Flute playing is bad for the morals of the people. — Aristotle.
You ask me what is worse than a flute? Two flutes! — Luigi Cherubini.
I’ll have no flutes in my music. — James (Schnozzola) Durante.
A living reproach to Aristotle, Cherubini and Schnozzola is the Flute Club of New York. For 24 solid years, ever since the bearded, quizzical French flutist Georges Barrère founded it, the sodality has met regularly for the sole purpose of discussing, playing and listening to the flute. A few years ago the club erected a flutistic milestone by presenting the U.S. premiére of Henry Brandt’s Concerto for Flute with an Orchestra of Ten Flutes.
Last week the Flute Club held its regular monthly meeting in Manhattan’s new City Center of Music and Drama. Some 100 flutists and their friends wandered about the auditorium, filling the air with a high-pitched and rarefied din. On a platform at a piano, Mrs. John Wummer, wife of the New York Philharmonic’s first flutist, served accompaniments to those who wanted them, as a hostess might serve canapés. Near the door stood one of the club’s nonflutist members, one Edwin Rosenblum of Brooklyn, who loathes the flute but cannot resist the morbid spectacle of an army of flutists pilliwinking away at once.
There are some 30,000 professional flutists in the U.S., and nobody knows how many amateurs. Their profusion is due in part to the fact that the flute is the easiest of all wind instruments to play, and in part to the untiring evangelism of the Flute Club’s founder and president, 67-year-old Georges Barrère. Flutist Barrère, one of the few surviving devotees of the gaiter, the Prince Albert and the imperial beard, was brought to the U.S. by Walter Damrosch in 1905. Son of a Bordeaux grocer and alumnus of Paris’ Folies-Bergère orchestra, he barnstormed every state in the Union with an organization known as the Barrère Little Symphony.
How Can They Do It? The most harrowing problem which confronts flutists is not how to play the flute (which is easy), but how to play it well (which is not). Of the thousands of U.S. professionals and amateurs, nearly all are admittedly terrible. Their difficulties arise from the nature of the flute. Except under the most expert control, its tones have a whistling, flatulent quality which even a flutist’s best friends pass over in discreet silence. Its lower tones tend toward the hoot. When it is played loudly it goes sharp, when softly, flat. Only the greatest virtuosos can play it in tune.
Nevertheless, from the age of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy Auletes, down to that of Communist Earl Browder (who used to flute away his time in Leavenworth Prison), many men have been unable to leave the instrument alone. The flute has claimed, among others, Frederick the Great, Henry VIII, George III, George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Benvenuto Cellini, and composer Hector Berlioz. U.S. Composer Stephen Foster could not play anything else. Charles G. Dawes and George Bernard Shaw are both amateurs.
Today, the flute has a few master exponents. Among those who do not belong to the Flute Club are Wayman Carver, a brilliant hot flutist who has played with some of the best Negro jazz bands, and Alberto Socarras, also a spirited syncopator, whose rumba band was last week at Broadway’s Café Zanzibar. The finest legitimate flutist in the U.S. is William Kincaid, a courtly, silver-haired, Honolulu-raised native of Minneapolis, whose abilities ornament the Philadelphia Orchestra. Like all great flutists, Kincaid has a chest like a bellows. He developed it while a child, swimming at Hawaiian beaches with his friend Duke Kahanamoku.
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