Happy Flute Friday and Happy Halloween! Today’s blog post is devoted to the subject of Fear (*cue blood curdling scream). Stage fright has kidnapped the best of all of us at one point or another. We may practice for hours, days, weeks, and months and still find that when the lights hit the stage our stomachs hit the…

Happy Flute Friday! In recent years I have performed in groups that relied heavily on tuners and metronomes to collectively establish pitch and rhythm. I am sure we have all at some point sat patiently through a group rehearsal where a well-meaning conductor has held up a tuner and asked each performer individually to correct their pitch based on the…

Welcome to Flute Friday! With Halloween just around the corner I thought I would devote today’s post to something truly terrifying for musicians (young and old) – Memorization. The very same look of horror that shines on my student’s faces the moment I write the words “from memory” in their lesson notebooks has remained unchanged throughout the years. My own reaction…

Happy Flute Friday! Often a piece of music tells a more intricate story than a simple melody or a series of exciting runs may convey. Unaccompanied pieces, for example, urge us to look beyond the title and notes for clues within the harmonic and melodic foundation serving as interpretive meanings between the composer and performer. Arthur Honnegger’s, Danse de la Chevre, for example, is more…

Happy Flute Friday! I really hope everyone out in Internet Land is enjoying these weekly posts. If you have any topic that you are dying for me to cover, or really anything that you think needs to be said about the flute, please message me. I realize most of my recent posts have covered various aspects of flute teaching so I will…