Obviously ITM offers a huge source of tunes for simple flutes, but what other options are there? Understandably there are key and range limitations but what other areas of music have a decent amount of accessible tunes? Renaissance/“Early Music”, Baroque? Does recorder music readily transfer?
Along the same vein, what modern tunes have you seen written for simple flute, or ones that work well on them? I’ve seen some Lord of the Rings themes (“Concerning Hobbits”), Titanic, and “Lion’s Pride” (World of Warcraft).
There are a host of different tunes available here, including Asian, classical, and many others that are quite accessible to simple system flutes - you should be able to find something that you like for a change of pace… Tod
Very much recorder music is written (or transposed) in the “easy” keys, C,D, F and G, though you’ll need to watch out for the occaisional “low” C if your flute doesn’t have any keys. A genre you might like to consider is “English Folk Dancing” music, John Playford’s “Dancing Master”, for instance, much of which has been prepared for the recorder
Ah, speaking of recorder music:
In case you don’t already know it, I love the music collection “Der Fluyten Lust-hof” (the title is simply marvelous, meaning something like “The Flute Pleasure Garden”) by Jonkheer Jacob van Eyck, a blind baroque recorder virtuoso. All of the tunes are in the keys of Cmaj, Dmin or Ddor, and therefore can be easily transposed for a keyless flute in D (just up a whole tone step) without having to worry about notes beyond its range. The scheme of the tunes is always the same: He first presents a simple (folk or liturgical) melody, which he then elaborates in several improvised variations, each of which becoming more and more complex and difficult. You can find a few renditions on YT.
If you want to go the way Megapop suggests above there’s this blog that deals with 16/17th century and later Dutch/Flemish music and has on-line versions of manuscripts and collections of same.
‘Oude en Nieuwe Hollantse Boerenlieties and contredansen’ is another large collection along similar lines as ‘Der Fluyten Lusthof’ that Megapop mentioned.
While we’re at it the accordeonaire blog has a fair lot of downloadable collections of French music that could suit the flute.
Fantastic info everyone! I’m pleased to hear recorder and baroque can offer a good number of options. Having played a lot of baroque music on the classical guitar I’ve got some resources in that area.
I would also recommend Breton tunes. A couple of resources spring to mind. First is a book you can get from Amazon called ‘Traditional Breton Dance Tunes “Fest Breizh”’ by David Surrette. The second is a book/cd set by John Sketon called (I think) “Breton Tunes.” I looked around and could not figure out where to buy this, but someone might be able to pipe in with further information.
