In the days leading up to our concert, Together We Sing, the author of our programme notes provides an alternative look at the pieces featured on Saturday 6th June. The series may be interspersed with other posts but will be more or less daily! We hope you enjoy it.
Fantaisie for Flute and Piano, Op. 79
In the Hornbostel–Sachs classification system, flutes are edge-blown aerophones. No, I didn’t know that either. Or even what it meant. So, just in case you are wondering, an aerophone is a musical instrument that produces sound primarily by causing a body of air to vibrate without the use of strings (chordophones) or membranes (membranophones) and without the vibration of the instrument itself adding considerably to the sound (or idiophones).
Flutes with hand-bored holes are the earliest known identifiable musical instruments and a number have been found in present-day Germany dating back 53,000 to 45,000 years. But while the oldest flutes currently known were unearthed in Europe, edge-blown aerophones have been found all over the world. A playable bone flute dating to about 7,000 BCE has been discovered in China, another, in Peru, dates back 5,000 years and a third, in Labrador, about 7,500 years.
Fast forward to 1898 and Paul Taffanel, flautist, conductor and instructor, regarded as the founder of the French Flute School that dominated much of flute composition and performance during the mid-20th century, commissions the 53-yearold Gabriel Urbain Fauré to write a piece for the Concours de flute, a flute competition held by the Conservatoire de Paris where Taffanel had taken over the flute classes in 1893.
Taffanel’s instructions are very clear: “The piece should be short: 5 or 6 minutes at most. I will leave the form of it entirely up to you; whether an Andante followed by an Allegro, or a single movement, but it needs to contain the wherewithal to test the examinees on matters of phrasing, expression, tone control, and virtuosity. The accompaniment should be for piano.”
And he did. Fauré’s Fantaisie for Flute and Piano consists of two movements – Andantino and Allegro – separated only by a grand pause. Of course, not being one to waste a good idea, like many other composers, including Handel, Bach and Vivaldi, he used the first 18 bars of the introduction for the incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande which he was writing at the same time.
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