Learn to Play Recorder

Lesson 55: Contemporary Techniques, Part 1 — Flutter Tonguing and Glissando

  • Produce a sustained flutter tongue using a rolled r or, if you cannot roll, a uvular r.
  • Slide between two adjacent notes with a controlled glissando by gradually opening or closing a tone hole.

The recorder of Berio, Hirose, and Linde is the same instrument as the recorder of Telemann — played differently.

Composers from the 1960s onward — Berio, Linde, Hirose — treat the recorder's standard pitches and articulations as a starting point, not the whole catalogue. This lesson covers flutter tonguing and glissando, the two extended techniques most easily isolated. Neither is difficult in the abstract; integrating them into musical phrases is the work.

Flutter tonguing

Instead of a single t at the note's start, sustain a continuous rolled-r trill of the tongue through the note. The result is a rough, granular texture — the note sounds slightly torn.

  • Alveolar (tongue-tip) — rolled r; do not force it if you cannot roll.
  • Uvular — back-of-throat r; the alternative when alveolar fails, with the same effect.
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Plain A — flutter-tongued A — plain A. The notation looks identical; flutter is applied to the middle whole note only.
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The whole scale flutter-tongued. Hold each note steady; the flutter is the only articulation.

Glissando

There is no slide mechanism: the pitch ramp comes from uncovering a tone hole gradually instead of in a clean step. Hold F, then slowly slide the finger off hole 4 — not lift, slide — and the pitch ramps up to G.

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F, then G, then F — the slide is between them, not in the printed note values.

Reading and writing them

Modern scores signal both with symbols added to notes:

  • Flutter: three short slashes through the stem, or flz. / Flatterzunge.
  • Glissando: a wavy or straight line between two notes, sometimes marked gliss.

Now play these

Seek out one of these published works through a music library or rental:

Hans Martin Linde, Music for a Bird (1968)
The standard introduction; flutter from the opening bar.
Ryohei Hirose, Meditation (1975)
Flutters and glissandi over a near-static pitch field.
Luciano Berio, Gesti (1966)
The dense end of the repertoire — listen first.

When you can flutter-tongue a sustained A for eight beats at quarter = 80 without the air pulsing in time with the flutter, and produce a controlled glissando between any two adjacent notes in the lower octave, move on to Lesson 56.