A successful arrangement is a metamorphosis in the mythological sense as explored by the Roman poet Ovid. To use the flautists’ own (often misunderstood) myth as an example: Syrinx becomes a crying and singing reed pipe, but after metamorphosis she retains her identity. The pillager may have appropriated her for his own purposes; she remains, nevertheless, essentially herself, the quidditas, the very what-ness, of the nymph Syrinx. Which is, I suppose, a somewhat longwinded way of saying that an arranger, like a player or anyone else involved in producing music from the page, has to start from the heart of the piece. An arrangement is, after all, a re-creation, and in being so is very much an act of trust as well as of understanding between composer and arranger. The question to be asked in the end is not so much ‘does it work?’ but ‘is it true?’

For me arranging was in the blood, I think. Although I have written quite a few original pieces for voices and instruments, I have always been fascinated by the way arrangers transform a piece. I was brought up in a house filled with the sound of the arrangements and orchestrations of Andre Kostelanetz and others. At secondary school, no sooner had I started playing the recorder and clarinet and become immersed in baroque and early classical music, than I began arranging piano pieces for woodwind trio and guitar, or for any instruments that were to hand: anything, basically, that  I could get hold of from the musical score section of the public library. Sounds becoming other sounds – it was magical; the fun of experimenting with the placing of the notes of a chord with a different instrument - to my mind there was nothing quite like it. I was inspired, too, by the example of one of my chemistry teachers who was a gifted musician and conducted the school orchestra. He produced some truly imaginative arrangements for us. Mind you, he was also lucky in his players, for the orchestra at that time had John Wilbraham on trumpet and Richard Lee as principal flute. Richard died very young, but even so managed to work with Elmer Cole and others in the 1960s on the flute tuning problem as well as being a wonderful player.

Most of my playing musical life has been spent as an amateur oboist and singer. Two epiphanies guaranteed my abiding love of the flute: Atarah playing The Serious Doll with the Liverpool Phil and, from the same decade, the LP A Victorian Musical Evening with WIBB, Trevor Wye and Clifford Benson. Haunted – almost, I think, possessed - by those very different sounds, I determined then to try and play the flute myself. Very recently, oboe sold and mind concentrated, I have begun to see that I should have started 50 years earlier....But this has the advantage that I approach flute arranging from a position of ongoing discovery. Amazing sounds keep on being revealed to me and I want to use them. My young daughter, Hattie, helps here, as well. Her pleasure in the flute, and technical facility on the instrument at what I regard as the tender age of 12, instructs as well as fascinates me and is a constant source of ideas. As for the alto flute – I’ve heard it played many times, and had more than a go at it myself. But it was only when I heard Hattie’s teacher, Jonathan Booty, play his alto in a concert that I understood how utterly beautiful its sound could be. With these intimate experiences, together with a long lifetime of listening to Gareth Morris, Richard Adeney, Rampal and so many more, I have a kind of note-hoard in my mind. When I arrange, I start by feeling as if I am on the ocean of frozen words in the Fourth Book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. The act of arranging releases, like a warming breeze, all these flute voices that are inherent in whatever piece is before me at the time. But to get down to practicalities:

 

 

 

 

 

 

I suppose for me the ideal flute choir is the size of Harry Christopher’s Sixteen or fewer. With any more flutes playing together you tend, I find, to lose the individual lines. I speak here from this arranger’s and listener’s viewpoint. (There are many exceptions, as always. To mention two: Trevor Wye’s Spem in alium is truly thrilling at the BFS conventions where it has been performed; and The Marriage of Figaro Overture played by the flute choir of the Music Department at Taeshin University, South Korea (on YouTube) is a splendid piece of   work, even if the group is supplemented by the odd additional orchestral instrument. Their other items on You Tube are pretty remarkable, too.) As a player, of course, it is the greatest fun to be in a very large group and part of an enormous corporate sound. But I must confess to a bias: although I have played the oboe and viola in amateur and university orchestras, my preference as listener and player is for chamber music or for the small orchestra of the classical period, so as an arranger for flutes I tend to look for music written for small forces – solo piano, quartet and so on. I have undertaken larger commissions, but they have been for mixed winds where the variety and versatility of the instruments enables one to reflect more the colours of the orchestral palette. A basic principle: I know pitches have varied historically, but I always keep to the original key. A flat is A flat; G is G and not F. Many arrangers would disagree, and change the key to fit the instruments. I don’t like that. It feels wrong. The only exception I allow myself is if the original key produces an impossible playing key for the alto.

Concert flutes alone. These pieces tend still to be the most popular, and an initial problem – and opportunity – is to decide whom you are aiming at with a particular arrangement. A very elementary piano piece might have a melody and the odd chord and bit of inner movement. A guitar piece might well not offer any more. For four or more players you have to amplify the texture by adding the odd chord and counter-melody. I assume that in any given amateur group, some players will be better, or less nervous at being exposed, than others. They will take flute 1, expect a fair bit of the tune and hope to be allowed to go quite high. However, those given, or volunteering for, flute 2 may be equally competent as players, so you try to allocate some of the tune to them as well. As with flute 1, you tend to offer a fair bit of filling in when the tune is not being played: too many bars rest and players tend to feel left out or forgotten. You then have one or more parts left to cater for. In a simple piece (my Weber German Dances, Schubert’s Fifteen Original Waltzes, MacDowell’s To a Wild Rose, etc.) these parts may not be significantly different technically from the first two. After all, even though flutes 1 and 2 may alternate the tune, flutes 3 and 4 or whatever have to be kept interested even if their main function is to supply the lower voices. Simple rule: allocate equably while recognising possible limitations, and be prepared, within limits, to add counterpoint and fill out the harmony if arranging a piece that is originally harmonically sparse. Moral question: how far should you add, and isn’t doing so at all likely to alter too far the original work and with it the composer’s intention? Answer to the latter, well, yes, that may well often be the case but (answer to the former) you must add the minimum necessary to produce, for a different medium, a piece that is homogeneous and enjoyable for players and audience. My own arrangements for full flute choir include, for example, Schubert’s Impromptu in A flat (Op.42, #2). On the face of it, the notion of such an arrangement is outrageous. But it works! A movement from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony for lower flutes? Rubbish!! But listen to Carla Rees’s rarescale and be converted.

In writing for concert flutes one is, of course, limited by their tonal range. Even if you allow for some players having a low B, and however ingenious you are, the music has the limitations of all same voice arrangements. This is true even if the players are able to alter their tone colours, so it is a blessing to be able to add the lower flutes. An example here might be my arrangement of Three Irish Favourites for 4 concert flutes and alto flute. It would have worked with the top four, but the alto’s uniquely sonorous melancholy voice adds immeasurably to, for example, The Last Rose of Summer. It is here a true and necessary viola, lower, richer, and thus helping to bring out the quintessential ‘Irishness’ of that lovely melody. Yet in Oft in the Stilly Night, though the melancholy remains, the instrument shares the semiquaver arpeggios with the others and becomes less a viola than a bassoon. I must confess to having a very soft spot indeed for the alto, and I try to give it as much as possible to do so not only because I love its sound but also so that it doesn’t become the butt of the flautists’ equivalent of viola jokes. Nevertheless, the problem of ‘same voice’ still remains to some extent, which is why some people argue that the most successful flute choir arrangements are from ‘same voice’ sources – piano pieces, items from the string or choral repertoire, and so forth. My own feeling is that these don’t necessarily work any better than arrangements from mixed sources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The full(er) flute choir. Again, and obviously, considerations of possible levels of competence, the adding of voices and filling in of chords, and so on, apply. But the addition of alto and bass flutes completes the traditional SATB ensemble and so is, by default, satisfying. (There aren’t many contrabass flutes around in amateur hands, I don’t think, so I have never written for one.) To revert to the Schubert A flat Impromptu: I decided that the triplet-based second half wouldn’t work as it is much too pianistic for anything other than the piano. I concentrated instead on the first section, the one with the tune that audiences would recognise. As it stands, the piano score is full of luscious thick chords and textures, and this meant that even with my chosen medium of 3 concert flutes, alto and bass I still had to be selective while simultaneously giving an idea of the original texture. But then I thought: the poor old bass sits there more often than not just filling in and living a boring life counting rests, so why not give him/her some fun. Hence a fairly demanding passage of semiquavers that aren’t anywhere in the original. And if they are not in Schubert, neither is my short introduction. With such a well-known piece, the transplantation of which from its true home in the piano is in many ways a violation anyway, why not complete the transformation with some amplification, all in the name of player liberation? The arrangement remains Schubert in essentials but, as it were, says to the flutes: tune in to the work through the introduction (which is thus a kind of meditation moment in A flat), and it says to the bass: go on, have fun; do a bit of improvising on your boring old part.

Of course, there are different considerations when one adapts pieces not originally written for the same voice or timbre. Two extremes here might be my arrangements of the Haydn Opus 11 Trios for flute, violin and figured bass/cello and Beethoven’s Romances for violin and orchestra or the Mozart’s Violin Concertos in D and A. In the case of the Haydn, I decided to retain the two melody parts as written and use the figured bass as permission to add whatever seemed necessary in the middle while keeping the bass part also as written. The result works well, I think, a flute chamber piece becoming a slightly different flute ensemble piece. A particularly interesting thing happens with the first movement of no 1 in D: while the first flute sings gloriously, usually alone and occasionally in thirds with the second flute, the accompaniment develops that wonderful ‘squeezebox’ effect that Mozart gets sometimes out of his wind serenades. It sounds delightful. I must admit, though, that the effect was unintentional, one of those magical and accidental results that you hope for but can’t fully plan. I actually prefer the flute choir version of this movement to the original.

With the Beethoven Romances or the Mozart Violin Concertos, not even I would claim to prefer the arrangements to the originals. Nevertheless, a strong principal flute can play the original solo parts without alteration apart from a few octave transpositions, and these pieces have the advantage of being well within the scope of amateurs. In the original orchestration of the Beethoven there’s a lot of doubling of parts between winds and strings; in the Mozart, the orchestra is considerably smaller and the orchestration of a chamber quality. With the Beethoven the problem is the simple one of keeping as many of the voices as you can; with the Mozart it are the problems of what to add and of fair allocation. In reducing any orchestra I find that the alto often comes especially into its own: not only can it use its ‘viola’ voice; at certain levels it can be a French horn, especially when doubled with the bass. To revert to the solo parts for a moment. In the Rondo of Mozart 4 in D, at bars 120-3, the soloist echoes himself an octave lower. I decided simply to transpose the whole passage up an octave so that the relationship between voice and echo remained the same. But I am still not sure that I shouldn’t have allocated the lower echo to the alto, leaving the whole thing at the original pitch and the soloist with a bar or so of much-needed rest. In other words, do you leave the solo part alone as far as possible or do you start to pull the thing apart? Here, unlike with the Schubert, I tend towards the conservative.

Numbers: I am told that there is an arrangement extant of the Beethoven F major Romance for soloist and double flute choir, choir 1 taking the wind parts, choir 2 the strings. The effect must be breathtaking, particularly if the conductor or leader can elicit different timbres from each group. My own arrangements, though, assume a minimum number of players: one of each instrument only. I think we have all been to too many rehearsals where attendance has been unexpectedly low. Hence, too, my fondness for writing for concert flutes alone, or concert flutes plus alto.

If, however, one does allow oneself the luxury of a minimum of 2 or 3 concert flutes plus alto and bass, the result is not only things like the Beethoven and Mozart but pieces like the Godard Suite de Trois Morceaux or the Koehler Valse des Fleurs. Again, although it would be possible to dismember the solo parts and reallocate the disjecta membra to the various instruments, I believe you should tinker as little as possible, so the solo part that we all know and love remains intact. In the case of the Godard, though, or any other multiple-movement piece with soloist, there is nothing to stop a different soloist taking the different movements.

But the Godard highlights the old problem of interest for the players, as also does the Koehler. We may expect pianists or the lower strings to tolerate bar after bar of oom-pah-pah, but I’m not sure that flautists are too happy doing it. Yet the result is, I think, worth it for players and listeners alike, and the player’s reward is a moment of steam-roundabout glory like the alto’s countermelody in the Godard Valse movement. Even more, listen to the second movement: the rippling of the stream that is integral to all idylls works wonderfully when the semiquaver arpeggios are shared between the flute voices. Not only does everyone get something worth playing and contributing to; the effect is, again, magical as the inner voices generate a dialogue between themselves in counterpoint to the soloist’s gentle melody. The transformational alchemy of arranging for flute choir works once more.

The best arrangements: listen to Quintessenz and Concert Lumiere! They leave the others standing and are, surely, what every flute choir aims to be. Engaging on stage and not shy of a little bit of stage ‘business’, they hold their audiences spellbound. Admittedly, players don’t come any better than this, and they have got a marvellous array of instruments at their disposal. But if anyone asked me, ‘why flute choirs?’, I’d tell them of the haunting beauty of Quintessenz’s Prelude a l’apres midi d’un faune, or of Concert Lumiere’s Banks of Green Willow with William Bennett. The arrangers here are supremely gifted: we are not just talking allocation of parts, but a genuine rethinking of the pieces concerned. In these, and similar, instances, Syrinx and Pan are on the same side for once.

Final word: I have spent my working life as a literary critic, editor, scholar and University teacher of English Literature. As a writer on literary topics I have been constantly drawn to the exploration of structures – symbolic, spatial, and so forth. As an amateur musician I have thoroughly enjoyed playing or singing inner- (or, if you prefer, under -) parts, playing the viola or oboe or singing alto or bass. In writing and arranging music my professional and amateur selves have, I think, become one. Indeed, I tend not to think of a hierarchy of instruments or parts but of equal voices. And what do I think when my own work is arranged? It hasn’t happened very often, so far as I am aware, but a few instances come to mind: a piece of Giuliani arranged for 4 flutes that turned up in a concert played by a brass quartet; the Weber Waltzes, originally for piano, arranged by me for flutes with the flute version performed by a mixed jazz ensemble; and a Christmas anthem for 4-part choir and organ with the accompaniment rearranged for string quartet. In each case I found the rearrangement fascinating, utterly enjoyable and revealing, and extremely humbling.

douglasbrooksd@tiscali.co.uk