Fist Full of Flutes, Quartets, Vol. 2

Achille-Claude Debussy (1862-1918) spent a great deal of his 20s in Parisian cafés, soaking up the fin de siècle (turn of the century) culture with his artist, composer and poet friends. It was during this time that the Universal Exposition, a world’s fair, was held in Paris. Claude was fascinated with the Javanese gamelan orchestras – traditional culture ensembles with all sorts of metallic xylophones, musical gongs, pots and pans, which used combinations of scales and harmonies not commonly heard in Western Europe. Debussy had already begun to experiment with exotic melodies and harmonies but this confirmed it for him, a new/old direction for his compositional style. The Sarabande is from that period, 1894-1901, as he was composing the piano work from which it is derived, the 2nd movement of Pour le piano. Here’s the original piano score.

The challenge with this work is to let the music breathe at cadence points and after fermatas. It’s a little like a marine animal swimming: flow, slow down, turn direction, suspend. I imagine my Caribbean diving experiences, floating with sea turtles and beneath large schools of tarpon. Go watch some fish before your first rehearsal.

There are many places where the four lines are in unison. I took most of the vibrato out except for the first part. Try it different ways and see which seems the most beautiful and the least distracting. You will notice that I made 4-bar phrases. Sometimes the music calls for a longer line, so at these times I did catch breaths, short sips that don’t take long and are hardly detectable to the listener (that is when they aren’t sitting 3 feet from your mouth, as the microphone was from mine).

Several times the 3rd and 4th parts have the interesting parts, make sure your balance supports those parts being in the forefront. The chords at mm. 59 and the end are probably the most challenging to tune. If you haven’t already, watch the tuning video to get some tips on intonation in flute ensembles. This selection was in the top five favorite pieces for Jeff, the recording engineer, of the sixty that we recorded, so it comes with high praise – enjoy!

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was the second son of a cartwheel maker and a cook. Are you wondering why the careers of someone’s parents were so important in a historical biography? Well, for someone like Joseph Haydn, who was enormously talented and needed talented and experienced teachers, finding the means to get this young boy an education was incredibly challenging for a father who made cartwheels (actual wooden wheels, not the acrobatic kind) and a mother cooked for the local Count. To complicate this further, they lived far away from anything resembling a music school. Fortunately, Joseph’s dad was a part-time musician and was able to send Joseph to live with a distant cousin who was a music teacher. Even before this music training, it was clear that Joseph was blessed with a great singing voice, destined for the church choir. Soon he made the big time: St. Stephen’s choir school in Vienna, at which he was taught singing, violin, music theory and composition, language and other studies and participated in least 2 performances (masses or other religious services) a day. Haydn had a long career working for one wealthy family, the Esterházy dynasty. His job description not only included composition and performing but also managing the musicians and their uniforms (including properly powdered wigs), the instruments and the library. It is possible that he wrote the very first theatrical symphony, called the ‘Farewell’, in which the performers all ended at different times, blew out their candles (on the music stands) and left the stage, leaving just two violins on stage at the end. It was supposed to be a hint to Prince Nicolas Esterházy that it was time to leave the summer mansion and go home to Vienna. This two-movement selection is from the London Trio in G major, H. 4/3.

For the Andante, I believe the cadenza can be an intimidating moment for the 1st player – all alone and no rhythm to go on, what is one to do? I found if I made a kind of rhythm for me to feel internally, it made more sense musically, even if the listener isn’t aware of an actual rhythm. Here’s how I organized it:

Speaking of rhythm, also notice that not just the first but all the grace-note ornaments are played on the beat, not before. For the Allegro assai, the syncopation can be problematic for inexperienced players. Shorten the notes and practice without the 1st part to get the “motor” solid as a freight train. This movement may require a great deal of individual metronome practice and rehearsals in twos. The play alongs will help too, of course!

This is a lovely selection of two contrasting movements and we use it often for gigs. I believe that you will have fun working on it. Concerning part assignments – make sure that you have a strong player on 4th part. Both the Andante and the Allegro assai need a big, solid low flute sound for the bass line and bass melodies throughout these movements.

Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a Russian composer and the teacher of Igor Stravinsky. Did you notice the two different spellings of Korsakov? That’s because, since the time of this Rubank publication in 1964, linguists have revised our English language versions of Russian names. The English and Russian alphabets are different, so our English versions are written according to how they sound –‘phonetic spelling’ is the term for it. Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov in the Russian alphabet is: Никола́й Андре́евич Ри́мский-Ко́рсаков.

Did you know that this is the composer who brought us Flight of the Bumblebee? He was a self-taught musician who was hired as a composition professor and even wrote a book on harmony while secretly self teaching himself the very subject he was instructing. He was fired for being sympathetic to the revolutionary students (the same revolution that inspired my Jewish great-grandparents to move to America) only to be reinstated and then wrote an opera mocking the authorities. I like this guy! In 1876 and ’77, Nikolay edited a book of 100 Russian Folk Songs and soon after he began to infuse his compositions with folk music traits. I had hoped to find this folk song there but alas, it was not included. I even talked to a Russian immigrant whose mother played Russian folk music on an accordion but he didn’t know it either. I did hear ‘Here Is A Fish, Fat and Fine’ performed vocally once almost twenty years ago, in Russian, by a group of Russian folk musicians who were visiting Ohio Wesleyan. They sang it very slowly and I remember how interesting the Russian syllables sounded, spilling over one another.

I think finding a tempo that I was happy with was the main challenge. I wanted it to feel in 3 but not be too fast to be sung. I added lots of accented notes, which for me means spacing the notes. I did this in order to define the individual lines with this very busy texture. I imagined four street vendors all singing their fishy advertisements and competing for buyers. Maybe you could memorize the parts and come into the performance space from four different directions – let me know if it works – better yet, video record it and I’ll link it here!

Rameau, Jean-Philippe was born in Dijon, bap. 25 Sept 1683 and died in Paris, 12 Sept 1764. Jean-Philippe was extremely secretive about what he did in the first 40 years of his life (perhaps he was perfecting the recipe for mustard – born in Dijon, get it?) and then for the remainder of his life, split his time writing very controversial treatises on music theory and low-humor comic operas (opera comique). When he wasn’t busy with that, he wrote several collections of keyboard works. This movement, “La Villageoise”, is from Pieces de clavecin, composed in 1724 for harpsichord (clavecin is the French term for harpsichord). Here is the original score; look at p. 15.

The 3rd and 4th parts of this quartet arrangement are the most difficult parts because of all the jumping around they do. In fact, almost all the pieces in this Rubank Flute Quartets collection are fun for all the players and when my students use them for gigs, we always trade parts. It does make them a bit crazy when they are 1st year students, as I call out part assignments just before we play them, but by the time they are 2nd years, they consider it a point of pride to be able to play any part an instant before the performance. Try it – I dare you to shed the 1st part diva/divo personality and become an all-part ensemble member (or dare I write it – comrade)! Lots of dynamic contrast and accents in this one – make the most of that, it gives this piece some pizzazz.

Antonin Dvoràk (1841- 1904) seemed to pride himself on being as close to simple peasant stock that a trained musician can get. Although he was formally trained in music very early (age 6-18), all along he played in dance bands, those crazy dances that all the kids in the 1860s were stepping out: mazurkas, polkas, skočná and sousedská, all the while playing Beethoven and Wagner in the theater orchestra and composing in his spare time. The interesting aspect about Dvoràk is how loyal to the people of his country he remained throughout his life. Take for instance his first big opera to get a break, The King and the Charcoal Burner. The theater in Prague accepted the opera for production and had begun rehearsing when Dvoràk realized that the music he had written was just too difficult for these musicians to perform. Instead of storming off to Vienna where real musicians could handle his music, he took back all the music, destroyed it, and recomposed the entire opera as one more suited to the Prague orchestra and singers. Soon after, he destroyed all of his early works and totally transformed his compositional style to a less complicated one, rooted in Czech folksong.

Dvoràk big break was in 1878 when in a few weeks’ time, he became the most famous composer in Europe. This is when his Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 were published and, as one journal reported, caused “a positive assault on sheet music shops”. Within a few months, five major orchestras, including New York, were performing his music and all the most famous conductors and violinists were his new best friends.

For a few years, Dvoràk ended up in New York, as artistic director and composition professor at the National Conservatory of Music, with a salary of $15,000 – an amount five times what he had been making teaching in Prague, $364,000 in today’s dollars. It was interesting just how much his time in America affected him. Listen to the Largo movement of the New World Symphony and tell me you don’t hear a spiritual. Listen to the American String Quartet and tell me you don’t imagine the hilly fields of Iowa, where he composed it. He was here, traveling around our country, capturing just what Jeanette Thurber, the President of the National Conservatory, hoped he would – a true American classical music. Dvoràk wrote and arranged over 100 folk songs for voices. Here is a snippet of the original of “The Sparrow’s Party”, the fifth movement from Five Choral Songs for Male Voices to Lithuanian Folk Song Texts, Op. 27 B 87, composed in 1878 and published in 1890. The Sparrow’s Party is track 20.

The motor element of this quartet is the combination of parts 3 and 4. My students at Ohio Wesleyan have found that getting those two players in sync together and the 1st and 2nd part players together before a full rehearsal is helpful. The tempo can be relaxed if the articulation in the 3rd part is too problematic at 72 to the measure. The ending is a bit dated but it was traditional in eastern European folk songs and dances, so embrace the cheesy-ness. We use this selection often on gigs, the students love to play it and the audiences love to hear it, as it is very bird-like with the flute quartet and the motor element has been known to incite toe tapping and silly dancing.