Solo and Ensemble contests are a great way for students to learn to be responsible for the quality of their own playing, learn to play an independent part in a group and learn to play with other band instruments and with piano. Finding good repertoire, especially if you aren’t a flutist yourself, can be challenging. It goes almost without saying that there is lots of ensemble repertoire for beginning to intermediate players from the publishers of the band methods (in no particular order):
- Accent on Ensembles
- Festival Ensembles
- Classical Flex Trios
- Quartets for All
- Trios for All
- Duets for All
Here are several collections of more flute specific ensembles that I use all the time for advanced beginner through intermediate flutes:
- Rubank Flute Symphony (quartets)
- Flute Sessions (solos, duets, trios, quartets)
- 12 Bite Size Pieces – Mike Mower (duets, trios, quartets)
- Flute Trios, books 1 and 2 – Trevor Wye
- Quartet Repertoire for flute – Himie Voxman
- Flute Class Concert Album – Trevor Wye
- Selected Duets, books 1 and 2 – Himie Voxman
- Forty Progressive Duets – Ernesto Kohler
- Belwin Master Duets – Easy, Intermediate, Advanced
- and many more
Besides the band method solo collections such as the Standard of Excellence Festival Solos, there are many collections of solos for the beginner to intermediate players. These include:
- Concert & Contest Collection (Himie Voxman) – intermediate
- 40 Little Pieces (Louis Moyse) – easy to intermediate
- Solos for Flute (Donald Peck) – intermediate
- Rubank Book of Flute Solos, easy and intermediate – two books
- 24 Short Concert Pieces – intermediate to advanced
- Pearls of the Old Masters – intermediate
- Selected Flute Solos (Everybody’s Favorite) – intermediate to advanced
- and many more
I like using books that are already in SmartMusic so I can prepare the students to play with piano before they meet the accompanist. This is a huge time saver both for me and the pianist. The first four books on the list above are already in SmartMusic. With the rest, some of the repertoire is in SmartMusic as single pieces or in another collection. Some is not, however. If I have time, I create a Finale file and import it into SmartMusic.
In recent years, the biggest game changer in picking repertoire for my students at contest is the rise of the public domain sheet music websites. The best single website I know for flute repertoire in the public domain is www.flutetunes.com. There are solos, duets, trios and quartets for virtually every level of player. The typesetting is clean and accurate, though articulations have to be added for Baroque period music (I prefer this over heavily edited older editions from the 1940s and 1950s). This database is being added to daily. The other really indispensable website is IMSLP.org. This is a much bigger database of music from the Baroque period on. To benefit the most from this site, it is helpful have a working knowledge of flute literature. It can be searched by composer, instrumentation, type of ensemble, period of music history, etc. There are often multiple editions available, sometimes even including facsimiles of manuscripts.
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