In my flute lessons I have been playing duets with my teacher. It's valuable to me to hear his sound and musicality, and it's enjoyable.
We played pretty much everything in a well-known collection of duets edited by Louis Moyse. Then I started printing out duets from a huge archive of flute music that I purchased from the Clarinet Institute of Los Angeles. I had found myself playing a fair amount of baroque music and wanted to move forward at least to the nineteenth century.
After poking around among the files in the archive, I discovered a Danish composer from the first half of the 19th century named Niels Peter Jensen (1802-1846), whose duets were fun to play and almost easy enough for me to sightread. After going through a set of six of those, I decided against playing more of his stuff and found a set of duets by the French composer, Benoit Tranquille Berbiguier (1782-1835, what a great name!), who is best known for a set of flute exercises that he composed. The Berbiguier music isn't much more challenging than the Jensen. When I first started playing it, I thought it was pedestrian, but it grew on me as I worked on it, and some of it, when I played it with my teacher, was quite lovely.
Amusingly, my teacher was unfamiliar with both the Jensen and Berbiguier duets, though he had no trouble at all reading his part when we played them, and I hope that was fun for him. He's about the age of my older children, and most of his students are kids, so it must be a welcome change for him to be working with a mature person.
At my next lesson I plan to finish with the Berbiguier duets and move on to something much harder (and more interesting), the duets by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784), which are bringing me back toward the baroque, but WFB was an idiosyncratic composer, and his duets are quirky and challenging, full of unexpected notes and rhythmic figures.
The problem for me (my teacher doesn't assign music) is to find a level that's easy enough for me to play satisfactorily (though I don't aspire to get up to performance level) but still challenging, and not frustrating.
We played pretty much everything in a well-known collection of duets edited by Louis Moyse. Then I started printing out duets from a huge archive of flute music that I purchased from the Clarinet Institute of Los Angeles. I had found myself playing a fair amount of baroque music and wanted to move forward at least to the nineteenth century.
After poking around among the files in the archive, I discovered a Danish composer from the first half of the 19th century named Niels Peter Jensen (1802-1846), whose duets were fun to play and almost easy enough for me to sightread. After going through a set of six of those, I decided against playing more of his stuff and found a set of duets by the French composer, Benoit Tranquille Berbiguier (1782-1835, what a great name!), who is best known for a set of flute exercises that he composed. The Berbiguier music isn't much more challenging than the Jensen. When I first started playing it, I thought it was pedestrian, but it grew on me as I worked on it, and some of it, when I played it with my teacher, was quite lovely.
Amusingly, my teacher was unfamiliar with both the Jensen and Berbiguier duets, though he had no trouble at all reading his part when we played them, and I hope that was fun for him. He's about the age of my older children, and most of his students are kids, so it must be a welcome change for him to be working with a mature person.
At my next lesson I plan to finish with the Berbiguier duets and move on to something much harder (and more interesting), the duets by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784), which are bringing me back toward the baroque, but WFB was an idiosyncratic composer, and his duets are quirky and challenging, full of unexpected notes and rhythmic figures.
The problem for me (my teacher doesn't assign music) is to find a level that's easy enough for me to play satisfactorily (though I don't aspire to get up to performance level) but still challenging, and not frustrating.
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