the small finger-holes with large holes placed where the air column required them — joined by a ring-and-axle keywork that made the unreachable reachable. Within a generation the wooden flute was a survivor, not the standard. The silver Boehm flute was the modern instrument.

The flute that Debussy heard for Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune in 1894 is, in essence, the flute the player picks up today. Twentieth-century refinements — the gold lip plate, the offset G key, the open-hole French model — are matters of taste and fine adjustment. The instrument itself, like the bassoon, has achieved a quietly settled craft.

Specifications

A summary, for the composer’s desk.