It’s something every flute player should experience for the sheer executive joy of playing such a resonant, overtone rich, super-sonority.īut there is more to ‘Song’ than the singing and playing. The voice spectrum adds intensity and depth to the flute sound, especially in the low register. The best acoustic was “wet” and favoured the upper partials.This fortuitous combination is especially generous to the simultaneous singing and playing sections, making it feel as though you’re playing a 100-foot-long super-flute. I’ve given many performances of ‘Song’ since those initial tentative efforts, in various acoustics. No Pressure! In retrospect, through practising ‘Song’, I learned a lot: about voice production, tongue placement, and about transcending what I’d thought were my own physical limits. Some tentative initial efforts revealed to me that ‘Song’ is an exceptional piece of music, and that it therefore demanded an exceptional performance. I’d never encountered a score with such high level demands before. ‘Song’ was a ‘great leap forward’ for me due to the executive challenge of the simultaneous singing and playing. My first encounter with any of Vali’s compositions was with the extraordinary solo flute piece called ‘Song’ in the early 1990’s. All of his flute works reference the Iranian end blown flute, the Ney, with its characteristic melismatic phrasing, and all of them incorporate some use of Persian-inflected scales. Over the course of his career, Reza Vali has created a substantial and highly individual contribution to the repertoire of the flute. Now he is widely known as the “Iranian Bartok”. His name was already known to me through a trusted mutual friend and composer, Gerard Brophy (whose flute concerto I was performing in Pittsburgh). I met Reza Vali in Pittsburgh in 1992 where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. In this article, Australian flutist Laura Chislett talks about his flute music. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the birth of Reza Vali, a renowned Iranian-American composer, professor of composition at the School of Music, Carnegie Mellon University.
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