The Flute Book: A Complete Guide for Students and Performers - Paperback

by Nancy Toff (Author)

Teachers and flutists at all levels have praised Nancy Toff'sThe Flute Book, a unique one-stop guide to the flute and its music. Organized into four main parts--The Instrument, Performance, The Music, and Repertoire Catalog--the book begins with a description of the instrument and its making, offers information on choosing and caring for a flute, sketches a history of the flute, and discusses differences between members of the flute family. In the Performance section, readers learn about breathing, tone, vibrato, articulation, technique, style, performing, and recording. In the extensive analysis of flute literature that follows, Toff places individual pieces in historical context. The book ends with a comprehensive catalog of solo and chamber repertoire, and includes appendices with fingering charts as well as lists of current flute manufacturers, repair shops, sources for flute music and books, and flute clubs and related organizations worldwide. In this Third Edition, Toff has updated the book to reflect technology's advancements--like new digital recording technology and recordings' more prevalent online availability--over the last decade. She has also accounted for new scholarship on baroque literature; recent developments such as the contrabass flute, quarter-tone flute, and various manufacturing refinements and experiments; consumers' purchase prices for flutes; and a thoroughly updated repertoire catalog and appendices.

Author Biography

Nancy Toff is the author of The Development of the Modern Flute, Georges Barrère and the Flute in America, and Monarch of the Flute: The Life of Georges Barrère. Highly respected as a writer, researcher, and lecturer, she has been a consultant to the Dayton C. Miller Flute Collection in the Library of Congress and the Department of Musical Instruments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was curator of an exhibition on Georges Barrère at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. She is a past president of the New York Flute Club. Toff is the 2012 winner of the National Flute Association's National Service Award.