Is it time to refresh your back-to-school flute ideas?
The leaves are starting to turn, and although it’s still warm (well, here in southwest France it is) there’s an unmistakeable back-to-school feel in the air. In a country which basically takes the whole of August off, September and the beginning of Autumn mean just one thing: la rentrée. School’s back and it’s a time to reset and do a bit of a personal audit. September is the month of new ideas and fresh starts.
As players and teachers, it’s a good time to ask ourselves: am I just treading a well-worn pathway with my own flute practice, or my student’s repertoire or lesson plans? Repetition sometimes we just end up going through the motions; but change can reset our practice to a mindful state of progress. It can be a real engine for growth (as it is in every part of life).
We all need some fresh back-to-school flute ideas: both for ourselves and for our students.
If you teach, it’s easy to feel that as the years go by you say the same things over and over again. That’s not surprising. The same things will always need saying: “this is what you need to do to be a better player, and this is how you do it.”
Core elements don’t change – but we can mix it up to keep it interesting
The core elements don’t change. As flute players, we know that we—and our students—need to work every day on tone and technique, on our ability to control our sound, intonation, and dynamics over the range of the instrument, and on our command of the varieties of articulation. Any good technique book will cover more or less the same ground, but sometimes a fresh approach can be enough to get you and your students out of autopilot.
When I wrote my technique book, Micro Etudes (a winner of the NFA Pedagogy category in 2023), my idea was to explore a new approach to this well-trodden path by bringing a melodic focus to every exercise. After all, at heart what we all want is to be musicians, not technicians. So we should make every practice moment a musical one. For this reason, I also collaborated with John Alley to create downloadable piano accompaniments for every exercise.
If you would like to refresh your practice, you can download a complete sample set of Micro Etudes – including play-along piano accompaniments – FREE here. Why not try something different this year?
