Quotes
- "A gentleman is someone who can play the flute, but doesn't."
--anon (probably a frustrated piper)
paraphrased from Oscar Wilde's comment about saxophonists
- "Playing a flute is like writing a book. You're telling what's in your heart...It's easier to play if it's right from your heart. You get the tone, and the fingers will follow."
-- Eddie Cahill
- "The flute is the show-off of the wind section, the big shot:
Jean-Pierre Rampal, James Galway--both millionaires. (How many millionaire
bassoonists can you name real fast?) Well, that's fine. Everybody knows it's
the hardest, blowing across a tiny hole with your head tilted all your life:
it's like soloing on a pop bottle. The problem with the flute is that it
vibrates your brain, and you start wearing big white caftans and smocks and
eat roots and berries. You become a pantheist and sit in meadows, and you
believe that all is one and God is everything--God is a column of air
vibrating--and you know that's not right."
--Garrison Keillor, in The Young Lutheran's Guide to the Orchestra
- "Never give a flute player a screwdriver."
--anonymous
- "You know that I become quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument which I cannot bear."
--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a letter to his father, after being commissioned to compose flute music
- "SERIOUS ACCIDENT AT THE VINTNERS' HALL. On Tuesday night an accident
occurred at the Vintners'-hall, Thames-street, to a gentleman of the name of
Ireland, brother of one of the liverymen of the company, which caused great
alarm to those who were assembled at dinner on the occasion of the celebration
of the Lord Mayor's-day. He entered the hall a little before 9 o'clock, and
took his seat nearly under the orchestra. He had not been there above ten
minutes when the flute belonging to one of the musicians dropped from the
orchestra on his head. The blood immediately flowed most profusely, and he
was for a moment stunned. Mr. May, a surgeon of the neighbourhood, was
instantly called in, who found that he had received a slanting wound on the
scalp. The wound was dressed, after which Mr. Ireland was conveyed home in a
coach. The stewards promptly inquired how the accident originated, when it was
ascertained that while the musician was adjusting the leaves of his music-book
the flute slipped out of his hand. The man was perfectly sober. It was stated
by Mr. May that he did not anticipate any fatal result."
--unnamed reporter, in The [London] Times, 12 November 1841, page 7
- "And all the people went up after him, and the people were playing on
flutes and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth shook at their noise."
--anonymous scribe, in First Kings 1:40
- "Every music lover is familiar with the sound of the flute, which seems
to possess a magic power that emanates from its innermost being. It speaks, it
moves, it entrances, almost as if it had been revealed to us on the glorious
day of creation. And yet it is genuine human expression, an element of
language, the image of a dream continually repeated."
--Meylan, in The Flute, p.9
- "Flute music is love music from the heart. It must not stop, lest the
pulsing of the heart be broken."
--Judith Redman Robbins, in Coyote Woman
- "A flute with no holes is not a flute, and a doughnut with no
hole is a Danish"
--Chevy Chase
- The poem below, entitled "Music Lesson", should be accompanied by a
picture of a man carrying a grand piano on his back up a steep
incline of stairs.
"I really should have studied flute,
Harmonica, or chimes.
A clarinet is nice and light;
A fiddle would be fine.
But I had to take piano,
And my teacher is a brute.
He lives up seven flights of stairs.
(I wish I played the flute.)"
--Shel Silverstein, in Falling Up
- "Of all the wind instruments, the flute can do the most things the most
easily. A fine performer on a flute can dash up a scale and down again so
quickly that our ears cannot separate the notes. A flutist can skip and jump
from note to note so lightly that the music reminds us of the quickness of a
rabbit or of a gazelle. He can swoop and turn and trill the notes until we
think that we are hearing a bird. Musicians say that a flute can do anything!"
--Jean Craig, in The Woodwinds. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1963.
- Regarding a sign in a show window reading, "Flute for sale.
Easily concealed":
"Why, although this seems at first sight so strange, does it also seem so
appropriate? It is because the flute is terrible, mysterious and primitive...
the marvellous thin pipings of the flute are a link with older things - with a
fearful ecstasy of melody in the first dawn. . . Of all musicians, flautists
are most obviously the ones who know something we don't know... The goat eyed,
the devious flute player moves softly among us, none can see the flute he
carries. He walks past unsuspecting doormen, into public assemblies, into
restaurants and parties - into churches, even. He nods and smiles, he talks
to other people, to us. He does not reveal that he is a flute-player. For
there have been rumours - a pubful of people in Croydon discovered in a
trance, from which they have never emerged, a bus that simply disappeared
across fields, a whispered story of platelayers found sobbing in a tunnel,
of thin high music disappearing into a cave, of men discovered with a look in
their eyes like that of Mole in The Wind in the Willows, after he saw Pan..."
--Paul Jennings, "Flautists Flaunt Afflatus"
- "When in doubt, trill."
--John Phillip Sousa's advice to piccolo players
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