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Doug:
Really great stuff...you and Paula sound fine together, and your flute work is very nice. As a clarinetist who is sometimes forced to double on flute, I am really impressed with your flute chops. Thanks for sharing!



Thanks! Well, I've been primarily a clarinet player (and electric bassist) for most of my adult life, but since last year, I've been playing mostly flute, and my poor clarinet feels neglected, collecting dust in the corner. Like I mentioned, I've only been playing flute since last April ('08), so I am still a beginner, stumbling around, but I do appreciate the compliments. Listenting to flutists like Bill McBirnie, Sir James Galway, Lori Bell, Linda Chatterton, Yusef Lateef, Robert Dick, Nestor Torres, Holly Hoffman, and many others too numerous to mention, have inspired me to try to learn this instrument.

There are many things I like about the flute, but my favorite are: A) a beautiful flute tone almost brings tears to my eyes (okay, I'll 'fess up, it actually has brought tears to my eyes, in the case of Linda Chatterton's beautiful version of Debussy's "Arabesque #1" with harp accompaniment), B) there are no reeds to mess with! and C) I have much better endurance on the flute than on the clarinet.

But I will probably get back to the clarinet, cautiously. I may pick up a 'C' clarinet, so that I can read off the same parts as the flute and not have to transpose. I said "cautiously" above, because there is a school of thought that contends that reed instrument playing, particularly clarinet, can be damaging to one's flute playing. We'll see.

Regards,
Doug

Visit the Elegance Music page on MySpace for samples of my current work.