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This wasn’t a student-model flute it was an intermediate model with open holes and a B foot. It was a major step up from the band instrument I had learned on. I went ten years without a flute until, with my parents’ help, I bought the best flute I could afford at that time: a solid silver Jupiter. I lost track of it then, and I assume my aunt or cousin still has it. The Artley was eventually given back to my aunt for her daughter to take a turn with it. And so, without fanfare, my band career ended. But at the end of my tenth grade year, I was ready to turn my attention to other things. I played that flute from fifth grade through tenth grade.
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When I needed a flute ten years later, it was serviced, given new pads, outfitted with a spiffy new case, and passed along to me. My grandparents bought it for her to play in school band, and she was finishing with it around the time I was born. The flute was an Artley that belonged to my mother’s younger sister. Like most people who don’t play the flute but who are imitating flute playing, I held it with both palms turned toward me, as if I were waving at myself with everything but my thumbs.
#ARTLEY FLUTE REEDS HOW TO#
This was a flute-a foreign instrument that I didn’t even know how to hold properly. Most of the girls I was growing up with were also taking piano lessons.īut this was new.
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(I came of age when we knew they were called sharps, not hashtags.) I knew the names of some of the major composers and the musical eras to which they belonged. I’d been taking private piano lessons since second grade and was doing okay with that. The second big change was that I would be having music lessons at school. As a child, it might as well have been eighty.) And it was so far away! What an adventurer I was! (I just mapped the distance from the house I grew up in to that school and am shocked to learn that it’s only eight miles. This was thrilling! I was being transported to and from school in a vehicle not driven by my mom. For the first time, I was getting on a bus and leaving my neighborhood to go to a school miles away. That school year brought two significant changes. I started learning to play the flute in the fifth grade. (The Colonel with his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices had nothing on flute makers.) The manufacturers know how to keep us in a state of breathless longing. They’re made of silver and plated with gold or they’re a proprietary metallurgic combination. Flutes are crafted in sterling silver, Britannia silver, gold of various karats, platinum, and wood. You have your primary flute, your back-up flute, the flute that no longer suits you that you’re trying to sell, your dream flute that you’ll buy if you win the lottery, a low flute you don’t really need and will rarely play but that you covet nevertheless, the impulse-buy flute, the flute on eBay you think you’ve found a deal on that you hope no one else spots, the flute you never knew you wanted until you tried it at a flute convention-all those flutes (and possibly more, if you’re daring enough to go the Craigslist or pawn shop route).Īnd if the flutes themselves were not enough, we also have a dazzling array of materials from which to choose. It’s a story about flutes.įlute people are nodding in understanding and solidarity. Actually, it’s a tale of three flutes with brief appearances by three more flutes. In Dickensian style, it’s a tale of two flutes. It’s about a literal object of my affection-a flute.
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It’s a big love story, and it’s not about a person. These stories are capped at one hundred words and are about the object of the writer’s affection, sometimes a sibling or child but usually a romantic partner. The New York Times has a feature called Tiny Love Stories.