Imagine for Solo Flute

This is another really useful book from Hilary Taggart. Each piece has been written with a particular technical challenge in mind which makes targeting practice much easier. It also helps teachers who can use them as supplemetary material when learning other repertoire. The titles open up endless possibilities for discussion of performance points and perhaps some simple improvisation. Imaginative!

This is an enjoyable collection of 25 ‘study-pieces’ of intermediate level, aimed at players around Grades 3-5. The 'study-piece’ concept is a very useful one; these are etudes but with enough melodic and musical content that they could be performed in a concert.

Each of the 25 pieces includes some instructional notes, to guide the player towards the technical areas each one is aimed at. These include core skills such as articulation and rhythm, phrasing, tone colours, control of the air flow, clean finger technique, intonation and many more. The pieces contain useful challenges such as changing time signatures, a variety of articulations and flexibility in negotiating wide interval leaps. There is a clear educational basis to this work, and as such each of the pieces serves its purpose well as a study to help students improve.

For learning to be effective, it needs to be engaging, and that's the other strength of these pieces. The titles are often evocative, allowing space for players to imagine a story, character or atmosphere to depict in their interpretation. Examples of these are The Tudor Piper, The Spider, Arizona Creek and Icy Variants. Taggart's compositional style is accomplished and imaginative; she writes in an approachable, tonal language but I very much enjoyed the well-handled and surprising twists in the melodic lines which maintained my interest, and the well-balanced structures of these pieces. Her experience as a player, teacher and composer shines through here, and there's a real sense that she understands the needs of her target audience for these pieces.

Although they're designed for C flute, I also had a lot of fun playing them on the bass, where the intervallic leaps in particular give quite a workout for the more advanced player.