How to Take Care of Your Flute?

~When handling your flute, make sure that your hands are clean and dry.
~During assembly, remember to always hold the parts of the flute on the edge, never hold it where the keys are.
~If you're not using your flute, disassemble it and store it inside its' case. If you don't have time to disassemble, place your flute where it will be safe from any damage.
~Always make it a point to clean your flute after you use it to avoid deterioration of the pads. Use a different cloth to clean the inside from the outside of your flute.
~Never use metal polish on your flute.
~Do not lubricate or oil your flute.
~Do not try to adjust the setting of your flute yourself unless you have a good idea what you're doing.
~Contact an expert flute repairman if you're having problems with your flute.
~Store your flute at room temperature.
~Don't store in heated or damp areas.
Have your flute checked once a year by a flute serviceman to ensure your flute is in tip-top shape.Assembling the flute

How to Clean Your Flute?

~Use a clean cloth (flannel cloth or a J cloth is good as long as it's not too long or too short) to clean the inside of your flute.
~Fold the cloth lengthwise in half and thread the edge of the cloth through the slot on the cleaning rod.
~The cloth must be wrapped snugly on the edge of the rod so you'll be better able to clean the inside of your flute.
~Wrap the rest of the cloth tightly around the rod and securely hold the end of the cloth and rod with your hand to avoid bunching up and getting stuck when cleaning the inside of the flute.
~Now push the cloth-covered rod all the way inside your flute and twist it as you move in and out. Be very careful when doing this. The head joint is the part of the flute that gets the most moisture so be sure to give it a thorough drying.
~The outside of the flute may be cleaned by gently using a clean damp cloth.
~Now you can store your flute in its' case when you're not using it. This will ensure that your flute will last longer and perform well.

The Western Concert Flute

The Western concert flute, a descendant of the 19th-Century German flute, is a transverse flute which is closed at the top. Near the top is the embouchure hole, across and into which the player blows. It has larger circular finger-holes than its baroque predecessors, designed to increase the instrument's dynamic range. Various combinations can be opened or closed by means of keys, to produce the different notes in its playing range. The note produced depends on which finger-holes are opened or closed and on how the flute is blown. There are two kinds of foot joints available for the concert flute: the standard C foot (shown above) or the longer B foot with an extra key extending the flute's range to B below middle C. There can also be a Bb below middle c foot joint added to the instrument. With the rare exception of the Kingma system, or custom-devised fingering systems, modern Western concert flutes conform to the Boehm system.
The standard concert flute is pitched in the key of C and has a range of 3 octaves starting from middle C (or one half-step lower with a B foot). This means that the concert flute is one of the highest common orchestral instruments, with the exception of the piccolo, which plays an octave higher. G alto and C bass flutes, pitched, respectively, a perfect fourth and an octave below the concert flute, are used occasionally. Parts are written for alto flute more frequently than for bass. Alto and bass flutes are considerably heavier than the normal C flute, making them more difficult to play for extended periods of time.
Other sizes of flute and piccolo are used from time to time. A rarer instrument of the modern pitching system is the treble G flute. Instruments made according to an older pitch standard, used principally in wind-band music, include Db piccolo, Eb soprano flute (the primary instrument, equivalent to today's concert C flute), F alto flute, and Bb bass flute (incidentally, the clarinet and brass families retain this orientation to a Bb, rather than C tonal centre).

Categories Of Flute

In its most basic form, a flute can be an open tube which is blown like a bottle. There are several broad classes of flutes. With most flutes, the musician blows directly across the edge of the mouthpiece. However, some flutes, such as the whistle, gemshorn, flageolet, recorder, tin whistle, tonette, fujara, and ocarina have a duct that directs the air onto the edge (an arrangement that is termed a "fipple"). These are known as fipple flutes. The fipple gives the instrument a distinct timbre which is different from non-fipple flutes and makes the instrument easier to play, but takes a degree of control away from the musician.
Another division is between side-blown (or transverse) flutes, such as the Western concert flute, piccolo, fife, dizi, and bansuri; and end-blown flutes, such as the ney, xiao, kaval, danso, shakuhachi, and quena. The player of a side-blown flute uses a hole on the side of the tube to produce a tone, instead of blowing on an end of the tube. End-blown flutes should not be confused with fipple flutes such as the recorder, which are also played vertically but have an internal duct to direct the air flow across the edge of the tone hole.
Flutes may be open at one or both ends. The ocarina, pan pipes, police whistle, and bosun's whistle are closed-ended. Open-ended flutes such as the concert flute and the recorder have more harmonics, and thus more flexibility for the player, and brighter timbres. An organ pipe may be either open or closed, depending on the sound desired.
Flutes can be played with several different air sources. Conventional flutes are blown with the mouth, although some cultures use nose flutes. The Flue pipes of Organs, which are acoustically similar to duct flutes, are blown by bellows or fans.

History Of Flute(M.A)

The flute has been dated to prehistoric times. It has appeared in different forms and locations around the world. A three-holed flute made from a mammoth tusk (from the Geißenklösterle cave in the German Swabian Alb and dated to 30,000 to 37,000 years ago) was discovered in 2004, and two flutes made from swans' bones excavated a decade earlier (from the same cave in Germany, dated to circa 36,000 years ago) are among the oldest known musical instruments. A fragment of the femur of a juvenile cave bear, with two to four holes, found at Divje Babe in Slovenia and dated to about 43,100 years ago, may also be an early flute. The Bible, in Genesis 4:21, cites Jubal as being the "father of all those who play the ugab and the kinnor". The former Hebrew term refers to some wind instrument, or wind instruments in general, the latter to a stringed instrument, or stringed instruments in general. As such, Jubal is traditionally regarded as the inventor of the flute (a word used in some translations of this biblical passage). Some early flutes were made out of tibias (shin bones). Playable 9000-year-old Gudi (literally, "bone flute"), made from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes, with five to eight holes each, were excavated from a tomb in Jiahu in the Central Chinese province of Henan. The earliest extant transverse flute is a chi (篪) flute discovered in the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at the Suizhou site, Hubei province, China. It dates from 433 BC, of the later Zhou Dynasty. It is fashioned of lacquered bamboo with closed ends and has five stops that are at the flute's side instead of the top. Chi flutes are mentioned in Shi Jing, compiled and edited by Confucius.

Music appreciation - Tchaikovsky part 1

I am not wholeheartedly a pro-classical person.
Some classical songs are really not interesting and put you to sleep easily.
So I'll pick some composer piece that everyone would prefer.
I'll start with Tchaikovsky.
When I still a junior in KL FeiYang, I remember one of the conductors(don't remember who was it) said this :"We must listen to Tchaikovsky songs more often because we are always exposed to his compositions"
Well, Tchaikovsky compositions did pay more attention to brass part though.Ok, correct me if I'm wrong.

Full name: Peter (Pyotr) Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Birthplace: Kamsko-Votkinsk (Vyatka province),Russia
Interesting facts: He is a gay and parents are not musicians

I'll start a pretty long essay, good to read and best to remember.

Among the best known of the works he produced during little more than a quarter of a century are the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker etc.
His compositions are constant be used in Disney cartoon series.
Walts from The Sleeping Beauty was used in Disney's Sleeping Beauty.
Sang by Aurora in forest with her animal friends:
I know you~~I've danced with you in once upon a dream~~
I know you~~....I don't know any further lyric *wink*

*interesting trivia: Most Disney princesses sing with animals except for Belle from Beauty and The Beast, she sings with kitchen utensils, clock and furnitures*

As for swan lake, it's a very famous tune.
Listen to S.H.E - Remember's chorus part.

His musical talent manifested itself early, and he took piano lessons, first in Votkinsk and then in St. Petersburg, where the family moved in 1848.
Educated for a career in the civil service, he broke away to follow an inner calling to become a composer, and graduated with a silver medal from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1865.

Tchaikovsky suffered greatly from the secrecy to which his homosexuality condemned him in the society of his day, and an ill-advised marriage with a woman he hardly knew ended quickly in a nervous breakdown for him and a permanent separation for both.
A close, long-term relationship with his wealthy patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, was carried out entirely by correspondence.

Despite his depressive, self-pitying nature, he was a polyglot who traveled as far afield as the United States, where he participated in the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891.
In 1893 he conducted a triumphant performance of his Fourth Symphony at a Royal Philharmonic concert in London and received an honorary doctorate in Cambridge.
His death, in St. Petersburg on 6 November, was probably a suicide, but the story that it was provoked by a threat to reveal his liaison with a young aristocrat has not been substantiated. Professionally, Tchaikovsky experienced both fame and reproach in his lifetime, but his enduring, worldwide popularity came only posthumously.

I can't post up all of his songs one shot, so for today we'll listen to Dance of The Reeds from The Nutcracker.
(The Nutcracker consist a lot of other compositions but my Imeem gone cuckoo, I just able to upload Dance of the Reeds.
My apology, I'll post them up in part 2 perhaps.)

It's a pretty lively piece played by 2 pianist on 2 pianos.