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Cut air: An odyssey in flute phonography

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Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull
A witchdoctor of a British cult sings and plays flute.()
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull
A witchdoctor of a British cult sings and plays flute.()
You might think the flute isn’t the most rock ‘n’ roll of instruments, but sound artist and flute devotee Jim Denley is here to change your mind. He dives into the hardcore flute tradition, from shamanistic beginnings to Jethro Tull and back.
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‘Let’s face it, the reason the 20th century was in favour of music is because music molests children,’ wrote critic Chris Mann.

I became completely subordinate to the flute.

Perhaps ‘molest’ ain’t the right word, but I was 10 when Ian Anderson, through Jethro Tull’s 1969 LP Stand Up, weirded up my consciousness.

With bluesy-voiced-rock-flute (famously on one leg), he stood for individual expressionism; I bought the embedded ideological message hook, line and sinker. It jump-started an obsessive quest—I became completely subordinate to the flute and quickly discovered other flautists with alternative messages. 

In a Fairy Meadow supermarket in 1970 my pocket money went on A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky on the Nonesuch Explorer label. The series had covers with monochrome line drawings of traditional art—as if this was mediated conservatism.

This solo overwhelmed me, it was full of invention, nuance and complexity, but had nothing to do with individualism; the liner notes stated that the tradition was linked with Zen Buddhism.   

In 1983 I travelled to study with the Shakuhachi master who cut this LP, Yamaguchi Goro. Tokyo gave me further insights, but truthfully, the LP had been powerful initiation.

Shaman playing flute
A chief shaman of an indigenous Indian tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon playing a pan flute.()

Supernatural

By the mid-20th century, phonography had exploded music by offering high fidelity audio icons from many cultures.

Listening in equal measure to A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky, discs from India, as well as the avant-garde, world music and free jazz, records had an analogous power with the photograph of Earth from space—they shrunk it. The exotic, through a needle spinning around cut vinyl, was conjured in our lounge room; nothing was remote.

The opening track on one such icon, Music of the Upper Amazon, has haunted me most of my life.

‘After having subjected themselves to fasting and silence, the men construct musical instruments whose tone must interpret the voice of the     spirits,’ say the liner notes. ‘The players are considered supernatural during the performance.’

The men are Iawa, from west of the border of Brazil and Peru in Upper Amazonia.

When a jet stream crashes against an edge the air column vibrates, sound magically springs into existence. On guitars we see the string, on drums the skin, on speakers the cardboard cone vibrating, but on the flute, whatever the frequency or dynamic, we see nothing.

This shamanistic emergence has produced diverse traditions for millennia and perhaps this invisible genesis is why, in many cultures, the instrument is associated with the supernatural, as I experienced in the cut from the Iawa.

Sex and gender

But the phrase, ‘playing the flute’ has other idioms. Flute can stand for phallus, many flute traditions take this as a given.

In ancient Greek mythology Pan had the hots for the chaste nymph Syrnx, who wished to be a hunter. To escape his embrace she asked the gods to turn her into reeds. Pan blew into her new form—struth, the first flute.                                            

Gilbert H. Herdt’s 1981 study Guardian of the Flutes is about a society from the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

‘The flute is used for teaching about fellatio in the penis and flute ceremony, and in that context the bamboo flute becomes a sign for the penis and an icon of the cult,’ he writes. ‘Ingesting semen masculinises; playing flutes is manly behaviour.’

Back in Australia, at some point during the late 20th century, flute playing switched from being a masculine pursuit to something both sexes could be involved in. Natasha Anderson, for instance, plays bass recorder, a large end-blown flute (not unlike some of the instruments played by male-only cults in PNG and Amazonia). 

In Australia today, most professional flautists are women and perhaps as a backlash, the flute has become something of a joke. Let’s face it, the potency of the flute shown in Amazonia, Melanesia and Pan’s libido—its male erotic power—has gone flaccid. When I tell many musicians I’m making a radio program on the flute I’m met with open laughter.

Chris Lilley’s Ja’ime King—probably the cruelest creation in Australian satire—plays the flute. 

Andean man playing flute
An Andean native plays reed flute (quena) as he parades with llamas and alpacas to promote a local fair in Lima, Peru.()

GDP, collectivity and mediated intimacy

Many of my favourite audio icons are flute ensembles from financially poor parts of the globe—Ethiopia, Amazonia, Columbia, Malaita in the Solomons, and North Yemen—that present remarkable, and remarkably different, examples of collectivity; communities that model, through unique intonation, metric and rhythmic systems, forms for organising and sharing.

Above all, they work with spaces and contexts to produce music embedded in locality. Paradoxically, ethnomusicologists recorded this ephemeral art on magnetic tape, then, inscribed on vinyl by record labels based in the north, it was shipped to a global audience, largely free of royalties. What’s remarkable is that something of the shamanistic power remains and is perhaps even amplified by this mediated fetishisation.

I’ve been lucky to experience jaw dropping flute traditions live: in the desert regions of Rajasthan where one musician plays two flutes simultaneously, circular breathing and providing his own rhythmic drone; and in a car park in Columbia where a street band played the worlds loudest flutes, Gaita, in pairs.

But my most touching flute encounters remain on disc—the decontextualisation that recording engenders allows us to focus on the materiality of sound, undistracted by other senses.

Recording is a sort of time machine. Musicians like Taiasa Talyaga who plays Pupepe (pan pipe)—from Papua New Guinea Vol. 2. ENGA traditional music, recorded at Irelya on December 9, 1974—are teleported from huts and villages to living rooms and headphones worlds away. From an ephemeral moment in 1974, the performance becomes a fixed and repeatable icon we reflect on year after year.

The intimacy of this recording is almost shocking—we rarely get this close to another’s lips—and it’s easy to see why we’ve gender-ised and eroticised the instrument.

But it’s not only Talyaga’s playing that creates this presence. The recordist, Frederic Duvelle, used a decidedly un-classical technique, putting the microphone as close as possible to the source, so we hear microscopic detail of Talyaga’s physicality. Just as the invisibility of air vibrations gives flutes mystery, the audio-only documents of the mid 20th century allow our listening to zoom in, leaving the context somewhat unexplained.

Perhaps the golden age of audio is already over (the 21st century seems to be biased in favour of the audiovisual), but the intimacy of Talyaga’s breath and lips gently caressing our earholes is a powerful combination of music and phonography.

Whatever worldly points flutes are co-opted into making, the way Talyaga animates the mind and senses through a dry wooden flute shows that the divine can magically spring into existence, cut by breath.

The spell can endure, inscribed in vinyl grooves or even ones and zeros.

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