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Jean-Paul Wright- Dear Flute Player, What Exactly Are We Doing?: Fifty Conversations About Music, Mistakes and the Joy of Playing the Flute

Jean-Paul Wright- Dear Flute Player, What Exactly Are We Doing?: Fifty Conversations About Music, Mistakes and the Joy of Playing the Flute

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Jean-Paul Wright- Dear Flute Player, What Exactly Are We Doing?: Fifty Conversations About Music, Mistakes and the Joy of Playing the Flute

Author: Jean-Paul Wright
Paperback book exclusively signed by the author

About

What if we’ve been taking the flute far too seriously?

After more than fifty years of playing the flute, Jean-Paul Wright has reached several important conclusions. Perfection is suspicious, wrong notes are remarkably short-lived, expensive instruments do not come with talent included, and somewhere in every flute section there is almost certainly a battle for power, prestige and biscuits.

Dear Flute Player, What Exactly Are We Doing? is a collection of fifty warm, funny and occasionally mischievous conversations about the peculiar business of being a flute player.

From the mythical search for the world’s best flute player to the tyranny of perfect notes, terrifying first notes, headjoint obsession, low-flute politics, vibrato, embouchure, confidence, audiences, flute choirs and the curious belief that somebody else always sounds better than we do, Jean-Paul turns an affectionate eye on the habits, anxieties and glorious absurdities familiar to flute players everywhere.

But beneath the mischief lies something rather more important.

This is not a book about becoming a better flute player. There are already plenty of those. It is about remembering why you wanted to play in the first place.

Written for professionals, students, teachers, enthusiastic amateurs, returning players and anyone who has ever stared at a flute and wondered why yesterday’s beautiful sound has apparently left the country, these fifty conversations offer humour, reassurance and the occasional uncomfortable truth.

You may not agree with everything in this book.

Jean-Paul is rather hoping you won’t.

Because after more than half a century of playing, listening, teaching, travelling and talking to flute players around the world, he remains convinced of one wonderfully simple thing: You play the flute. That’ll do.

About Jean-Paul Wright

Jean-Paul Wright has been playing the flute for more than fifty years and is still trying to work out what exactly everyone is doing. His musical life began in a small English village, where an early fascination with drumsticks eventually led, by a route nobody seems entirely able to explain, to the flute. He went on to become a professional musician and has spent much of his working life in the international flute world. Along the way he has performed, taught, travelled the world, made rather a lot of podcast recordings and talked to countless flute players, from complete beginners to some of the most celebrated names in the profession. He has discovered that, regardless of ability, geography or the price of the instrument in the case, flute players tend to share remarkably similar worries, ambitions, mishaps and moments of sheer joy. Known to some as The Flute Geezer, Jean-Paul writes about this wonderfully peculiar world with affection, humour and the accumulated observations of half a century spent inside it. He remains convinced that music should contain rather more joy, considerably less anxiety and far less worrying about what everybody else is doing. He lives in England and is still counting rests.

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*We are not able to accept returns for instruments supplied outside the European Union.  This is because we would be charged import duty and VAT on re-entry into the UK which we would not be able to reclaim.  Orders accepted outside the EU are on an irrevocable order basis only.

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