Dorothy Stone, critically acclaimed flutist and founding member of the California EAR Unit, presents six new works for flute which explore the expressive potential of the pure voice of the solo flute in a variety of sympathetic contexts.
Babbitt’s solo piece, None but the Lonely Flute, written in 1991 for Ms. Stone, takes as its point of departure the familiar Tchaikovsky song “None But the Lonely Heart,” celebrating the utter “alone-ness” of the solo flute with subtlety and wit. Cage’s Ryoan-ji (1985) is a musical counterpart to drawings he made of the Ryoan-ji Garden in Kyoto after a visit in 1962. From these drawings, beautiful in their starkness, Cage then, in 1985, fashioned a musical counterpart, with a live flute solo against a tape of prerecorded flutes and with simple percussion that seems to be filling around the “rocks” with a sandscape. Feldman’s Trio for Flutes (1982) is “pure” Feldman: a kind of distant view from a mountaintop, with the fragments of an obsessive, compressed musical idea seeming to scud across the landscape like wisps of cirrus clouds. Mosko’s For Morton Feldman, completed in 1987 shortly after Feldman’s death, is “a reflection on many of the ideas he introduced to me. (This) composition is concerned with musical ideas forming and evaporating, re-forming in many ways, and again dissolving...” Mosko’s Indigenous Music II: Flute (1985) is a survey of the many kinds of music-making indigenous to the instrument—not only the usual melodic line, but also multiphonics, whistle tones, and singing while playing—while also exploring new territory in the use of extended glissandi over the range of the instrument. Alexander’s And the Whole Air Is Tremulous meshes Stone’s live performance with a tape composed of manipulated prerecorded samples of various members of the flute family. The work is not programmatic, but it is associated with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: “So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs stir; hives are brushed; and the whole air is tremulous with breathing...”
