Unwinding the Wind (2016)

Native American flute solo — 6 minutes

Video

Audio

Score (Free Download)

Program Note

The Native American Flute is an elemental, magical instrument, which in its simplest form of playing produces a pentatonic scale of 7 notes covering the range of a tenth. After a distinguished career (including serving as solo flute with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Professor of Flute at the IU Jacobs School of Music), James J. Pellerite has spent decades exploring and developing a command over the possibilities of this simple instrument; he should be credited as co-composer of this work, which is a collaborative response to the vocabulary he has developed, his passion for expressive detail and his inspiringly inventive artistry.

Unwinding the Wind opens with a folksong-like phrase, pentatonic, pure and universal as the wind, but the middle phrase of this opening section introduces chromatic elements, altered colors, and a more individualistic expressiveness. These elements become more pronounced in the dramatic section which follows, unleashing an array of gestures and nuances which marry the primeval sound of the flute with personalized characterizations: playful, pleading, mysterious, struggling, rocking — culminating in a primitively wild section which Pellerite describes as “Rite of Spring on the Native Flute!” An avalanche follows that gives way to a return home. The opening stanza reappears as a memory, more freely expressive in its metrical structure but recaptured with a resolute determination.