A Most Versatile Instrument

Music for Flute(s) and Ensemble

Harry Haskell

The flute’s status as a kind of Ur-instrument, with a global history stretching back to the heyday of the prehistoric Mesopotamian city and beyond, has helped make it not only one of the most versatile members of the modern instrumentarium, but also a touchstone in cultures ancient and modern around the world. “God picks up the reed-flute world and blows,” wrote the 13th-century Persian poet Rūmī (in Coleman Barks’s modern rendering). “Each note is a need coming through one of us, a passion, a longing-pain.”

Like the instrument itself, the origins of flute music are shrouded in the mists of time, but the modern concert flute—historically known as the transverse or “German” flute, to distinguish it from the upright recorder—was still in its infancy when composers like Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and his father, Johann Sebastian, realized its potential as a solo instrument in the early 1700s. The development of the all-metal Boehm flute in the 19th century sparked a further outpouring of music for the instrument that has continued unabated to the present day. Flutes have found a home in almost every conceivable chamber ensemble configuration, from Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s unaccompanied duets to Amy Beach’s postRomantic Quintet for Flute and Strings and György Ligeti’s ultramodern wind quintet.

Melodies “Uncommonly Fine and Elegant”

J. S. Bach groomed his eldest son to follow in his footsteps from childhood. Born while his father was serving as court organist and chamber musician in Weimar, Wilhelm Friedemann was destined to achieve comparable renown as an organist and harpsichordist. Even the genres in which he excelled as a composer— keyboard and church music—were closely associated with his father. When Wilhelm Friedemann sought his first church post in Dresden in 1733, Johann Sebastian helpfully penned his application letter. Yet the younger Bach was no carbon copy of his famous father; much of his highly virtuosic keyboard music is notably forward-looking in style and technique. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, the elder Bach’s first biographer, asserted that of all Johann Sebastian’s musical sons, Wilhelm Friedemann “approached the nearest to his father in the originality of his thoughts. All his melodies have a different turn from those of other composers, and yet they are not only extremely natural, but, at the same time, uncommonly fine and elegant. When performed with delicacy, as he himself performed them, they cannot fail to enchant every connoisseur.”

Bach’s Six Flute Duets exemplify the blend of contrapuntal mastery and Italianate lyricism that contemporaries lauded in his music. The first four duets were likely written during the early 1740s in Dresden, where the composer was serving as organist at the Sophienkirche (a majestic Gothic cathedral that was heavily damaged in the Allied fire-bombings of World War II and subsequently razed by the East German government). Bach fraternized with members of the excellent Dresden court orchestra, including the virtuoso flutists Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin and Johann Martin Blockwitz, and it may have been for them that he wrote the three duets on tonight’s program. Although the pieces share a conventional three-movement format, fast-slow-fast, they exhibit considerable variety of texture and affect. Duet No. 3 in E-flat major is characterized by elaborate grace notes and other ornamental figures, and capped by an exuberant, bracingly bravura finale. Duet No. 1 in E minor is comparatively uncomplicated, in terms of both instrumental technique and structure (each movement is in two parts, both of which are marked to be repeated), as well as its extensive use of canonic writing. In Duet No. 4 in F major—by far the longest of the six in the set—Bach puts the players through their paces with an impressive display of spitfire passagework, athletic leaps, and—in the richly expressive slow movement, marked “lamentabile” (sorrowful)—searching chromatic harmonies.

Back to Musical Basics

As a student in Hungary during and after World War II, György Ligeti was virtually cut off from the latest trends in Western European music. Thrown on his own devices, the inquisitive young composer decided to make a virtue of necessity and construct a musical language from the ground up. In the early 1950s, he recalled, “I started to experiment with simple structures of rhythms and sounds, in order to evolve a new music from nothing, so to speak. I regarded all the music I had known and loved up to then as something I couldn’t use.” Ligeti’s early works are steeped in the idioms of Hungarian folk music and Béla Bartók, the country’s most famous musical exile. In the wake of the Soviet invasion in 1956, Ligeti, too, fled to Vienna and eventually settled in Germany. There his interest in electronic music and “micropolyphony”—a style characterized by dense, cloudlike saturation of musical space— bore fruit in his best-known work, Atmosphères, popularized in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ligeti’s early back-to-basics approach to composition is illustrated by Musica ricercata, a set of 11 piano pieces that use a strictly limited collection of pitches, ranging from two notes (A and D) in the first piece to all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in the last. In 1953, Ligeti arranged a half-dozen of these keyboard miniatures for wind quintet. The Six Bagatelles pay homage to Bartók in their spectral “night music” effects and use of small motivic cells as building blocks. At the same time, the atmospheric tone clusters, extreme dynamics and registers, and propulsive ostinato rhythms anticipate Ligeti’s later works. The last Bagatelle—which climaxes in a giddily accelerating sequence of loud, dissonant chords to be played “as though insane” —so alarmed Hungary’s cultural watchdogs that they ordered it cut from the work’s first performance in 1956. The playfulness of the opening Allegro con spirito, built on a brisk, five-note motto, is accentuated by the contrast between gaily chirping piccolo and plodding bassoon. The second movement is a slow, lugubrious lament, its smoothly undulating patterns punctuated by throbbing dissonances. In the Allegro grazioso, a waltz-like cantabile melody floats atop billowing waves of crisp staccato septuplets; their slightly disconcerting asymmetry is mirrored in the heavily accented 7/8 meter of the fourth Bagatelle, marked “Presto ruvido” (coarse or unpolished). Another somber slow movement follows, more richly chromatic than the first and dedicated to Bartók, whose influence can be felt in the tremulous, hauntingly ethereal ending. The shifting meters and swirling melodic lines of the concluding Molto vivace evoke the spirit of Stravinsky, while the wistful coda—a muted horn solo—has a decidedly Brittenesque flavor.

An Elegiac Quintet

A child prodigy on the piano, Amy Marcy Beach (née Cheney) made her debut with the Boston Symphony at age 18, playing Chopin’s brilliant F-minor Concerto. In contrast to Clara Schumann, who gave up her composing (but not her piano) career in deference to her husband Robert, Beach obliged her spouse by redirecting her exceptional talent to writing music, an occupation which, in the late 1800s, was considered more suitable for an upper-class Boston matron. Largely self-taught as a composer, she went on to produce a handful of large-scale symphonic works, a mass, and a one-act opera, all of which she published under her married name, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. (In observing that “she composes when she feels the inclination moves her to it,” an interviewer for Etude magazine drew attention to the fact that she did not need to support herself.) However, Beach is best known for her vocal and chamber music, which is characterized by a distinctive blend of late Romanticism and impressionism, sometimes laced with a soupçon of the atonality embraced by more “advanced” composers of her generation.

Having spent several years before World War I building a successful career in Europe, Beach enjoyed an enviable reputation on both sides of the Atlantic by the time she wrote the Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet in 1916. Critics nonetheless persisted in qualifying their praise by identifying her as a “woman composer.” Notwithstanding Beach’s insistence that she never suffered professionally from gender bias, gender-based comparisons were inevitably drawn. A year or so earlier, no less a figure than conductor Walter Damrosch had condescendingly slighted musical women’s work as typically “light and frothy; it lacks weight and profundity, sentiment and philosophy in comparison with men’s masterpieces.” The languid lyricism that suffuses the Theme and Variations may have done little to alter such blinkered perceptions, but the work’s finely crafted eloquence—and Beach’s thoroughgoing mastery of her art—speak for themselves. Based on a part-song for women’s voices that she had written 12 years earlier, the six variations shift back and forth between elegiac pathos and energetic, no-nonsense briskness. The third variation, a bittersweet waltz steeped in weltschmerz, is the emotional heart of the quintet; whether consciously or otherwise, Beach’s marking “con morbidezza” (meaning, more or less, delicately) echoes the direction Debussy gave to performers of his 1910 piano waltz La plus que lente, which he had recently arranged for flute and chamber ensemble.

Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster specializing in the music and culture of Central Europe. His writing appears in newspapers and magazines as well as concert and opera programs worldwide. His first book, A Home for All Seasons, was published in 2022.