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.

Lesson 41 — double tonguing (the tongue control needed for flutter).
Lesson 11 — cross-fingering control for glissando partial-shading.
Steady sustained tone for at least eight beats.

Flutter tonguing (alveolar and uvular).
Glissando via partial hole-shading.
Extended technique vs conventional tone production.

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

The recorder has had an active twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Composers from the 1960s onward — Berio, Linde, van Hauwe, Ryohei Hirose, Maki Ishii — have written for the instrument as if its standard repertoire of pitches and articulations were a starting point, not the whole catalogue. The next two lessons walk through five of the most-used extended techniques. None of them are difficult in the abstract; what is difficult is integrating them into musical phrases. This lesson covers flutter tonguing and glissando — the two techniques most easily isolated. Lesson 56 handles multiphonics, whisper tones, and harmonics.

Flutter tonguing

Flutter tonguing is sustained articulation. Instead of a single t at the note's start, you produce a continuous trill of the tongue against the alveolar ridge — the sound a singer makes rolling rr in Spanish or Italian. The result on the recorder is a rough, granular texture — the note sounds slightly torn. In notation, flutter tonguing is shown by three short slashes through the note stem.

Two ways to produce it:

Alveolar (tongue-tip) — rolled r. About two thirds of players can do this naturally; the rest cannot. If you cannot roll an r, do not force it.
Uvular — back-of-throat r, the French and German one. The vibration is in the soft palate. This is the alternative when alveolar fails. The texture is slightly different but the effect is the same.

Pick whichever you can produce, and use it consistently.

Plain A — flutter-tongued A — plain A. The notation looks identical; flutter is applied to the middle whole note only.

The whole scale flutter-tongued. Hold each note steady; the flutter is the only articulation.

Glissando

A glissando on the recorder is a pitch slide between two notes. There is no slide mechanism — the slide is produced by uncovering or covering a tone hole gradually, instead of in a clean step. The effect is a smooth pitch ramp between the two notes. The technique works best between adjacent fingerings; long glissandi (an octave or more) are possible but require multiple finger crossings and are part of the advanced contemporary literature.

Pick the simplest case first: glissando from F to G on the soprano (or from B-flat to C on the alto). To finger F, hole 4 is closed; to finger G, hole 4 is open. Hold the F, then slowly slide the finger off hole 4 — not lift, slide — so the hole opens gradually. The pitch ramps up to G. The slower the slide, the longer the glissando.

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

Reading and writing them

Both techniques are signalled in modern scores by symbols added to notes, not by new note shapes. You will see:

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

If you compose a passage that uses either, write the marking once and trust the reader to apply it.

Now play these

There is no library piece on this site that uses extended techniques — this is a gap we acknowledge. Seek out one of the following published works (any of which is available through a music library or rental):

Hans Martin Linde, Music for a Bird (1968): The standard introduction to extended techniques on the recorder. Flutter tonguing in particular is built into the texture from the opening bar.
Ryohei Hirose, Meditation (1975): Japanese composer; sustained tones, flutters, and glissandi over a near-static pitch field. Try it after a month of drill, not on the first day.
Luciano Berio, Gesti (1966): The dense end of the contemporary repertoire. Mostly the technique is multiphonics and whisper tones (Lesson 56), but flutter passes through. Use as listening repertoire first; play it only after both contemporary lessons.

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.