Through the Digital Door: Flute works in CMC's Library

There is a wealth of music in CMC's Library for solo flutes of all kinds, from bass flute to concert flute to flute with sliding head joint. This week's feature opens the digital door on the vast selection of flute music available in the CMC Library.

If you have a library or research query, please email Library Co-ordinator Susan Brodigan on sbrodigan@cmc.ie

This work is dedicated to flautist William Dowdall and the memory of Edgar Allan Poe.

At an advanced stage of composition, I read a newspaper review of a German translation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allen Poe, that had been issued to celebrate the great author's 200th anniversary. The article was headlined "Tekeli-li", the incoherent cry that echoes through Poe's unfinished text, and that fitted the rhythms of the pattern that begins and recurs throughout my piece. These coincidences helped give the piece its final form: a tightly-structured but rhapsodic étude that is dedicated to William Dowdall and to the memory of Poe.

Dedicated to and premiered by flautist Carin Levine, this work was written while the composer was in residency at the Banff Centre in Canada.

At the core of this work is the link between our inherent ability to make sound and how then we translate or transfer this ability to our chosen instrument, in this case the bass flute. Therefore, much of the sonorities of this piece stem from the performer's voice, which are gradually transformed into different sounds using the bass flute.

The ‘tape part’ of the piece is derived purely from recordings made of both the original performer; Carin Levine and her bass/contra bass flutes. This interest in utilizing the live instrument in the creation of the tape part lies at the centre of my recent works for solo or duo instruments and tape. One of the desired results of this process is for the listener to be unsure about the origin of the sounds. The performer should play to this concept while also being aware of an imagined rivalry between their live and pre-recorded self.

Premiered by flautist Carla Rees, this work is the second in a series of works Séamsur I-IV, a set of works which attempts to examine the incorporation of elements of Irish traditional music into contemporary music, looking specifically at microinterval modality in old Irish traditional music and taking influence from the recordings of the Irish-American uilleann piper Patsy Touhey.

This work was composed for the Patrick Kavanagh Centenary in 2004 and was premiered at the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen by flautist Brian Dunning. It is performed in this recording by Wales-based flautist Emma Coulthard.

This work was premiered by William Dowdall for the Irish Composers' Collective Solo Series at the National Concert Hall in April 2013.

This work was premiered by flautist Lina Andonovska in dlr LexIcon in 2017, and is included on her new album A Way A Lone A Last, released on the Diatribe label in April 2020.

This work was premiered in 2010 at the National Flute Association Convention in California by Christine Hankin. This work also featured in a CMC Salon in April 2014 in the Kevin Barry Room, National Concert Hall with flautist William Dowdall.

CMC 2014 Spring Salon Series: William Dowdall (flute) from Contemporary Music Centre on Vimeo.

James Wilson: Arlecchino (1979) 3'