Word: fluting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Such amateurs of the flute as Rockwell Kent and Charles Gates Dawes know how hard it is to play correctly. Great flautists like New York's Georges Barrère or Philadelphia's William Kincaid have taken years to perfect themselves. Flute technique is hard because a flautist cannot see his lips or the air coming from them, but none the less his lips must be properly shaped, his wind properly directed. A flautist does not blow through the flute, but across its mouthpiece to the opposite edge. The edge vibrates, sets the whole column...
...lipping." By shaping his lips differently, altering the quantity and speed of the escaping air, making it strike the mouthpiece at different angles, he can produce ingenious tonal colors, change the volume, manage the most difficult harmonics. The quality of the tone is affected too by what the flute is made of. Thirty years ago most flutes were wooden. Nowadays all but five U. S. flautists use instruments of silver or some cheaper metal. Flutes have also been made of bamboo, ivory, jade, porcelain, crystalline glass, rubber, papiermâché, wax and human bones...
...Berlin 25 years ago Claire Dux was singing Wagnerian roles as few others could. When Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier was first put on in London she enchanted Covent Garden with her girlish Sophie. Next year Londoners heard her again in The Magic Flute, called her one of the best Mozart singers alive. She had three glorious years in Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen...
Jacob Bertha Levison, 75, somewhat resembles the eminent flutist Georges Barrère in his close-cropped, courtly white beard and twinkling eyes. He too plays the flute, but this and his long patronage of music in San Francisco are matters of diversion. For 60 years Mr. Levison's business has been with disaster by land & sea. Fortnight ago he retired from the presidency to the chairmanship of San Francisco's famed Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. Last week its two main subsidiaries confirmed him in the same change of office. Having thus ended 20 years...
...choral music in the New England schools, which, by rigorous training in choirs and glee clubs, have pointed their students toward the Harvard Glee Club rather than for the informal singing that the Instrumental Clubs provide. Currently, came the shift of taste from banjo and mandolin to violin, 'cello, flute, and the like, a shift which has prospered the Pierian Sodality, but has laid the banjo and mandolin clubs in the grave. Couple all this with waning undergraduate support, which culminated in calling off the last two Christmas trips, and hard times are the inevitable result...