The dreaded "sknork!", and keyed flute thoughts

Irish Flute
1

While putting a little practice time in–I’m off from work today–I kept having something irritating happen, and though I’ve played flutes of one kind or another for years, and while in all states of health, this is new to me.

Background: like everyone does, I have allergies, and my nose alternates between running and being stuffed up this time of year.

Anyway, I was working on a nice piece called Eileen Curran–more on that in a minute–and when taking a deep breath, my throat (I guess) made this horrible “sknorkch!” sound and vibrated my whole head. :confused:

I stopped playing–don’t want that happening when I’m playing in public, obviously, and just last night was having some tunes in front of the bookstore–and tried to figure out what just happened. I can’t do it again on purpose–any thoughts on what exactly happened, and how I can avoid it, as it sounded horrible and was really sort of unpleasant as well?

Ok, on the my thoughts which stemmed from Eileen Curran, or the Sailor’s Return. This is nice reel but is in G minor–two flats–which is a moderately horrid key for a keyed flute to play in.

I can pick up a Boehm-system flute and just rattle this reel out, no problem. I can play it on a keyed flute, but it requires all my concentration and if anything distracts me in the least, I trainwreck.

Anyhow, while trying to get this reel in a bit better shape on keyed flute, I decided to see how hard it would be to play this thing on a Baroque 1-key small-holed flute. It was easy! Fell right into place with that fingering system, no problem.

Then picked up my antique 8-key and started noodling the tune out on it. Challenging but doable. Then started mixing in some of the Baroque flute fingerings, which work reasonably well on this flute as the holes aren’t all that large, and suddenly the thing was pretty easy to play.

Picked up my M&E 6-key and tried this, and quickly found out that almost none of the cross-fingerings from the Baroque flute work on the M&E. If you try to use them it just makes a mess, so to speak. The holes on the M&E are what I consider medium-sized, but still small enough I would have expected this to work better.

So here’s my thought:

There has always been the question of why the antique flutes were tuned the way they are, with flat C-sharp and flat F-sharp and the “flat foot” syndrome. I’ve always sort of favored the idea that they were tuning in a kind of mean tone, but now I wonder if at first it wasn’t just to keep things lined up where you could switch to the old 1-key fingerings when you wanted to, and then later this tuning carried over into the first couple of generations of medium and large holed keyed flutes, even though the 1-key fingerings would no longer work.

Thoughts on either, anyone?

–James

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Hi James,

first off, it’s amazing the bizarre things the human body can do…

As for your theory on the flat notes on older flute, it makes sense to me. Perhaps some of the heavyweight histornians might add more, and it would be worth a post on the woodenflute list, too.

Eric

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Hi Peeblj!

First, excuse me if there’s any faults in the following, english is not my forst language!

About that “sknorkch!” , it happened to me once…playing at a session…everybody turned to me with big eyes :astonished: , and started to laugh at me… well, I wasn’t really having fun since my throat was really sore… :confused:

Well, according to me, it’s simply the low part of the tongue that vibrates a bit like when you imitate a pig. But taking a breath while playing the flute makes a lot more air pass in the throat, and a lot faster. So if your tongue is just a little bit in the way, it’ll start vibrate like a flag in the wind.

So to avoid that, simply keep your tongue as low as possible. And this is the part a the perfect technique for taking the most efficient breath. Actually, you should try to open a tunnel as large as possible from your lips to your lungs to make the breath as deep and fast as possible (and silent by the same way). And to acheive that, you must have your tongue slept at the really bottom of your mouth and by the way, avoid the “sknorkch!” that happened to you.

Well, hope this is helpfull.

Wishes!

Franck

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I think this is more or less the accepted theory. If you want to talk to someone who knows and who has an amazing collection of old flutes, ask Rick Wilson. He hangs out in the earlyflute Yahoo group. Great guy.

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Why don’t you play Eilen Curran in A min? You’d be able to take out a more “flutey” version on that key (2nd octave C apart!).It’s very difficult
being musical while playing a Gmin tune on concert flute.
It’s great in my opinion learn to play tunes in different keys. Fiddlers like Martin Hayes or Oisin McDiarmada do it very often.
Ciao!
Michel