The Implosion of a Flute's Melody

My object is my intermediate flute, which I have had for about four and a half years now. I chose my flute out of everything else because music is an important part of my life, in particularly in regard to music that I play and create with other people. I chose it for the project because it was the most meaningful object that I own and have with me at Knox, as well as an object that I thought would work well for the project, because the production isn’t as difficult to trace as, say, a phone. It matters to me because it is my main instrument. I play piano as well, which was started mainly by my mom. I alone decided to start playing the flute. It also brought me to the music department, where the majority of my friends are from.

I picked my “expert” based on the only person I knew who knows a lot about flute. My flute teacher does not identify herself as an “expert”, however she does identify herself as very knowledgeable about the instrument. She acquired so much knowledge because she majored in music in college and has a Ph.D. in it. In particular, she studied the flute and musical performance. She has also had enough authority in regard to the instrument in the past that flute stores have hired her briefly to advertise their head joints-part of the flute. Additionally, she had a good friend who makes flutes, the same friend that made her head joint, so she also gets information from him.

Looking at my knowledge gap-map, I definitely had more full-fledged answers for the sections regarding my object in relation to my body and in regards to the instrument’s place in education. That is not to say that my answers were extremely-detailed, but they were the most accurate answers, if simply stated. I had no idea about the symbolic, historical, or technological aspects of my flute. I knew about the body in relation to the instrument because a body is needed to use the instrument and I have been playing it for years. I know a lot about how the parts of my body create sounds through my flute. The reason I had no idea about the symbolic, historical, and technological aspects of my instrument is because my knowledge of those areas or lack thereof does not affect how I play my instrument and the quality in which I play it. Symbolic flutes portrayed in various ways are amusing, true, but otherwise unnecessary for me to know. The same reason applies to the historical and technological content, although technological was also pretty unnecessary for me to know because my flute teacher does if I have questions. If I decide to learn more about my flute, I can always ask my flute teacher my questions or look them up. Gemeinhardt, the company who made my flute, certainly has information about manufacturing. My dad also has a ton of music books in our basement that I could borrow, and definitely one on the history and construction of the flute.

The questions that were the most evocative for me were the questions about what materials made up my flute and the history of the flute. I realized that, despite having playing my flute for over seven years, I barely knew anything about it. I’ve been thankful that the flute was created, but I never knew who to be thankful to and what the long process was that allows me to play the flute I play. Although I never thought in-depth about it, I always thought that the flute developed from the recorder. Actually, it began as the flute. In fact, according to the Vienna Symphonic Library, “The flute is one of the oldest musical instruments and is regarded as the first ever wind instrument,” (Vienna Symphonic Library). I knew that flutes were simpler and made of different material than the metal they most often are made of today-some are crystal. I knew that keys were not a part of the original design. I did not know how many styles of flute there were as people attempted to give the instrument more notes to play and attempted to make the pitches and tones more consistent so that players could be in a group. Below is the introduction to Nimbus 2000 from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which I'm first player in, in my band group.

I also didn’t know where my flute came from. I was aware that it came from a store called PM Music because I went, played, and bought the instrument myself-although technically my parents paid for it. I learned through my research on The Gemeinhardt Story that my flute was produced in either Taiwan, China, or the United States. Unfortunately, because it was factory made rather than made by hand, there is no way to tell if my flute was created in the United States or shipped to the United States to be sold.

Through this realization of my areas of ignorance and my research, I realized what a complicated musical network it is that I belong to. The history of a flute as an instrument is vast and complicated as it evolved into what it is today. There used to be different fingerings and different shapes and placements of finger holes. There used to be only specific groups and places in which it was played: “It was used in military contexts and was even played at court.,” (Vienna Symphonic Library). Even when I look at my particular flute’s maker, it is a multi-national network.

Once again, I turn to Turino, who wrote about habits. People, including myself, have a habit of ignoring the origins and backstory of what we possess. Although the information is more or less there on the Internet if nowhere else for us to look at, we tend not to peruse it. Marcel Mauss writes about body techniques, which definitely need to be factored in when someone is learning how to play an instrument. It is important for flute players because they have not only different fingerings for each note, they have to blow more up and down continually for each note to stay in tune and change the tone. Players have to train their fingers, lips and tongue-also known as the embouchure-and lungs to play the complicated fingers in an order than produced songs and doesn't break up the melody too much with breathing.

Twist 4: I was generally stressed and frustrated by the Implosion Project. The point of the project was to go deeper in the chosen object to learn more about its origins. I did that. I learned the history of the flute and some of where it came from. I learned a good portion of how it was made from a video on YouTube. However, I was not able to learn everything about where the materials came from. It was also generally difficult to get information important to how the world was in my flute, because my flute teacher knows how to fix a screw or the cork or some such task in order to adjust my tone or make a key work properly again. Unfortunately, she knows very little about the process the materials go through to become instruments. Additionally, as other classmates have noted, companies don’t like to take time out of their day to answer a random few questions about their products. I contacted Gemeinhardt to find out more about my flute and they didn’t answer.

I also felt overwhelmed by the talk because of the sheer amount of information I was being asked to try to find. Not only were there one hundred and thirteen questions to answer on the initial assignment-yes I counted because there were a crazy amount-but I had to create a visual to represent how many of those questions I knew the answer to versus how many I couldn’t answer. And then I had to ask people to talk to me about my object when they were busy with homework and didn’t want to take time to talk to me about what they considered a pointless project. That aside, it was assigned over the last couple of weeks of the term-yes I know it’s the final project-which made the time to find all of the information and completely all of the project’s parts constrained and therefore more of a stressful project to complete. Below is the ending to Nimbus 2000. 

That being said, it was nice to learn more about my flute and its origins. It just would have been nice to do so on my own time, when I didn’t have three classes worth of college work as well as actual work and band to focus on as well.

If anything, this tells not only me but the rest of the class that people are remarkably unaware of how they are able to live the lives that they do. Every day we are surrounded by objects that mean something to us, even if that object only means we’ll have clean teeth during the day. Every day we take what we have in our lives for granted without consideration for who and/or what helped or made it come into our lives. The world is vast, complicated, and impossible-to-understand interconnected in ways. One of those ways is how all of our items are produced and reach us. That is something that will always be amazing, whether we consciously think about it or not.

Citations/Sources of Information:
Vsl.co.at. (2018). History - Vienna Symphonic Library. [online] Available at: https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Concert_flute/History/ [Accessed 14 Nov. 2018].

Gemeinhardt.com. (2018). The Gemeinhardt Story. [online] Available at: http://www.gemeinhardt.com/our-story.html [Accessed 14 Nov. 2018].