Re: [tuning] pVcFuJaRa

Dan Stearns wrote:

> a very nice and affordable addition to the tradition ImO (check the
> vids):

I've been studying overtone flutes for about 5 years and I think I could have something to say here.

Vladiswar Nadishana himself, the inventor of the "futujara", may be a good instrument maker but I don't think he is actually any great performer. I've heard some of his futujara recordings about half a year ago and I'm afraid he is not making much use of the melodic possibilities of the instrument. Nevertheless, he claims there's an overtone flute called "kalyuka" in Russia, which I don't know much about. But I would be surprised if Russian folk music should include a flute which is played in an almost "quasi-percussive" fashion. In folk music of Sweden and Norway, the so-called "willow flute" is a very popular instrument (i.e. "sälgflöjt" in Swedish, "seljeflöyte" in Norwegian). If you listen to Swedish or Norwegian musicians playing it, it's much more "melodical" than what Mr. Nadishana is doing. Not only Swedish and Norwegian, but the same is true for Slovak folk music where "fujara" and "koncovka" are amongst the most favored instruments (actually, "koncovka" could be translated as something like an "end flute"; the name for the instrument probably comes from the fact that no other flute uses alternate opening and closing of its opposite endto change tones). I think some overtone flute players treat the instrument a bit similarly as someone could treat a didgeridoo. :-D However, overtone flutes can sound pretty "expressive", actually. About 4 years ago, I heard a recording of a french flutist who was in Sweden for some time and learned to play the "willow flute" very nicely (unfortunately, the link doesn't exist anymore). And some time later, there were even some recordings of Finnish musicians accompaniing the singer Leena Joutsenlahti (one of them was playing an overtone flute) -- maybe I have saved it on my laptop's hard drive, I'm not sure.

Anyway, my very first experience with overtone flutes was some day in 2003 when I almost fell in love with the sound of a hollow metal pipe, so much so that I began to learn playing it with an unusual passion -- BTW: At that time, I hadn't played an ordinary "Boehm flute" for about 3 months and I was only playing my overtone flute; and, lo and behold, when I took my Boehm flute into my hands after such a long time playing the overtone flute, I tried to play only about 20 tones and, from that short try, I realized I got my flute tone sounding perhaps a hundred times better than all those past years which I had attended flute lessons. :-D

To give a clear example of what I mean by "melodic possibilities of overtone flutes", I made a short improv on the metal pipe I was talking about. So if you want, you can have a listen here: www.sendspace.com/file/i2f7o8

Petr