Florida Flute Association « Practicing Flutist

Back from the Flute Fair! Amazing!

January 30, 2012 at 7:44 pmCategory:Flute Life

I’m back home from the 2012 Florida Flute Fair and I think I can say that a good time was had by all. A whole weekend of flute immersion, what a wonderful thing! We are so lucky to have this terrific event here every year.

My presentation, Cyberflute: Navigating the Internet was well-attended and went pretty well. The audience was terrific and it was an enjoyable session. I’ll have to figure out how to make the handouts available for those of you who are interested. The rest of the program was packed with great performances and presentations, including a terrific concert by this year’s headliner Carol Wincenc. She also gave a wonderful session on getting warmed up to play. The attitude of the audience was also quite impressive. At least 95% of the audience participated eagerly. It was an amazing experience to have about 100 flutists all doing the physical exercises and long tones together. We made all kinds of noises and funny faces as we prepared to sing through our flutes, figuratively and literally. I am sure that everyone there benefited from her excellent advice and amazingly positive and encouraging manner. I can’t use the word ‘amazing’ enough!

Here is a link to the program: http://www.floridaflute.org/FFA2012ConventionScheduleGuide.pdf. I can’t wait for next year, if you are nearby next year, you should check it out!

Flute Fair Prep

January 21, 2012 at 1:33 pmCategory:Flute Life

It’s time for the Florida Flute Fair again and I am so behind on preparation for my presentation! I submitted two proposals and of course, they chose the one I made up on the fly over the one I could give in my sleep. My topic is Cyberflute, internet resources for the flutist. Kind of ironic considering how bad I have been about posting! (That will be incorporated, how intermittent some resources such as blogs can be.) I didn’t intend to be a topic in the presentation, but there it is! Any input or ideas you have are welcome, I want to be as comprehensive and interesting as possible.

I am looking forward to a weekend devoted to flute and fluting, learning new things, meeting new people, hearing new music, and shopping for flute stuff. It is such a departure from my daily life of being a flutist with a day job. For 3 days I get to just be a flutist, what a luxury!

A Different Flute Breathing Exercise

April 3, 2011 at 4:56 pmCategory:Practicing the Flute

Lately I’ve been working on a new breathing exercise that has made a big difference for me. The goal is to learn to breathe in quickly and quietly so you can take a breath whenever you need it instead of whenever it’s convenient. While this idea is not new to me (Alex Murray advocates taking several quick, quiet, little breaths and maintaining good tone quality, than taking a few big ones that may attract unwanted attention), I’ve never been able to incorporate that effectively into my playing.

I have a lot of tension management issues so I’ve concentrated on learning to take full, easy, quiet breaths. This has done me a lot of good, but those wonderfully relaxed breaths are also slow breaths. My quicker breaths tend to be a little sloppy and entrances after are not as refined as I would like. This new exercise addresses that!

I got this exercise from a masterclass given by Jill Felber at the 2011 Florida Flute Association convention. She said that basically “you have to learn to pant like a dog”. She suggested playing the Bach Partita, breathing after every note. When you are comfortable doing that, then try after every beat, then every measure. The goal is to take quick, unobtrusive breaths. (You could also do this on any long articulated passage, or on scale exercises.)

Practicing the quick intake and immediate expulsion of air (while producing a good sound!) is really tiring at first. The biggest challenge is to not take in too much air on all those mini breaths, but eventually I am able to reach an equilibrium of intake versus outgo. When it’s really working, it feels like a kind of internal bouncing action that is really freeing. It sounds like you are using circular breathing when in reality you are breathing much more than normal. Neato, huh!

Working on this exercise has really improved my ability to take unobtrusive breaths in all situations and to reenter with good tone. It was just the tweak I’ve been needing. Maybe it’ll work for you, too!