Word: fluting
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...piece by the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Halaphone not only transmuted the instrumental sounds electronically, but sped those sounds around the concert hall via loudspeakers pinned to the walls. Boulez remained onstage cuing the technicians. The title of the composition is descriptive: while the violin, flute or vibraphone plays on a given pitch level (fixe), the trumpet or cello explodes (explosante) with violent rhythms or scale passages. But fixation can sometimes change to explosion, and vice versa. Through another of the Halaphone's circuits, for example, tones produced by the clarinet actually trigger electronic changes...
Pastoral and elegiac in mood, Duo for Flute and Piano is a chamber-music gem that should become a staple of the scant flute literature. In it, Copland returns to the comparatively simple harmonic and melodic world of Appalachian Spring, though the piece is far from simple to play. "Ai-yai-yai-yai-yai! Copland cried out repeatedly at the recording session as he missed one or another of his own notes. A few feet away, Shaffer smiled sweetly back, having nothing to swear about, since she misses a note about as often as the sun fails to come...
...daughter of an Altoona, Pa., insurance agent, Elaine Shaffer got her first musical experience as a tympanist in her high school orchestra. "There wasn't much to do there behind the kettledrums," she recalls. "Then I noticed that the flutes were always busy, and gee, they got to play in the band at football games." She bought a flute and an instruction book and taught herself to play. Upon graduation, having become a Kincaid admirer through recordings, she auditioned for him, and was promptly enrolled as his pupil at the Curtis Institute of Music. Four years later she landed...
...flutist was a virtual impossibility in the U.S. Most of the leading players were working in orchestras, giving recitals on the side. Shaffer had had enough of the orchestral life. She and Kurtz moved their base of operations to Europe, where despite Aristotle's warning ("The flute is not an instrument which has a good moral effect; it is too exciting"), the flute has remained in high standing. There she established herself among the concert world's handful of top-rank women instrumentalists...
...many Angel LPs attest (notably the Bach Flute Sonatas with Harpsichordist George Malcolm), Shaffer is thoroughly at home in the recording studio. "Making a recording is like taking your stage makeup off," she says. "For example, the same tempi that work well before an audience tend to sound too slow coming from a disk. The same is true of dynamics. You can't be as loud, and you can't be as soft." Wherever she is playing, Shaffer tries to preserve the feeling that she is singing instead of merely blowing. That helps explain why she watches...