Mark:
Frank Grady wrote it. It’s called Mystic Hornpipe. Yes, beautiful. I’m hoping to record it this winter (along with a few other items). I should share the ABCs on it.
Dan:
I just got to play last week with the woman who found that 100+ year old Boxwood Rudall that Chris Norman plays. She (Linda Hickman) sold it to Chris way back when. She’s a fine player, lives in NYC (is from Colorado, so comes here every so often) and is with (married?) fiddler Tony DiMarco.
She’s great. Fun and very talented.
We perhaps need to think that we are in control, we have free wills and are animate, thinking beings. The world around us is a distinct group of objects we can manipulate for our own ends–living trees, dead wood, organic and inorganic, this computer. All that is true, like light as understood as particles; afterall there is thousands of years of evidence.
And when the topic comes up, we say “I” this and “I” that. We are ego–we cannot help it.
Then why the flute? why THIS flute?
…because the flute you have chose YOU as a tool through which it could be a flute and play music. So the question equally becomes why did this flute choose me and my poor embouchure? somehow, if we wake from the zone when playing the flute, we may be able to sense that is is also true.
It all began in 9th grade as a Boy Scout playing the fife in a fife, drum and bugle group in Queens, NY. On and off for years thereafter. I checked out Skp Healy’s fife site and found he made flutes too. Hmm! A little Virgo research and learned they were in the same key and were keyless and . . . to quote from Tom Madden (NJ Irish flue player), “The fife’s just not a parlor instrument.”
On to the flute buying the first one from Dave Migoya’s site when he was selling flutes - a Casey Burns. And its all history.
Glad to read this thread since I’ve been off the flute - and my other instruments - for about two months - and am now enthused to get back into it again. Thanx for the tread.
Because my good and great brother of the hat-ready perfect head…the wilkes is still looking for you! And the M&E? Smart flute, if you ask me…not many flutes can go and live with a musical family in one of the great US meccas of art and craft. Geez, man, if I could be a flute (let’s not get too freudian here), I might choose you too!
Hilarious, Mary! You might be on to something. Maybe those flutes are being strategic–choosing you so that you’ll trade them to the person they know you’ll trade them to!
Oh great, now I have an image of my flutes sitting in my wooden trunk >crying “Get me out of here!”
Mary
Hilarious, Mary! You might be on to something. Maybe those flutes are >>being strategic–choosing you so that you’ll trade them to the person >>they know you’ll trade them to!
G
G - I really think we should drop the subject, I just remembered one of your flute dropped a long way, and I don’t even want to think it jumped!
The M&E is my most played flute, and I only wrote the thing about the Wilkes, because it was in the other room “flute played “off with California” after beating its owner to death”.
I started playing the flute in my second year at high school, listening to Jethro-Tull.
pretty soon after that, I started ditching school to play music (I was already ditching to go surfing, now I ditched when there were no waves as well!). I’d be so much into the music, that a knock on the door, and I’d need a few second to come back to this Earth.
Music still gets me to do a lot of traveling with out the need for a ticket.
ahh yeh - and I never became the rocket scientist that my parents hoped I’ll be
I always liked the flute.When listening to classical music I always waited for the flutes to come in,and listened more closely then.
My mom taught me to play recorder.I liked that.My grandma bought me a whistle on one of her travels,thinking it was another recorder.I heard an Irish band one St.Patrick’s day and fell in love with Irish music.Started playing tunes on recorder,expiramenting with that whistle and wanting a flute.Found a cheap silver flute in a thrift shop.Started playing that,liked it.Got a better silver flute,liked it more.Got a Casey Burns flute,and am hopelessly,deeply in love.Why? I haven’t a clue.I’m just a flute person.Also a wind instrument in general person.I’ve got lots of whistles now,and I’ve started learning the uilleann pipes.I still don’t know why.
-Kelly
You folks are to blame!! Evil-doers all of you. I was whistling away, quite happy, and collecting more whistles looking for that right sound. But I made the mistake of lurking on this site and I was reminded of how much I really love the sound of the flute. Then I got the Hall and actually got it working well. Then I got to thinking the sound could use the warmth of wood, glass being a colder sound. So it was a Casey Burns for me. Back and forth, back and forth, like a hermit crab trying on a new shell, back to the old one, no, back to the new one, no, and so on. After about three or four months Casey’s flute won. The whistles are still very cool, but the flute has me forever.
