Music of the Day, 28 June 2024

ahhhh, Bach

I’ve continued with my nearly daily flute practice¹ since picking it back up a month or so ago. My improvement is noticeable, but not as rapid as I’d like. As with my first go at it, so far I’ve been self-taught—until just the other day, it didn’t occur to me that I could seek out instructional videos. I haven’t even been listening to flute music lately; I know I’ll judge myself even more harshly (and yes, unreasonably).

So I’m not sure what caused today’s MotD to pop up in my YouTube recommendations yesterday evening. I’m very glad I watched it, for several reasons, and I hope you enjoy the luscious music.

That is Flute Partita in A Minor (BWV 1013). It’s the only known work for solo flute by Johann Sebastian Bach, and is performed by Marten Root. One needn’t be a musician to appreciate Root’s skill, especially since he’s playing the piece from memory.

But look at his instrument: it’s quite distant from the modern flute. It’s a Baroque forerunner of the flute, called a traverso. Best I can tell, it has no keys²: it’s all open holes bored into wood, including the embouchure hole. This makes creating a good and consistent tone even more difficult, as one must take care to cover the holes completely and consistently.³

The other important thing to know about the lack of keys is that the flautist’s embouchure is vital to playing a note in the correct octave (as well as its overall tone quality). During some of the closeup shots, we can see the subtle, rapid movements in Root’s face to hit the correct pitch.⁴ It gives me a deeper appreciation of this amazing performance, as well as motivation to keep at my practice.

Not only is Root a talented flautist, he’s an expert on historical flutes, so an ideal person to perform this Bach piece. It’s 15 minutes of aural beauty. To my ear, wooden traversos and flutes have a warmer, less shrill tone. That makes the echoes in the old church in Bunnik, Netherlands a welcome element of the performance.

This piece is part of the All of Bach project by the Netherlands Bach Society. Its goal is to record all of Bach’s works and share them online for free. I expect that I’ll be exploring more of its recordings whenever I want to listen to classical music.

1. Six days a week minimum so far; and I’m up to 45-minute practice sessions

2. there may be one on the foot joint

3. I’ve always considered it borderline cruelty to give elementary students a recorder as the first instrument to explore. Not only do they have open holes, they are extremely easy to overblow, creating sharp squeals

4. I must have implicitly learned all this the first time around; I don’t recall ever consciously attending to my face while playing, nor looking at my fellow flautists’ faces to observe their movements.