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This is étude No. 13 of the first book of Ernesto Köhler's Progress in Flute Playing, Op. 33. The first part is a melancholic moderate-tempo barcarole, while the second part is “more agitated” (“Più mosso”) but still graceful (“con grazia”).
Thanks to Neri for suggesting this piece!
This is the opening movement of a sonata in A minor for two flutes by the German Baroque composer and music theorist Johann Mattheson. It was published in Amsterdam in 1708.
Jacques Hotteterre is regarded as one of the most outstanding French musicians of the baroque period. He was the most celebrated of a family of wind instrument makers and wind performers.
Hotteterre owed his fame largely to his talent playing the flute, an instrument for which he wrote a number of pieces, significantly extending the repertory for the instrument. In addition, he played the bassoon, oboe, and musette (French bagpipe). He was also an internationally celebrated teacher to aristocratic patrons, and he wrote a few methods for the transverse flute.
In addition to performance and teaching, Hotteterre continued his family's tradition of wind instrument making. It may have been Hotteterre who made a number of changes in the design of the transverse flute, though there is little concrete evidence for this. Most notably, the flute, which had previously been made in one cylindrical piece, was cut in three pieces: the head, the body and the foot.
This jig is taken from Francis O'Neill's celebrated collection Music of Ireland, published in Chicago in 1903. In a 1906 letter to Alfred Percival Graves, O'Neill identifies his source for this tune:
A police patrolman, Michael Raverty, from Tyrone, my partner on duty thirty years ago, “shortened the night” by quietly whistling “The Mountaineers,” March No. 1,030 in Collection.
Here is another melodious study from Giuseppe Gariboldi's Vingt petites études, or Twenty Studies. This one covers the G-major scale, fast triplets and large intervals.
Tremendously popular for his extended stage works during the reign of Louis XIV, Jean-Joseph Mouret today is remembered only for this fanfare, lasting less than two minutes. Oddly, it became associated with the pomp and glory of England, not of France, when in 1971 WGBH radio announcer Robert J. Lurtsema proposed it as the theme for Masterpiece Theatre, WGBH-TV's repackagings of BBC historical dramas for broadcast on American public television.
The piece, taken from Mouret's first Suite de Symphonies (Fanfares for Trumpets, Kettledrums, Violins and Oboes), is a popular musical choice in many modern weddings.
This gavotte is the third movement of the fourth of the six Op. 7 flute sonatas with bass accompaniment by French flutist and composer Jean-Daniel Braun, published in Paris in 1736.