I recently visited my son’s preschool classroom with a bag of flutes and flute-like creatures, since his class had started a unit on music. I planned a short demonstration in which I would show how a sound is produced on a flute and what causes pitches to change.
The kids gathered around on the carpet as I pulled out the first item in my demo – what I call my “water flute.” It is a set of 8 small glass bottles filled with different levels of water, colored blue so it's obvious how much water is in each. Each bottle is tuned to play a different pitch of a major scale. I first blew across the top of the empty bottle, then across the bottle with the most water, showing how much higher the second bottle was. They are tuned one octave apart. Then I played them in order from least water to most, so they could hear the scale. I played “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the bottles next, to show how the notes in a scale can be arranged to make a tune. The next tune I played was “This Old Man.” I started with the first two phrases, which rhythmically are only quarter notes and half notes. Since I have to pick up each bottle to play a note, I showed how this got to be tricky when the phrase got to “give a dog a bone,” which is in eighth notes! I couldn’t pick up the bottles quickly enough to play the phrase in time, and at this point I picked up my pan flute. I showed them how the pan flute is a lot like the bottles – the longest one being the lowest note – but I can switch notes much more quickly with it since the tubes are all connected.
I continued the demo with a few other end-blown flutes. “End-blown” flutes work by blowing across the top of a tube, like I did with the bottles and the pan flute, but pitches are changed by covering finger holes. Covering the finger holes creates the same effect as blowing across different-sized tubes, by changing the length of the column of vibrating air inside the tube, but without having to switch to a different tube every time I want to change notes. I demonstrated my bamboo shakuhachi, then a clay cup-shaped flute from Africa, and finally a Native American double-flute. The kids were intrigued by the double-flute. One side has finger holes and the other does not, so it’s possible to play a melody while holding a drone pitch at the same time. (If you're curious, here's a link to a post on my old blog in which I describe in detail a fun collaboration I had with a composer who wrote a piece that used this flute.)
I finally brought out my regular flute. I demonstrated the first octave by playing the first solo from Ravel’s Bolero, then for contrast I played the bird solo from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. I also demonstrated my alto flute and piccolo so they could see again how size matters with regard to pitch. I finished my demonstration by playing John Williams’s music from the Harry Potter movies, with electronic accompaniment on my laptop. (SmartMusic comes in very handy when I don’t have access to an accompanist!)
About a week after my visit, one of the teachers that was present in the classroom came up to me and said that my demo was informative for her! She said that she didn’t really know how flutes worked until my step-by-step introduction with the class. I hope that my visit, along with the visits from other musicians to the classroom, will inspire in many of these children a love for music.