During an overdue cleaning of the guest room, I discovered a folder of notes from my days as a high-school first-chair flute-player. Inside this folder, I found fingering charts, tiny pages meant for flip-folders, and handwritten notes.
Some of the notes were from a tutoring session with a professional musician. This experienced flautist spent a long Saturday teaching students about posture, alternate finger positions, and better embouchure. I also found notes labeled as the instructor’s “GOSPEL.” Decades later, those notes still stand out as powerful advice, not just for musicians, but for creative writers too.
Here’s the “Gospel” for flute players:
- ALWAYS build or relieve tension. Play like you’re going somewhere.
- Less tight = less tense = faster runs
- Bring everything forward + breathing [is] easier. [Remember to take] 3 BREATHS—back, belly, chest
How much of our love of music comes from suspense? We love the building up and relieving of tension. (OK, that probably sounds like certain other activities, too.) The advice is good for more than just Bolero, however. His points are great advice for the writing craft—fiction, in particular, but other types of creative work too. Even actors, when they leave the stage, are told to exit as if they have somewhere to go!
If you want lovely fast runs on the flute, tightening up will not help. Gripping your Gemeinhardt like it’s a life rope won’t make your music faster, louder, or easier. Sometimes you need to loosen your grip, take a step back, and—this leads to # 3—breathe.
Breathing lets you play the long notes, the high notes, the eerie low notes. As writers, we’re often told to practice reading our work aloud.
When we read aloud, breath means everything. What is the pacing of my work? Where am I taking a breath–or a pause–in my poetry? If I race through a long passage breathlessly, is that a problem? Or does my breathlessness heighten what I want to convey—panic, rage, little-kid excitement?
Thanks, long-ago flute tutor. I don’t know what we paid for that Saturday instruction, but the lesson was priceless.
