The Piccolo

The piccolo is the flute writ small — half the length, an octave higher, and possessed of a character all its own. It is brilliant without effort, shrill if asked too much, and capable, in its middle register, of a sweetness no other woodwind can quite match. Composers either love it dearly or use it sparingly; rarely both.

It is, before anything else, an instrument of the top. A single piccolo will be heard above ninety musicians at full cry — a fact every orchestrator learns once, and afterwards never forgets. Its powers should be saved, like fireworks, for the moments that warrant them: storms, marches, the final pages of symphonies and the first light of ballets.

The piccolo is built in two principal joints — headjoint and body — most often of grenadilla or cocus, sometimes of silver, and occasionally of a wood body fitted with a metal headjoint. The keywork follows the Boehm system, identical in fingering to the modern flute, though the bore is conical where the flute’s is cylindrical, and narrows steadily toward the foot.

Sound is produced as it is on the flute — by the player’s breath striking the far edge of the embouchure hole — but everything is smaller, faster, and more demanding of intonation. A flautist does not simply pick up the piccolo and play; the embouchure is its own discipline, and the best piccolo players are those who practise the two instruments as kin, not as one.

Berlioz, in his Treatise, returns again and again to the piccolo with a mixture of admiration and warning. In the high register it is, he writes, “excellently fitted to express violent passions and the strident accents of fury and vengeance,” and yet equally capable, with care, of the most delicate effects. The instrument is a creature of contrasts. It is the lightning of the orchestra and, when held back, also its most fragile thread.

Its low register is breathy and weak, almost a whisper; the middle is round and pure, the most underused part of the instrument; the upper, brilliant; and the extreme top, piercing — a sound that no forte in the strings can cover. The composer who knows when to deploy each is the composer the piccolo will reward.

“In the high register it is excellently fitted to express violent passions, and the strident accents of fury and vengeance.”

— Berlioz, Grand traité d’instrumentation

The piccolo asks little, and gives much — provided the writer remembers that, of all the orchestra’s voices, this is the one most easily made to scream. Use it well and it will sing. Use it badly and it will not be forgiven.

The piccolo will reward the composer who treats it as a soloist even when it is not, and punish the composer who treats it as a decoration always. A few habits, kept in mind, will help.

• i.Write at sounding pitch only when you must. The piccolo reads in treble clef, sounding an octave higher; written above the staff is the rule, and ledger-line forests are the consequence of forgetting it.
• ii.Beware the lowest fifth. From D₄ to A₄ the tone is breathy and indistinct; covered by anything at all, it disappears. Reserve those notes for exposed lines, or do not write them.
• iii.Honour the middle register. Between G₅ and G₆ written — the second octave — the piccolo is sweetest. Most composers ignore it; it is the surest source of new colour the instrument offers.
• iv.The top is loud, always. Above C₆ written, the piccolo cannot truly play piano — and above G₆ it cannot play less than forte. Plan dynamics around the player, not against them.
• v.Give the player rests, and a moment to breathe. The instrument is exhausting at the top of its range. A piccolo line without silences is a piccolo line a player will come to dread.

Beyond these few rules, write with the player in mind. A piccoloist 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 piccolo can do, and what composers from Beethoven onward have asked it to do.

1. № 01

   Beethoven — Symphony No. 5, Finale

   Allegro

   Its admission to the orchestra. The piccolo enters with the trombones and contrabassoon, and the symphony breaks into daylight.

   Listen on Spotify
2. № 02

   Vivaldi — Concerto in C major, RV 443

   Allegro

   Written for the flautino — its modern home is the piccolo. Cascades of semiquavers, brilliant and unrelenting.

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3. № 03

   Tchaikovsky — Symphony No. 4

   Third movement, trio

   A miniature march for the woodwinds, the piccolo skipping above on its toes — pizzicato strings beneath, like distant tambourines.

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4. № 04

   Sousa — The Stars and Stripes Forever

   Final trio

   The most famous piccolo obbligato in any repertoire — once heard, never quite shaken loose.

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5. № 05

   Shostakovich — Symphony No. 9

   First movement

   A glittering, faintly mocking solo above the strings — the piccolo as a small bright bird the composer cannot quite take seriously.

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Further entries will be added as our study deepens.

The piccolo descends from the fife — a small, keyless transverse flute that for centuries marched alongside the snare drum in the regiments of Europe. The military fife is not, strictly, the piccolo; but the kinship is plain in every shrill march and storm passage that followed.

Vivaldi, in the early eighteenth century, wrote three concertos for what he called the flautino — a small, high-pitched flute whose precise identity scholars still debate. Whatever the original instrument, those concertos are now standard piccolo repertoire, and no piccoloist of any seriousness has not played them.

The piccolo entered the symphony orchestra by the side door, with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony of 1808. Its first appearance in the finale — alongside the contrabassoon and three trombones, all making their orchestral debut at once — is one of the great instrumentation moments in the repertoire. Beethoven used it again in the storm of the Sixth, and the precedent was set: the piccolo is the orchestra’s lightning, kept for the moments when lightning is wanted.

Theobald Boehm’s redesign of the flute’s keywork in the mid nineteenth century carried over, in time, to the piccolo. The instrument acquired a full set of Boehm-system keys, the conical bore was refined, and the modern wood-bodied piccolo emerged — an instrument capable of playing in tune across its full compass, a thing its predecessors could not reliably claim.

The piccolo of the twenty-first-century orchestra is essentially the late-nineteenth-century instrument, refined in keywork and materials but otherwise settled. Most professional players prefer a wooden body — usually grenadilla — for the warmth it lends the middle register; metal piccolos persist in marching bands, where weather is unkind to wood. Otherwise, what Tchaikovsky and Mahler wrote for is what a player picks up today.

Specifications

A summary, for the composer’s desk.