Tone and Nature of the Flute
humility and resignation at the same time." They are admirable in solos, but require careful treatment in orchestral writing, being easily rendered inaudible.Its various Registers They can also infuse a certain tinge of mystery into the music. On the whole, the best part of the instrument is the middle register: there the notes are mild, sweet, plaintive, and poetic, admirably suited to convey the dreaminess of love. Walckiers mentions melancholy as one of the chief characteristics of the flute; hence Sir Henry Irving, at a dinner of the Royal Society of Musicians, once humorously referred to the flute as "perhaps the most conspicuous interpreter of all the melancholy of these damp islands. What a stimulus to charitable impulse ought to be given by the flute!" The upper register is brilliant, bright, gay, lark-like. In an orchestra it tells out and penetrates the whole mass of the strings. The flute has been termed "the diamond of the orchestra"; and Gevaert says, "Les flutes, grace et ornament de l'orchestre, créant au dessus de la masse sonore une atmosphere de lumiére azurée." Schumann speaks of the "ethereal tones" of the upper register, which have been compared to a delicate light blue in painting.
Some one has spoken of the "fatal facility" of the flute. It certainly is much the most flexible and agile of all wind instruments.Its Agility Rapid sequences, scales, arpeggios, and octaves in all keys, skips from high to low notes and vice-versa, all are easily playable on it. "Harmonics" are also possible in the95
