Category: Flute Practice

This is a go-to technique in my flute-teaching to teach how to play with a modern, multi-coloured, expressive sound.

There is an actual book that this method uses, Marcel Moyse’s Tone Development Through Interpretation, which I studied for a long time as a student.

But I don’t teach it just using the melodies written in the Moyse’s book. I learnt gradually (maybe glacially) that there’s no magic in just those tunes, many of which are now somewhat obscure. It’s really the approach that we can learn from; the repeated close listening, the acute study of tone colour, character and direction, how to carry and characterise tunes, the transposition of originals to then deal with the difficulties posed by transposition into different keys.

Also, just having the love for the tunes themselves is vital – I find they have to be personally really meaningful for me to spend enough time on them to really benefit. Fewer tunes really mean as much to me in the actual Tone Development book as other tunes I’ve collected.

I often start with an actual flute tune (or one at least played on the flute) such as James Galway’s rendition of Annie’s Song: a great recording, something I’ve loved listening to for decades (I totally lack hedonistic response).

I love this tune because it’s so simple – short phrases, limited range, small jumps, easy to remember. Nothing not to like.

What to focus on? Tone colour and intensity (the most obvious “tone development” bit of it), imitating Galway’s vibrato, his quasi-portamento legato from one note to another, the sense of direction and intent he imparts in the phrases. Often times it’s the degree to which the tone/dynamic is developed that is the revelation.

My students and I do this all from ear – just listening and remembering. It’s somewhat disabling of your listening abilities to be reading music and easy to get into a reflexive, this-is-how-I-always-play-the-flute groove without questioning whether you’re reproducing really what you hear.

Later I branch out to mainly non-flute tunes – lots of voice and strings but also other woodwinds. This is harder of course, but we can learn even more, especially from strings and singers with their hugely wide expressive range. And to be totally frank, most great instrumentalists would have the drop on even great flute-players in terms of expressive range.

Basically, at some point we all want more – more dynamic and expressive contrast, more colours in our sound. While the flute is super-easy to get reasonably good at, after a while in terms of expressive range, it often pales in comparison to other instruments.

Marcel Moyse confronted this hard truth back in 1934 when he wrote his book, De la Sonorité (About Sound) and in which he outlined a methodical way of developing a bigger, more expressive sound.

You continue the exercise illustrated here all the way down to low C’ or B’, then back up the scale to at least C””. The principle is simple and remains the same:

• Make the most beautiful, brassy, bodacious and bold sound that you have ever made on B – no matter how long it takes
• Take that sound and move it to Bb – only a semitone away
• Repeat this all the way down the scale – learning as you go all the little subtle changes of lip/mouth shape you have to do to make up for the inadequacies of the modern flute scale.

Everyone has to do this exercise at some point. There is no way around it, you must go through it. “Most beautiful” should gradually (over weeks and months) get better – more lustrous, darker, more powerful.

Flute players like James Galway and Michael Martin Kofler show the extreme end of this process in their relentless, powerful and lustrous tone.

Some of the biggest things I find to really help this process along are:

• Intense listening to the great flutists out there – there are a billion Galway recordings to listen to for example. All are fine examples to copy.
• Close your eyes while you do this – you need all your brain power focused on feelings and sound when you do this. If your eyes are open, you’re just busy distracting yourself with your visual sense – which is worse that useless here.
• Imaginative visualisation of the shape of your mouth/embouchure can really help encapsulate changes you’re trying to make.
• Running, swimming or rowing to really expand your lung and give you capacity to experiment and just blow harder for longer.
• The fast way is the slow way. The slower you go and the more you persist on tough notes, the faster the overall progress you’ll achieve.