MAVerick Ensemble
2:00pm
Sunday February 27, 2011
Flat Iron Building, Ste. 222
1579 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL
This past September I played on the premiere of whirl by Chicago composer William Jason Raynovich. We are repeating this performance this coming Sunday at the Flat Iron Building in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.
Scored for wooden flutes, viola, trumpet, and percussion, Jason says this about his piece: “whirl was commissioned by Access Contemporary Music for a tour of Chicago architecture. This piece was written for the Marquette Building. This building’s entrance creates a striking mix of imagery that left me thinking about honor. whirl is an esoteric post-modernist powwow with bugle calls, a love song and an Eskimo song, a French modification of an Indian melody of a Ravel melody, an Ivesian celebration/conflict, Trumpet death call, and a Native American Indian Taps.
This past summer, Jason approached me and asked if I would be willing to play a Native American flute on this piece. I enthusiastically agreed, and we sat down with three flutes from my wooden flute collection to sketch out a pitch and fingering chart for each of them. With only five or six holes on each flute, the resulting cross fingerings meant that I would need to do lots of practicing to wire my brain for this performance.
A Native American flute works the way a recorder does; the player blows directly into an opening at the top of the instrument and the sound is produced when the air strikes a notch a few inches below the top of the flute. Full chromatic scales are not possible on these particular flutes, and neither is very much dynamic control. A three-plus octave range, full chromatic scale, and wide dynamic possibilities on my “normal” metal flute seemed like such far-away luxuries when I was entrenched in learning Jason’s piece!
The first flute featured in this piece is a bamboo flute I bought at an art fair from a flute maker in Michigan years ago. Pitched in F, the flute has four holes plus one for the thumb, and plays an octave and a fifth. The next flute I play is a double-flute made of cedar. In rehearsals, we nicknamed this flute the “two-flute flute” since I didn’t know if there was a more official term for classifying the instrument. Both sides of the “two-flute flute” are pitched in D, though one side serves as a drone while I can play melodic passages using the five holes on the other side. I can play both sides at once or just one side at a time. Playing both sides of the flute at once uses a considerable amount of air, so long phrases had to be chopped up because of my frequent need to breathe. The final flute used is a fife-style flute. I bought this flute when I was 10 years old on an elementary school field trip to Michigan’s state capitol, Lansing. I have no idea what it is made from, and I probably paid $10 for it, but it has a very cutting sound and plays a mostly in-tune diatonic scale. It is pitched on a Bb and plays about two octaves.
Playing whirl was only the second time I have performed on any of my wooden flutes in a formal concert setting, and the first time I have combined a wooden flute any standard orchestral instruments. The resulting atypical timbres were haunting. We needed to mute the trumpet for balance purposes, but the blend with the muted trumpet and the double flute with the drone employed was simply otherworldly. The wooden flute with the viola made for an ethereal, gossamer timbre. This was one of the more unusual performances I have been involved with, and its success makes me hope to make more frequent use of these flutes in the future.
For more information about whirl, check out these links:
- whirl's premiere on 9/18/10 was well-received. You can read the review on Chicago Classical Review:
- The event that encompassed the premiere was ACM’s season opener “Songs about Buildings and Moods.” This event was the first of its kind and obviously made an impression on its audience. Chicago Classical Review named this event one of the Top Ten Classical performances in Chicago for 2010! Read about it here:
- Also, Jason put together a nice recording of whirl on YouTube, accompanied by photos from the performance:
