If you’re learning the flute and you’re finding a piece you’re learning difficult, you might start thinking about what the hardest piece ever written for flute might be. Is there an obvious piece that is just harder than all the others, or is there a big debate about what the hardest piece is? I’ve been wondering the same, so decided to try to find out.
A particularly difficult piece for flute is the Chant de Linos. Is it not necessarily agreed that this is the hardest piece for flute, but it’s certainly up there. Things like extended techniques can make pieces harder and there will likely be harder pieces that have never been published because nobody would be able to play them.
The flute is one of the easier instruments to play really fast, which makes it very impressive when someone plays something really quick and showy. Really quick pieces can be very difficult to get exactly right and take a huge amount of practice. I want to identify some of the hardest flute music ever written to get an idea of whether it will always be the quickest music that’s the hardest, or whether there are some slower pieces for flute that are just as hard as the quick ones.
After doing some hunting around, I found that a few different people have named Chant de Linos by Jolivet as the hardest flute piece ever written. This and a couple of others are listed below and I’ll talk a bit about each one:
- Jolivet – Chant de Linos
- Ibert – Concerto
- Nielsen – Concerto
Jolivet – Chant de Linos
This is widely accepted as one of the harder pieces written by flute, with some claims that it may actually be the hardest. Having never attempted it myself, it’s quite difficult to comment, but it certainly sounds very impressive. There are a lot of really quick passages, made more difficult by the fact that some sections are in 7/8 time. Although it’s a piece from the modern era, it’s intended as an ancient Greek modal chant with laments and is based on an archaic modal scale.
One thing that is missing from the piece that I have always found can add extreme levels of difficulty is a large range of extended techniques. Jolivet does use flutter tongue and a huge dynamic range, which can be very difficult to achieve on the flute, but there aren’t any of the more difficult extended techniques.
Ibert – Concerto
This piece is also known as one of the more difficult pieces written for flute. One of the main difficulties is that because it’s a concerto, projection over the whole orchestra has to be maintained while playing passages that are already quite difficult in terms of breathing and articulation. The second movement particularly contains a lot of very long phrases which can be difficult to master breathing-wise, with the added difficulty of projection.
Another difficulty of this piece is that it comprises a wide range of styles. Ibert was known for composing using ideas from a lot of different composers, from Mozart to Stravinsky. This piece is no exception and the player has to prove themselves to be very adaptable to get through it successfully. There are some very fast passages that require a very high technical standard. Again, however, the piece does not include extended techniques.
Nielsen – concerto
This is very much a playful piece, featuring the flute as the main soloist, but also the bass trombone. It aims for a very characteristic flute sound, with many fast passages and uses a very light timbre. Again, ability to project over the orchestra features heavily and the piece features interruptions from the bass trombone, making timing vital.
There is quite a discordant quality to the piece, along with some free, almost improvisatory sections. The biggest difficulty with the piece, however, is not necessarily the flute part itself, but more the interaction with the orchestra. It’s a very difficult piece to bring together, but possibly a bit less technically difficult in terms of the flute part itself. Again, it’s not a piece that incorporates extended technique.
Each of the three pieces listed above are written in the first half of the 1900s. This was a great era for experimentation with the limitations of instruments and therefore a lot of difficult music was written in that period. Composers had also begum to use more exploratory harmonies and tonal structures, which can add to the difficulty level of a piece, often by making it less predictable to the player.
Do extended techniques make pieces more difficult?
Recently, there has been a lot of music written using extended techniques. This can often add levels of difficulty for a player, as they may have to learn these techniques from scratch. Some of the techniques may not be all that difficult once mastered, but the player might have to go back to basics to get the hang of them.
Other extended techniques can be extremely difficult and the addition of those to a piece can really make the player struggle. One technique that is used fairly frequently is microtonal flute playing. This is where the flautist has to use alternative fingerings or half holes to achieve notes that are not the standard semitone intervals. This is a difficult technique, however, it is one of the more well-known extended techniques, so a player may have already mastered it, in which case it shouldn’t pose too much of a problem.
What can be more difficult are the less widely used techniques. Most players will not have familiarised themselves with these and they can be tricky. Things like jet whistles and slap tongue are among some of the techniques that can be found in the occasional experimental piece. This will likely cause the player to have to spend a long time learning the technique before they are able to play a piece, therefore giving the impression that the piece is really difficult.
In my opinion, a piece that incorporates fast, highly technical sections and extended techniques could be more difficult than some of the pieces currently classed as the most difficult flute pieces. I think that currently pieces using extended techniques don’t use these in a particularly difficult setting, as the player needs to get the hang of the technique itself. When these techniques become a bit more commonplace, it’s likely we’ll see some even harder pieces emerging that incorporate these techniques.