Playing outdoors. . . normal, or the edge of destruction?

Irish Flute
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I’m asking about a Baroque flute in grenadilla/blackwood, but I’m figuring that the ITM crowd has more experience with this.

I played for some time on wooden simple-system flutes and piccolos from Casey Burns and Terry McGee. I broke in and maintained them as recommended by their makers, and played outdoors as much as indoors, albeit being careful about the RH they were kept in, as well as drying and oiling them properly. About a year and a half ago I switched to Boehm flute in sterling (my everyday is a sweet-voiced Haynes from 1917).

My real love is Baroque, and have gotten interested in playing the music of that era- Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann, O’Carolan (more on that in a moment :upside_down_face: ) on the flutes prevalent at the time. So, on a fortuitous eBay snipe, I’ve acquired a Denner replica (ca. 1715) in grenadilla by Hernandez. The unfortunate part is that Hernandez’s care instructions and warnings are somewhat terrifying, like, when I was playing my former wooden flutes outdoors, I was risking certain destruction, like, they were should have cracked/ split/ exploded in my hands at the first breath of wind or glimpse of the sun. . . which they did not. I’m thinking that what I’m reading is possibly a bit alarmist, and that the environments that musicians encountered in the early 1700’s were somewhere between uncomfortable and downright nasty, and that in any case, the sheer number of wooden instruments that have survived intact lo these three hundred years makes the warnings a bit questionable in any case.

Thoughts? Feelings? Experiences? Please.

Oh, and just to stir the pot slightly- on the sainted Blind Harper as a Baroque composer? Compare him to Antonio Vivaldi. Their lifetimes overlap quite closely. Their styles are quite similar- they both wrote bouncy pop tunes for their patrons, fun to play, sing, and listen to. When they died in the mid-1700’s, their many critics and proponents of more serious music- and we surely know how serious Irish musicians can be- said “Good riddance” and buried their compositions along with them. 200 years later, when bouncy pop music was once again in style, both of them were suddenly rediscovered. Play either tune O’Carolan wrote for the Powers mother and daughter for a Vivaldi devotee and tell them it was a recently rediscovered piece from the Red Priest himself and they will hands down believe you.

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This strikes me as a case of the maker wanting to cover their backside. By warning the player to avoid using the flute in anything but the most congenial conditions then they can wash their hands of any issues that might arise. Not to be cynical or anything. Maybe he has had some bad experiences with cracking flutes or some such. I make a variety of wooden flutes and my basic suggestions to players is to just be mindful of avoiding extreme conditions. Don’t leave the flute in a hot car, on a sunny windowsill, propped up next to your wood stove. Don’t leave it out in the rain (something I accidentally did with a bamboo shakuhachi once), or let it freeze. If you do accidentally let it get really, really cold, don’t start blowing hot air into it without letting it warm up gently first. Common sense stuff. I can’t imagine that any ordinary wooden flute is going to self-destruct if you simply play it outdoors under reasonable conditions.

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I 100% agree with this assessment. Wooden instruments have long been played outside. Clarinets in marching bands for example deal with harsh conditions…most now are not wooden, but they were for decades. I’ve played wooden flutes outdoors and think with common sense it’s totally fine.

Eric

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Thank you. Your recommendations are very similar to Casey’s. Also, when I played GHB, my pipes were a very vintage solo set of Sinclairs; the chanter was paper-thin, constantly played outside, often running with spit, and seldom oiled.

The Hernandez’s home, once I get a chance to properly break it in (which won’t be until the summer), will be the Pelican laptop case my Burns and McGee flutes lived in. It’s extremely temp and humidity stable, plus, can shrug off my partner’s occasional “it’s just a plastic box” handling.

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A thousand times this. When I was grade school, I remember a classmate of mine bringing her new clarinet to show & tell, and carefully writing “grenadilla” on the blackboard. She played that horn right through high school, marching band, concert band, and everything else. Somehow I doubt it ever got really gentle treatment.

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For over 30 years I played Irish flute, first an original 1830 Rudall & Rose in boxwood, then an original c1860 Pratten in cocus, in all sorts of outdoor conditions here in California, temperatures up to 100f, and never had any problems.

I did try to avoid playing in direct sun on hot days, but there were occasions when I had to.

On the Highland pipes, including 45 years playing pipes made c1860, c1900, c1920 in direct sun in 100f desert, in chilly rain for hours in Scotland, and everything in between, I never got a crack in the wood.

What’s strange is that a couple times after playing a set of pipes for years under all these conditions with the wood remaining entirely stable, I sold the pipes to people in the Eastern US who reported that after a few months in THEIR weather the pipes developed a crack.

These were experienced players, and I can’t even imagine what they could have done to make the pipes crack. Maybe indoor heating in snowy winter? Super high humidity in the summer? I have no idea, we don’t have weather like that here.

So when I hear about people getting cracks in their flutes or pipes it’s a bit hard to imagine what is happening. Are they new instruments made of unseasoned wood? Are the players overplaying, getting the instruments soaking wet, then exposing them to super dry air? Who can say.

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I have to say, I don’t really hear it. To a certain extent he has similarities with composers of his era, but if you played me any Carolan composition and told me it was Vivaldi I’d say you were lying. I’m sure there’d be a way to arrange it to make it sound much more like Vivaldi, but that’s not really in the spirit of the argument. The two men were writing in completely different idioms in completely different cultural contexts. They’re related inasmuch as they’re European composers of a similar era, but otherwise I just don’t hear the connection. I’d also question the characterization of both as “bouncy pop music,” but perhaps that’s a different post.

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Ah. It would be hard for me to characterize Vivaldi’s Gloria in D major as anything but bouncy pop; it’s also terrific fun to perform. And c’mon, Planxty Johnston? But really, I’m talking about comparing like-to-like performances. Not Vivaldi done by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, or O’Carolan in your local session. Have you ever listened to O’Carolan performed by a chamber ensemble? It’s there. Or Vivaldi performed by Red Priest, fronted by Piers Adams, arguably the best vertical-flute player ever? He could make you throw down your whistle and take up tatting instead. They could do an entire O’Carolan set and you’d never know what you were listening to if you didn’t know the melodies. Remember that the bulk of Vivaldi’s compositions weren’t his sweeping operas or The Four Seasons. They were uncomplicated short pieces written for his students at an orphanage in Venice, his home city.

Submit that they were not writing in different idioms; they were both writing for money. Their compositions needed to be hummable, pleasing to the ear, and profitable enough to keep them on their feet. People like what’s in style; that’s what pop is. O’Carolan’s planxtys had to be modern and fun to coax open the purse strings of the local worthies, as did Vivaldi’s. This leads to them feeding off one another, and even the locals in County Roscommon would have been aware of what was being played in the concert halls. Consider that in Dante’s time, blacksmiths chanted his verses in time with their hammers.

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There is a fully baroqued up version of Carolan for orchestra [by TC Kelly IIRC), I seem to remember it was the concerto but may well have been something else. It was deliberately done to mimick Vivaldi in the orchestration. I can’t find it right now, it must have been decades since I heard it. Anyhow, I didn’t feel it was convincing, more pastiche than anything comparable.

(Add: found at least a fragment :here)

I am familiar enough with Camerata Kilkenny doing Carolan. Again, no echoes of Vivaldi there to my ear, if anything they make the concerto sound like a lost part of the Brendan Voyage. See here.

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Sorry, but this is patently untrue. The Ospedale della Pieta was a renowned music school with a number of virutosic alumnae. The “bulk” of Vivaldi’s compositions are concerti written for, at the very least, very good musicians, along with sonate and quite a few vocal works. It’s not that everything he did was super-complicated, but I’d say that The Four Seasons and his operas are actually among the more tuneful, “pop”-y of his compositions.

Submit that they were not writing in different idioms; they were both writing for money.

That’s not what “writing in a different idiom” means. They were absolutely writing in different idioms, Vivaldi in the (later-named) “Baroque” style of Italy, and Carolan in the Gaelic harping tradition of Ireland. Despite the one tune’s name, Carolan never wrote anything close to a concerto in form, and you’d have to squint really hard to argue that any of Vivaldi’s compositions comes close to the form of a “planxty.”

Have you ever listened to O’Carolan performed by a chamber ensemble? It’s there. Or Vivaldi performed by Red Priest, fronted by Piers Adams, arguably the best vertical-flute player ever?

I’ve heard both. The former I’ve generally found unconvincing, and they are almost always playing arrangements of Carolan consciously written to sound more “classical.” The latter put out possibly my least-favorite reworking of The Four Seasons I’ve ever heard, and that’s including both Richter and Kennedy’s horrific additions to the genre. At least Kennedy did a decent enough recording with the English Chamber Orchestra. Europa Galante, Brecon Baroque, La Serenissima, I Barrocchisti, I Sonatori De La Gioiosa Marca, the English Concert, and more have excellent renditions of what Vivaldi actually wrote.

But getting back to the above quote, that’s an important point: Red Priest does not necessarily play what Vivaldi wrote, like the chamber groups playing Carolan they are often playing a re-imagining of his musical material. I’d humbly suggest that some of the similarity between the two approaches might be down to the fact that both have modern musicians with modern sensibilities re-arranging the music with modern audiences in mind.

Horses for courses, of course. Everyone hears things differently, so I can’t say what you hear any more than you can say what I hear. And they’d certainly be more similar to each other than either would be to music from Mongolia or Madagascar. I just don’t think that anyone particularly familiar with Vivaldi’s music would mistake Carolan’s compositions for his, at least not without significant re-arrangement/modification.

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Mr Gumby that fragment is painful.

Not the orchestration, which well makes the point, but the intonation on those high notes.

To flip it the other way, here’s Bach on uilleann pipes 13 Gavottes, Bourree, and Gigue from J.S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major

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Back to the OP: I’ve played baroque flutes outdoors plenty. I’d avoid rain and wouldn’t leave a blackwood flute out in the sun for very long.

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