Free Flute Sheet Music

Tune of the Day: Oranges and Lemons

This traditional English nursery rhyme refers to the bells of several churches, all within or close to the City of London.

Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement's. You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin's.
When will you pay me? Say the bells at Old Bailey. When I grow rich,
Say the bells at Shoreditch.
When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney. I do not know,
Says the great bell at Bow.

The song is used in a children's singing game with the same name, in which the players file, in pairs, through an arch made by two of the players (made by having the players face each other, raise their arms over their head, and clasp their partners' hands). The challenge comes during the final lines:

Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

On the last word, the children forming the arch drop their arms to catch the pair of children currently passing through, who are then “out” and must form another arch next to the existing one. In this way, the series of arches becomes a steadily lengthening tunnel through which each set of two players has to run faster and faster to escape in time.

The song is one of the nursery rhymes most commonly referred to in popular culture. These include George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it is used as a snippet of nursery rhyme embodying the forgotten past that protagonist Winston Smith yearns for.

Thanks to Jan-Steyn for suggesting this tune!

Tune of the Day: Study in A-flat major by Prill

This is the twenty-third piece from 24 Technische Studien für Flöte (24 Technical Studies), Op. 11, by German flutist Emil Prill. It was first published in Leipzig in 1911.

Tune of the Day: The Harmonious Blacksmith

“The Harmonious Blacksmith” is the popular name of the fourth and final movement, “Air and variations”, of George Frideric Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major, HWV 430, for harpsichord. This instrumental air was one of the first works for harpsichord published by Handel

There have been a number of explanations proffered as to why this movement was called “The Harmonious Blacksmith”. The name was not given by Handel and was not recorded until early in the 19th century, when the movement became popular on its own.

One story is that Handel, when working at Cannons between 1717 and 1718, once took shelter from the rain in a smithy, and was inspired to write his tune upon hearing the hammer on the anvil. A variation on the story is that he heard the blacksmith singing the tune which would later become the Air; this explanation fits in nicely with Handel's general technique of borrowing tunes. Neither story is true. The legend began three-quarters of a century after Handel's death with Richard Clark in his Reminiscences of Handel (1836). Clark found an old anvil in a smithy near Whitchurch, Edgware and fabricated a story to identify William Powell as the fictitious blacksmith, when, in fact, he had been the parish clerk. They raised a subscription for a wooden memorial to him, and in 1868, the people of Whitchurch subscribed again for a grandiloquent gravestone, which is still standing. However, Handel had written his harpsichord suites of the 1720 publication before he lived at Cannons, probably when he was at Adlington Hall in Cheshire, or even earlier still.

Another possible story concerns William Lintern, a blacksmith's apprentice from Bath who later took up music and so was The Harmonious Blacksmith. The piece came to be called after him, probably because he published it under that name for reasons outlined by William Chappell in the following extract from Grove's Dictionary of Music:

A few months after Clark's publication the writer saw the late J.W. Windsor, Esq., of Bath, a great admirer of Handel and one who knew all his published works. He told the writer that a story of the Blacksmith at Edgware was pure imagination, that the original publisher of Handel's lesson under that name (The Harmonious Blacksmith) was a music seller at Bath, named Lintern, whom he knew personally from buying music at the shop, that he had asked Lintern the reason for this new name, and he had told him that it was a nickname given to himself because, he had been brought up as a blacksmith, although he had afterwards turned to music, and that was the piece he was constantly asked to play. He printed the movement in a detached form, because he could sell a sufficient number of copies to make a profit.

The present arrangement for two flutes appeared in Blake's Young Flutist's Magazine, published in Philadelphia in 1833.

Tune of the Day: Alla Siciliana by Quantz

This is the central movement of Johann Joachim Quantz's Sonata in A major for flute and continuo, QV 1:145. It is one of many works for flute that Quantz composed for his student and patron Frederick II, King of Prussia.

Tune of the Day: The Falls of Doonass

This reel is taken from Francis O'Neill's collection Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, published in Chicago in 1922. The cited source is James Clancy from San Francisco. The Falls of Doonass are a section of rapids on the River Shannon, near the village of Castleconnell in County Limerick, Ireland.

Tune of the Day: Study in F minor by Terschak

Today we propose the twenty-fourth piece from Exercices journaliers pour la flûte (or Tägliche Studien in German, i.e. “Daily Exercises”) by Austro-Hungarian composer Adolf Terschak. It was first published in 1867.

Tune of the Day: Allemande by Montéclair

This allemande is the sixth movement of the third of six Concerts à deux Flutes Traversières sans Basse by the French Baroque composer Michel Pignolet de Montéclair. Here the French word concert is a synonym of “suite”, and has nothing to do with the Italian concerto.