Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trills

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flute fingering, flute pedagogy, flute technique

Your flute students (and other woodwinds) are usually going to be asked to trill by the time they have been playing a year or so. Trills provide the flutes and other woodwinds the opportunity to add brilliance and excitement to a score. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but a trill is a rapid alternation between adjacent pitches, up either a half step or whole step from the notated pitch (never down). The next question is how does one know whether it’s a whole or half step? One word answer – context. Here are the basic rules for trilling:

• Trill to the next note above the notated pitch in the key except….
• If there is an accidental next to the tr sign, then trill to the accidental indicated or….
• If the note being trilled is itself an accidental, again trill to the next note in the notated key unless there is an accidental next to the tr, as previously noted.
• Anything bigger than a whole step is considered a tremolo, not a trill.

In the absence of direction, kids will come up with the darnedest things, especially in the case of trills. They know they need to wiggle something, so they do….any adjacent finger will do. Doesn’t matter if it is up or down. They think because they are wiggling a finger, they are trilling. And it sounds just awful.

Here are some pointers about trill fingerings. Many trill fingerings are obvious like F to G, G to A. No special fingering chart needed. However, a large proportion of trill fingerings are not “normal” fingerings. Trill fingerings are a collection of cheats, hacks and other tricks you would never use to play a regular note. They idea is we are trying to simplify the fingerings to be able to wiggle as few fingers as possible, with only one finger being ideal (but not always achievable). The alternation is rapid enough that the listener won’t hear it’s a cheater fingering. Some notable examples include C to D (first trill key), Db to Eb (second trill key), E to F# (finger E and wiggle the right first finger). Trills that include Bb almost always require using the thumb Bb. Third octave trills require using harmonic fingerings. Having a good trill chart is not just a good idea, it is essential. I recommend the Woodwind Fingering Guide (It’s available on the web. You can see it on your phone in your pocket. No excuses.)

One small performance practice caveat regarding trills in music written before 1800. It is considered correct to start the trill on the auxiliary pitch rather than the notated pitch (except when approached from the scale degree directly above the notated pitch). If you are interested and have time, check out the Quantz treatise, On Playing the Flute. There’s an entire chapter on trills in the Classic, Pre-Classic and Baroque periods.

Lastly, for trills to sound good, you need to remember to blow. You can be furiously wiggling your finger, but without sufficient blowing, there’s no point. In this respect, trilling is like tonguing. It is very easy to get distracted by the wiggling finger or the tonguing and forget that the very foundation of flute playing (indeed any playing any wind instrument) is blowing, keeping the air column moving and energized.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Common Ornaments in Flute Music

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flute pedagogy

Woodwind players, but especially flutists, have to deal with a lot more ornaments earlier on in their playing experience than brass or percussion instruments. There are a number of symbols that are very useful to know about so you can help your students learn to properly execute these ornaments.

Let’s start with trills. By far the most common ornament in flute music. You will see trills in band repertoire, flute literature from all musical periods and small ensemble music. First of all, you always trill upwards, always. How do you know what note to trill to? You trill to the next note above in the key. This can be a half step or whole step. There is one big caveat. If there is an accidental next to the tr symbol, the accidental supersedes the key signature and you trill up to that note instead. In flute specific repertoire, there is another caveat for music written before approximately 1800. It is frequently correct to start the trill from the auxiliary note above the note being trilled whether or not there is a written appoggiatura (small grace note without a slash). Your students unlikely to see this in band literature, but in solos, etudes and chamber music.

Trills often use what would normally be considered cheats or fingering shortcuts. It’s important to emphasize to your students that they need to look the fingering up if they are not sure how to correctly execute it. Lots of kids think trilling is just about wiggling an adjacent finger, whether it is to the correct fingering or not. Make them look it up. With everyone having a device in their pocket these days, there is no excuse for not having the correct fingering for trills. My go-to site for all things fingering, including trills, is the Woodwind Fingering Guide. There is also now a free app for flute players that is really complete for standard, alternate and trill fingerings called Fingercharts.

This example from an Andersen etude has three very common ornaments, namely grace notes (the little notes with slashes through the stem), turns a.k.a. gruppettos (looks like a letter “S” on its side) and mordents (a short jagged line above the note). Grace notes come immediately before the note it ornaments and actually steal just a small fraction of the value of the note preceding the note with the grace note. Play them as close to the note it ornaments as possible. In music before about 1800, the graces fall on the beat and steal a small amount of value from the ornamented note. Mordents are no big deal. Essentially they are a one wiggle trill, up and back down very quickly.

Turns are the most complex of these common ornaments. At the simplest, they consist of the note being ornamented, the upper neighbor, the note and the lower neighbor before exiting to the next written note. The complexity lies in using the correct rhythm. A simple example would be:
Here is an example with a mordant and a turn in another Andersen etude. Note that when the turn falls inside a dotted rhythm, it usually is executed with a triplet. Also note that the sharp under the turn symbol means to raise the lower neighbor half a step. An accidental under the turn means alter the lower neighbor. An accidental above the turn means alter the upper neighbor.

The last ornament we are going to look at is the appoggiatura. In music especially from the Baroque and Classic Periods, there are frequently small notes that look remarkably like grace notes with one distinguishing difference. There is no slash through the stem. Especially common in the music of Mozart and Haydn, you also occasionally run across appoggiaturas in music from the 19th century. The main thing that distinguishes appoggiaturas from regular grace notes is that the appoggiatura subtracts value from the note it ornaments. In this example from the Mozart Concerto in G major, this passage is played as straight 16ths, slur two, tongue two.

Finally, in this example from an etude by Kummer, there is a turn following a dotted half note, executed as a half note with a 16th note turn, followed by a half note appoggiatura. Play the appoggiatura as a half note followed by a quarter note.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Choosing Music for Solo & Ensemble

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flute pedagogy, solo and ensemble

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.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.