Back to Beginning

How long since I didn't play flute? Two weeks, maybe?

As my first instrument, playing back my flute really feels like back to the beginning of my music journey.

The story goes like this.

For a person who is just not concentrate on one instrument, like me, eventually will come to a question, "What instrument should I play today?" Well, I have quite some choices, English horn, oboe, flute, piccolo, alto flute, even baritone saxophone and tuba and euphonium. Especially when I have access to all the instruments, it can really be a big question. But thinking deeper, my choices are actually limited to oboe, English horn and flute, because I will always be a bit scared to play other people's instruments.

Today, feeling that I am not in the mood to challenge my 90 years old reeds, I decided to take out the flute. Officially, it is still my flute, so I do have the right to take it out to play. But, who really cares?

After stopping for quite a long time, playing back flute soon brings me to a problem. My flute embouchure is totally destroyed by English horn. But that is actually a good news, because my flute embouchure is simply not the correct one. If there is an "embouchure exam", I will surely fail. 100%, guaranteed.

So I played the flute with an embouchure I had never used before in my life. At first, the sound doesn't sound good, which is acceptable, because I haven't touched flute for so long. But soon, I realised that I have overblown a bit. Don't doubt it, when I tried to reduce some force, it just simply sounded better, of course not with too much reduction. And I can tell you, it is just so happy to realise that I overblown a flute. By overblown, I don't mean when you are playing the lower note, it will go up an octave that kind of overblown. What I mean is, imagine, when playing an oboe, you blow too much and it started to sound like suona(唢呐). Don't think it is easy, flute is an open instrument, and more than half of the air you use is wasted. In fact, I think the others, like Hock Wei, are practising (or rather, struggling?) hard to reach the point of critical, that means, a point that sounds the best without overblowing (both the two definitions before). And I simply overshoot. All because of English horn.

Still think that English horn is easy to play? Well, in a sense, it is. For me, all wind instruments are easy to play, just blow (many people think that this statement is like an insult to wind instruments, but I don't think so. That should be something us, wind players, are to be proud of). Unlike oboe, when you play English horn, you either sound well (with good reeds of course), or you can't sound anything. To sound even well, you have to pump more and pump more, you have to drop your jaw (everyone keep telling me this), you have to open your throat.

OK, back to flute. Using the philosophy of playing English horn, I played flute with those I have described. I pumped more and more (which caused my overblow), I dropped my jaw (not much), and I opened my throat. The result of opening my throat, is that after 20 minutes of playing, it was just so dry, as if I have been playing for two hours without drinking water. But the sound sounded really nice (at least for me).

So I guess now people will not say my English horn tone is a lot better than my flute tone. Maybe, a bit.

p/s: I played flute again today (the next day after this post). I am confused with my saying of overblown for flute. I think is like blast without controlling, so the tone wasn't nice. But, if I try to control more (like smaller embouchure), I can actually blow even more air into the flute without creating those kind of overblast tone. And now I think that flute is still the most stamina consuming instrument, because the air taking is just like no limit. Even for English horn, though people said that is not easy to be overblown, I did overblow it before. For flute, I just feel that I am not yet that strong enough to optimise it.