Six Pieces for Flute and Piano

Here is the latest chapter in my online autobiography. To read the whole story click on the link above left.

Six Pieces for Flute and Piano

As mentioned in a previous chapter, these pieces were written around the turn of the century and were my first efforts at writing for flute and piano using a computer programme, Encore3-0.
The late ‘90s for me were a period of intense individual instrumental teaching in the private sector. I had a good number of saxophone and flute students, mostly adults, and mostly between beginner and intermediate levels.
I always tried to teach in a room with a keyboard, having realised that having the harmony and some sort of rhythmic accompaniment helped the student understand better what he was playing. And in the private sector the important thing was to keep the students interested, since they paid by the month, not by the year. So that little moment of actual music making often made the difference.
At a certain point, as well as using the extensive repertoire of A4 sheets I had assembled, each with a few lines of melody of melody and perhaps some chord symbols written over the lines, I wanted to go a little further and create some pieces of my own, and specifically for flute and piano.
My habit of accompanying my students from the keyboard during lessons had helped me develop my rather basic keyboard skills to the point where I could now write credible if somewhat simplistic piano accompaniments. Since the piano was there to accompany the flute, and these pieces were intended for students, a lack protagonism on the part of the pianist wasn’t going to be a problem.
The process was guided by my coming to terms with the technology of the time. I soon found I could write the music in Encore, convert to midi file and then, by means of a floppy disc, get the keyboard in my classroom to play back the track. Gradually I was freeing myself from the limits of my plodding accompaniment style for the piano and could write more interesting parts – even physically unplayable parts if I wanted, which I usually didn’t.
Most of the melodies came initially from my doodling at the flute, but one of them actually grew out of the piano part. This was Mimosa, the first piece of the series to be written, and I remember constructing the basic two-bar piano figure first.

The slight rhythmic ambiguity of this motif, inspired the melody line which many students have found difficult to count at first sight.

I kept the pieces short enough to be approachable, and printable on two pages, so with a normal music stand no page turning was needed. The average time is just under two minutes; slightly shorter than a “single” but longer than an advert, and the length is just about enough to give a feeling of direction, of something happening, and of working to a finish. There is a basic form to each piece.
One thing I notice when playing though these pieces is my obsession with the note E2.

In 2000 I bought my Powell; flute number four in my life. This had a really full and satisfying E2 and I just kept coming back to that note, which funnily enough is often considered a “problem note” for flautists.
Just look at the opening melody of “Waterfalls:

On finishing the pieces, I asked the M.A.T school in Verona for whom I was teaching if they could do a sort of in-house edition so copies could be sold to my students. A playalong CD was recorded in the school’s studio. Of course, we were talking about sales in single figures here,
Some years later, in 2010, I finally got a publisher, Casa Musicale Eco, interested in the pieces. This was something of a breakthrough since, up to this point my only dealings with publishers (apart from those attached to record labels) had been with my Ten Studies for Flute, published by Stainer and Bell in London, back in 1985.
So I was really happy about this, and I went up to Monza, from Pescara, to record the flute tracks personally at their studio.
They did a nice job of the edition, and the book got some good reviews. But that was about it. The contract I had so happily signed stated that royalties would be paid after production costs had been recovered. In my experience, this usually means you are never going to see any royalties. I never received a statement of sales or royalties but at least the work remained available…until…
Then it got interesting.
In 2019 the entire catalogue of Casa Musicale Eco was bought by a sort of clearing house/distributor in Milan. In Eco’s website it just said: to order copies of my pieces you had to go to the other website.
OK, but, in 2025 one of my students tried to order the Six Pieces and was told they were no longer available, since stocks had run out.
So, hang on, all of the available copies had been sold, but I had still never seen any royalties.
I showed my lawyer the original contract I had signed with Casa Musicale Eco, and he said it was pretty awful. I had just been so happy at the time to get a publisher interested that I would have signed anything. As more or less I had.
I wrote to the company in Milan, Gruppo Editoriale Volontè & Co, asking when they were going to do a new print run. They replied saying they weren’t.
So, my pieces were now the exclusive property of a company who having sold all the copies, and never given me anything, had no intention of doing any reprint.
I then wrote asking, since they were no longer interested in this music, if they would release it to another publisher. Their reply said that if I wanted to lease the work, stating how many copies I wanted to print and at what price I would be selling them, they would consider a deal.
This was, of course absurd. I was being asked to pay for the right to print my music in a lease deal for a little book of six pieces. We were not talking about a Mchael Jackson song here, but these guys were geared up to working in certain way. They would buy up old catalogues, and then try to make money out of them by leasing the material around.
So, effectively my music was now dead and buried. They had no copies to sell, no intention to reprint, and were not allowing me to assign the music to another publisher without a lease deal- something a publisher of educational flute pieces isn’t remotely able to consider
They had the music dead and buried.
I momentary started work on writing “contrafacts” of the pieces: copies that were near enough to the originals without infringing copyright. I got little pleasure from this, but I felt the need to hit back in some way.
Then I prepared a parting shot in the form a highly sarcastic e-mail
I shared this e-mail with my brother before sending it, and he advised writing just once more asking for them to be reasonable, before hitting the sarcasm button and effectively burning my bridges. He said, maybe the unreasonable guy I was writing to might move on, and someone else might take his place.
So, I wrote again, and I got a reply from a new person, who had just taken over working in the leasing department, and who told me they would have no problem in assigning the music to a new publisher without conditions!
I had already sounded out my UK publishers Forton Music, and they were happy to take the pieces, and in a very short time the edition was available.

You can now order your copy from Forton, and you can also get the backing tracks in mp3.
In the meantime, all six pieces can be heard on my virtual album “Flute and Piano” which is on Spotify and other platforms.