It’s not a thing for me to say I make flutes as part of my practice but make them I do, since c. 1971, in fact, when I began to search for new sounds, tunings, a reduction down to the basis of a sounding device: a single sound that can be shaped and modified yet remains itself. I made a new one last week, the one at the bottom of the above image. The bamboo had been waiting for a long time. I needed the impetus to make those small adjustments that transform a length of suitable bamboo into a flute that I can use in performance. The impetus came from two sources, of which more in a second, and in the making there were accidents that forced me into a double flute derived from two distinct groups: transverse with one open end, closed at the other; notched flute with closed end (see photograph below).
The middle flute of these three above reminds me of a lot of things that happened during a formative period of the early 1970s. I was working with Paul Burwell, Bob Cobbing and Marie Yates, among others, and each situation seemed to demand less and less orthodox musical thinking. How could I make the tone of a flute slide, in a glissando, for example, without invoking the ridiculous Swannee or slide whistle? The answer appeared in a book which became my Bible: Musical Instruments of the South American Indians, by a Swedish ethnographer, Karl Gustav Izikowitz.
Originally published in 1934, its re-emergence in 1970 was perfect timing for me. Izikowitz wrote meticulous descriptions of instruments but also supplemented the text with precise drawings. From indigenous Palikur and Galibi people in Guiana (French Guiana) he documented examples of what he called hand-stop flutes, transverse flutes lacking stops but with a semi-concave aperture which could be covered with the whole hand. I tried it, scooping out a wide chunk of bamboo, and found I could work microtonally and multiphonically. The flute I made, probably in 1972, still travels with me for gigs now, 52 years later, still has something to contribute.
Another inspiration came from my friend Ragnar Johnson. Listen to his extraordinary recordings from Papua New Guinea, released on Ideologic Organ (https://ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com/album/spirit-cry-flutes-and-bamboo-jews-harps-from-papua-new-guinea-eastern-highlands-and-madang – for example). When Ragnar was living in the Madang region of Papua New Guinea, making recordings of sacred flute music, initiation ceremonies and bamboo jews harps, he would occasionally post me bamboo flutes in padded bags. Over time most of them split or were wrecked during performances but I still have one, the bottom one of these three below. This is as simple as a flute can be, no stops, closed at one end, no notch or duct to facilitate playing. Just a tube, like a pan pipe, a basic hooting machine to be played in otherworldly ensembles.
So what made me reconsider my flute making, to shift it from a somewhat secretive activity to something fundamental to what I believe in as a person who works with and thinks about the ecology of sound, silence, listening, music and all that hovers around the edges of music? Partly it was a podcast, an interview with Shabaka Hutchings (https://www.mixcloud.com/ElliotGalvin/music-and-flutes-with-shabaka-hutchings/) in which he talked compellingly about the need to think about flute technique in a different way, as an air stream meeting an edge (more or less Izikowitz’s definition of a flute, as an “air current striking the edge of a vessel.”) We can go back 35,000 years, to the Hohle Fels flute, and imagine its tubular vulture bone, elegantly curved and notched, inviting the patience of its maker to find its sound with Ice Age air. For Hutchings, moving away from the saxophone, the difference is ethical and structural: patience and relaxation rather than tension, meditation rather than trance, fewer notes.
A day after starting work on the new flute I visited the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, for an exhibition called Mingei / Art Without Heroes. Mingei was a post-1920s movement originating in Japan though connected to the international Arts and Crafts Movement. Soetsu Yanagi, author of The Beauty of Everyday Things, believed in what he thought of as the honest, humble, artless, utilitarian and anonymous virtues of everyday things. A beautiful example in the exhibition is the 19th century saddle cover from Iwate Prefecture, Japan (above), made from woven recycled paper. Yanagi spoke about everyday objects being “. . . rooted in the earth, deeply tied to the earthly life of honest, hardworking people, the recipients of the blessings of heaven.” These are not unproblematic concepts but they acted upon me in a curious way, bringing me to a realisation. Can I really say that what I do is useful, in that sense? Is it honest or rooted in the earth? I wouldn’t make such claims and yet the feeling of making something simple that is useful to me for more than half a century is very strong. The act of making flutes (a craft, even though I reject that word) has a centrality to my practice (another term I dislike) that is suddenly impossible to ignore.
At the end of the exhibition I entered a small room devoted to works by Ainu artists and two pieces by Theaster Gates, examples of what he calls Afro-Mingei. As I moved, the floorboards creaked loudly, groaned, fell silent, squeaked, leading me to a columnar stoneware piece by Gates called Portal. With its barrel shape and vertical slit it could have been a gigantic flute capable of making the dramatic creaking sounds of the wooden floorboards (nightingale floor, as they once called it in Japan). I was also reminded of the large slit drums recorded in Papua New Guinea by Ragnar Johnson – https://ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com/album/sacred-flute-music-from-new-guinea-madang-windim-mabu – but of course a portal invokes life online and its debt to metaphors of the spirit. The creaking of floorboards, eminently utilitarian, necessarily robust, anonymous and artless, seemed to me to be an ideal movement-sounding for this gathering of ideas and objects, in itself a variety of flute in that edges and agency respond to patience. Flutes to me are weightless, birds and air, and yet as bamboo they grow out of the earth. The body must listen before it can sound.
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