Sliding The Whistle Up A Full Octave

Breath is understood in many cultures as the foundation of life. Spirit briefly held, shaped, and sent into the world. A Western concert flute is five times longer, a piccolo more than twice as long. When I plugged these dimensions in the relevant equations, the lowest sound coming from my flutes should be about 1,200 hertz. Wind instruments, though, do not conform to simple predictive equations, especially not equations that treat them as mere tubes. The swirling, pulsing flow of air is shaped by the details of the instrument’s form and how it is played. The angle and sharpness of the edge that meets our breath alter the crispness and pitch of the sound. Flare at either end of the flute, curvature within the bore, or interior imperfections can choke, squeeze, or expand the sound waves within. The player brings the shape and skill of their body into relationship with the instrument. Instead, the player uses lips, tongue, facial muscles, and teeth not only to precisely direct a fine stream of air to the flute’s edge but also to sculpt the sound with subtle oral changes. This embouchure interacts with the rhythms and forcefulness of the player’s lungs and diaphragm to create music. I bring unschooled embouchure and breath to the bone edge of the flutes that I’ve made.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

What would a professional make of the Paleozoic instruments? Writing about what drew her to work with replicas of ancient flutes, Anna Friederike Potengowski says she felt a bit lost with her work in contemporary music. She sought an experience of roots, of beginnings. With bone and ivory replicas made by Friedrich Seeberger and Wulf Hein, experts in Paleolithic reconstruction, she set out to explore the sonic possibilities of Paleozoic bone and ivory. Seeberger’s and Hein’s artisanal and research efforts informed much of what we know about how the flutes were made. Potengowski took this experimentation into the sonic realm. I slide headphones over my ears and enter a space of sonic imagination. We cannot know for sure how the ancient flutes sounded, but these recordings open our senses to possibility. Sound works its power, carrying ideas and emotions from one consciousness to another. Potengowski’s playing is not time travel but rather offers experimental connections across the divide that separates us from ancient people. All of the dozens of her sound samples and compositions are modern imaginings, but a few surely capture the edges of musical innovations from long ago. The artifacts do not disclose to the eye how they were played. But experienced mouths, facial muscles, and lungs can teach us what the eyes cannot discover.

There's Still Time For It

Two methods of playing seemed possible to Potengowski. In the first, she blew a tight stream of air from closely pursed lips across the top of the cut bone, almost whistling across its end. To direct the air without lips getting in the way, she held the body of the flute at an oblique angle, somewhat like a Middle Eastern ney flute. The second method worked only on notched flutes. Holding the flute vertically, with the unnotched end against her lower lip, she blew across the top of the flute, hitting the notch with a stream of breath from lips slightly parted in a horizontal smile. This is like the embouchure used for notched wooden and bamboo flutes such as the Andean quena. Given that notches are widespread in modern flutes, she expected the second method to be more successful. The notch creates a sharp edge that slices the narrow stream of air, causing the stream to fibrillate, rapidly alternating its flow on either side of the edge. But Potengowski found that playing the notches on the Paleolithic flutes gave sounds that were, at best, indistinct. Despite much effort, the notch on the griffon vulture flute would not evoke a clear sound, only wheezy puffs. The notches on these flutes, then, may be artifacts of breakage. Or their fragmentary state may distort our idea of the original shapes.

All That Matters

The oblique method of playing, though, worked for all the flutes. The first time Potengowski put the swan radius to her lips using this method, her breath woke two simultaneous notes from the instrument. Two equally strong waves coexisted within the flute, one a harmonic of the other. The effect is a fulsome sound, one that offers a taste of tonal harmony rather than a single pitch. This is unusual for a flute, an instrument that normally plays one predominant pitch at a time. Potengowski thought that the sound must indicate a mistake in her approach. She quickly changed her opinion and came to appreciate the double tones as wonderful and a tool for musical expression. Multitoned sounds were perhaps one of the foundations of Paleolithic music. Single tones, too, have curious properties in these instruments. From the swan radius came a crisp whistle. Potengowski then slid the whistle up a full octave, then back down, a smooth incline of pitch changes. The sound is a little like a modern piston whistle, swooping up and down. But there’s no slider in these flutes changing the pitch. She used nothing but the shape of her tongue, facial muscles, and lips, a technique she termed the oral glissando. This glissando works only with the oblique playing method, with the flute’s end held against pursed lips. Potengowski found that the glissando was better at changing pitch than were the finger holes cut into the flutes. When she plays the instrument with the oblique method, though, the tone is gorgeous. The low sounds are like a distant train whistle, the higher ones like a sweet piping note from a bird. Like all wind instruments, the flutes can be overblown to find higher registers by increasing the force of the breath. Potengowski found that she could readily make all three flutes leap like this, giving each a range of about two and a half octaves. The highest notes, pitched close to the highest possible on the piano keyboard, were the hardest for her to create and their unpleasantly piercing sound wavers as her breath pushes the instrument to its highest limit.