First Festival Solos for Flute: 20 Easy Solos with Piano Accompaniments.

First Festival Solos for Flute: 20 Easy Solos with Piano Accompaniments, with CD, composed or arranged by Larry Clark and Sean O'Loughlin. Carl Fischer, 2013. www.presser.com; 32 pp., $12.99.

First Festival Solos for Flute is a series of 20 easy solos with piano accompaniment. The pieces are composed or arranged by Larry Clark and Sean O'Loughlin, who profess in their introduction that the solos are, "both musically fresh and more indicative of the types of contemporary music that the students will encounter as they develop into their later years in instrumental music." Standards by Schumann and Beethoven augment the original beginning material, and it is difficult to see how this collection will somehow shape the student's later years more than other available collections. That said, the music is generally lyrical and fun to play. Performance notes are included in an appendix, and the collection has an audio CD that contains audio MP3 files and PDF files of the piano accompaniments.

The collection includes many pieces that offer the beginning student slurred stepwise motion, for example, the lovely "Summer Breeze" (Clark). Clark's "Morning Reflections" and a "Dance" by James Hook (1746-1827), require a bit more difficult legato, being comprised of larger intervals. The rhythms are as elementary as the interval content, and fairly repetitive. All the pieces are written in one to three flats, and are kept within a very narrow but comfortable midrange of the instrument. Even with such limitations, the content of the music is quite entertaining, and the collection would make a useful supplement to beginning flute methods. At this level, suggested breath marks would have been helpful and could have indicated phrasing to a beginning player. Having the accompaniments available to print, though less convenient than the usual piano booklet, makes sense and keeps the volume at an affordable price of $12.99.--Reviewed by Douglas Warthen, Southern Illinois University Carbandale