Free Flute Sheet Music

Tune of the Day: Échos

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.

Tune of the Day: The Mountaineers' March

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.

Tune of the Day: Study in G major by Gariboldi

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.

Tune of the Day: Rondeau

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.

Tune of the Day: Gavotta by Braun

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.

Tune of the Day: The Ruins of Killmallock

This jig is taken from Francis O'Neill's collection Music of Ireland, published in Chicago in 1903. It had previously appeared under the title “Old Walls of Liscarroll” in Ryan's Mammoth Collection (Boston, 1883), although with the first strain in minor mode and a few minor differences in the second strain.

Kilmallock, a town of less than 2000 residents in south County Limerick, was during the middle ages the third largest city in Ireland. The ruins of a Dominican friary, built in the 13th century but sacked by Cromwell's forces in 1648, are still visible today, as well as the remains of the medieval walls which encircled the settlement.

Tune of the Day: Study in E minor by Köhler

This étude, No. 6 of the first book of Ernesto Köhler's Progress in Flute Playing, is a nice exercise in octave-jumping, but also contains arpeggios and short chromatic runs. After a development of the ideas stated in the introduction and a repetition of the initial theme, the piece ends in a fast coda, marked “Vivace”.