The flute is my favorite instrument; in fact, I overuse it. I'm still rather fond of this solo flute piece I wrote in grad school. It is a bed of G major-minor slow melodic gestures, from which arching atonal melodies sometimes spring up - like flowers above a desert. Sometimes it's difficult to get the flutist to do full justice to the piece's silences. Years after writing it I looked again at the score of Pierre Boulez's Rituel and suddenly realized with a shock how much I had drawn from that piece, not only in terms of the shape of the gestures but in the kind of pitch-independent contour variation among them. I had heard the American premiere of Rituel in Cleveland, and it's still my favorite Boulez piece. I also sense some influence of Stefan Wolpe.
MP3 (Sorry I can no longer find the name of the flutist)
- Kyle Gann
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