The Indispensable

U.S. flutists are divided into two classes: those who have and those who have not studied with William Morris Kinkaid.

The Haves occupy the first-flute chair of virtually every major U.S. orchestra; the Have-Nots are often unemployed. Last week Kinkaid made a televised farewell appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra, where for almost 40 years he has been demonstrating that he plays the flute better than anybody else in the land.

Holding the $6,000 platinum flute long familiar to Philadelphia audiences, he launched into Kent Kennan's Night Soliloquy. Not even the uncertainties of TV sound could obscure Kinkaid's pure, clear and sweet tones, nor his carefully parsed phrasing. As always, Kinkaid's playing seemed effortless, as full of colors and nuances as a first-class singing voice. "No one is indispensable," said a fellow horn player at concert's end. "But Kinkaid is."

Bill Kinkaid himself thinks that if he has a secret, it must have to do with breath control. A lean, athletic man, he works out on a chinning bar and punching bag in his apartment, finds that his control is always best after a summer of swimming. In his youth, Kinkaid was a champion swimmer in Honolulu, where his Presbyterian minister father was assigned, but he gave up an athletic career for music, studied with the late great Flutist Georges Barrere. He understudied Barrere in the New York Symphony when he was only 17, graduated to the first-flute desk at the Philadelphia Orchestra when he was 27. Kinkaid's importance to the orchestra is so great that both Eugene Ormandy and his predecessor, Leopold Stokowski, refused to record flute solos without him; Stokie once had him freeze a diseased appendix long enough to sit through a recording session of Afternoon of a Faun.

An energetic, hard-drinking man ("He discovered some years ago," said a friend, "that Scotch is the perfect antidote for platinum poisoning"), Kinkaid, 65, has a reputation for driving his students, often summoned them to his house on weekends to play. He himself is so fascinated by the production of sound that he has been known to sit at a soda fountain blowing through a straw in an effort to alter its tone. Even after his retirement from the orchestra, he will continue to teach. His replacement: James Pellerite, formerly of the Detroit Symphony. He is, of course, a student of William Morris Kinkaid.

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