Personal Sun Music/ASCAP

Distributed by SilverWinds Publishing

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo

4 C Flutes

Alto Flute

Bass Flute

Contrabass Flute

PROGRAM NOTE

Morning Suite was written on a commission from the Long Island Flute Club in honor of their 40th Anniversary. It’s designed to showcase the best qualities of the flute in all its forms, and to be fun and challenging for the players. The piece has four movements, illustrating four stages of morning. It’s played as one continuous work, without any stopping or separation between movements, to maximize the sense of story and flow.

The first movement, WATERCOLOR DAWN, is soft and pastel-toned, based on a set of chords in four voices. There are “sighing” figures which regularly appear between statements, some lonely melodies in the piccolo, and some gently rhythmic lines.

DAYBREAK (movement two) announces the start of the day with crisp syncopations and a brisk tempo. The two main melodic figures are bird-like in nature, with the first appearing mostly in solo or duet form, and the second played by all of the flutes in unison, sounding like a large flock. Also included are a couple of callbacks to the first movement, moving now at a faster pace. As we near the end of DAYBREAK, the tempo accelerates and the energy ramps up, leading directly into the third movement.

THE MORNING SCRUM is where the group really goes to work. At an aggressive tempo of 160 BPM, there are a lot of challenging passages, with the high and low flutes taking their turns playing busy riffs, rhythms and themes, portraying the manic nature of a typical day here in the 21st- Century. THE MORNING SCRUM ends in an insane gigantic flurry, finally plummeting all the way down to the bottom range of the flute.

ALL THE WORLD UNDER THE SUN, the finale, rises out of the low note with a gentle sweetness built on delicate major harmonies. It features the low and high flutes in dialogue - the piccolo and first flute have a short lyric melody, and the low-register flutes answer with an ascending line, and they alternate as the movement unfolds. Midway through there is another callback to the Watercolor Dawn chords from the opening movement, this time played over a pedal in the low bass, which then leads on to the final coda.

This is a digital version of the piece that you can download as a PDF and print .