Flute Fever

Something in all living things responds mysteriously to the sound of wind in the reeds. At the gentle pleasing of a flute, certain crabs glide out of their caves and sit listening under water. Mosquitoes of some breeds collect on people playing flutes. Lions fly into panic, dogs sink into bliss--though only when the flute is played in the key of C minor. In China, the musk deer is hunted with a Judas flute, which the deer meekly follows to its doom.

People respond to the flute too, and of late with special reason: the world is now entering the golden age of the flute. Never in history has "the metal nightingale" been so highly esteemed as a solo instrument; never in one period has it been played by so many virtuoso performers. In the U.S. and Europe, there are at least 30 first-rate flutists-London's Geoffrey Gilbert and William Bennett, Manhattan's John Wummer and Samuel Baron, Rochester's Joseph Mariano, Boston's Doriot Anthony Dwyer, Detroit's Albert Tipton, Marlboro's Louis Moyse--and among them there are four who may well belong among the great flute players of all time.

P: JULIUS BAKER, 52, first flutist of the New York Philharmonic, last week played the intricate trills in Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah as casually as another man might whistle for a taxi. A plump, dapper, matter-of-fact chap who looks and acts like a prosperous dentist, Baker is short on temperament but long on technique. He is the supreme mechanic of his instrument, and he produces what is surely the most glorious tone that ever came out of a flute: big, round, cool, white, radiant as a September moon.

P: JEAN-PIERRE RAMPAL, 44, the most famous French flutist of the age, this week had a concert date in Paris to play Mozart's Concerto for Flute in D Major. A large man with a suave stage presence, Rampal cannot make the flute sing as Baker can, but he does make it speak with a wonderfully expressive French accent. He is the master showman of his instrument, and he charms an audience as a fakir charms a snake.

P: AURELE NICOLET, 40, Rampal's leading rival, last week started a ten-concert tour of Israel. A slender, clear-eyed man whose art is often touched with a quality of rapture, Nicolet is a poet of the flute who may well become its greatest virtuoso. While Rampal stands always a little aside from the piece he is playing, Nicolet knows how to yield to the music and enter more deeply into its being. Rampal is a magnificent mannerist, Nicolet the profounder stylist.

P: SEVERING GAZZELONI, 47, the grand master of the difficult contemporary repertory, this week begins a monthlong concert tour that will take him from Copenhagen to Tripoli to Minneapolis. Fidgety and ferret-bright, Gazzeloni started noodling around with atonal music about 20 years ago, got fascinated when he found that in order to play the new music he had to dispense with the traditional flute technique and develop a new one. After several years of experiment, he developed one that permits him to cacophonize like an electronic menagerie. His art appalls the classical masters, but it reveals an exciting and significant new function of the flute.

The object in which these artists find such rich resource is the most ancient of wind instruments. Unperforated flutes have been found among paleolithic remains, and neolithic man had already learned to puncture the sound tube and turn it elegantly tangent to his lips. In classical antiquity, "Phrygian pipes" were played by prostitutes, and during the Renaissance an epidemic of flute playing swept across Europe. Henry VIII owned 148 flutes and tootled several hours a day. Frederick the Great of Prussia caught flute fever as a boy, and hid his teacher in a closet to escape the wrath of his flute-hating father. Though Couperin, Telemann, Vivaldi, Bach and Handel wrote stacks of magnificent music for it, the flute in those days was easy to hate. ("You ask me what is worse than a flute?" Cherubini once snarled. "Two flutes!") Like most simple instruments it was difficult to play well, but so easy to play badly that almost everyone succeeded.

After 1847, when a German jeweler and flutist named Theobald Boehm perfected the sophisticated instrument now in use, the French eagerly adopted it. By World War I, flutists like Claude Paul Taffanel, Georges Barrere and Marcel Moyse had produced an impressive tradition of virtuosity. Oddly enough, the romantic composers could not find a place in their palette for the infinite colors of the flute, but Debussy and Ravel, the great impressionists, splashed patches of flute all over their sound paintings. Suddenly instrumentalists began to clamor for flute lessons. In Europe, the great teacher was Marcel Moyse; in the U.S. William Kincaid. Between them, these men developed almost all the important modern flutists--who in turn have badgered composers to write for the flute and musicologists to ransack the archives for flute music long forgotten. In the last ten years, flute repertory has been strenuously improved and enlarged--some 5,000 selections are now catalogued. In the same time, the number of amateur flute players in the U.S. has more than tripled. Says Flutist Baker: "The flute at last is taking center stage as a solo instrument. Who knows? In the next ten years, it may even catch up with the violin."

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