Issue 16

Learning the recorder is more than child’s play, Derek Lim discovers, as four pros bring the instrument every kid loves to hate to the Singapore stage

If, like me, you grew up in Singapore attending one of our local primary schools, you’ll probably remember with a smile the hours you spent running around, throwing paper planes and pulling pranks on other students. Then there are the memories you’ve tried to forget – being picked on by the class bully, detention, painful sessions in the school dentist’s chair… and those darned recorder lessons.

Ah, the joy of music! Having to sit down for that precious half-hour each week on a sweltering afternoon, treating ourselves to the decidedly unmusical sounds of each other’s plastic Yamaha pipes while the memorably buxom music teacher exhorted us to blow it the right way (doo, doo, doo) week after week, was enough to put many off classical music for good.

So what are four elegant German women doing travelling the world over with this instrument of torture? Making it sound (and look) good, natürlich. Performing here as part of the annual Singapore Arts Festival, the Quartet New Generation (QNG) – made up of recorder virtuosos Susanne Fröhlich, Andrea Guttmann, Hannah Pape and Heide Schwarz – vows to change your concept of the much-maligned instrument.

Speaking from a studio in Frankfurt where the foursome had just played, they explained that the recorder was just a victim of bad planning. ‘The recorder is used in so many primary schools, but it’s actually not a good instrument to start with,’ Fröhlich says. ‘The only reason why so many schools use it is because it’s very cheap and very portable. Nowadays, up to 25 students play the recorder together in a classroom. And it just sounds horrible! So, most children have a very bad image of the recorder.’

When played well, it can astonish and delight like any other wind instrument. Sweet and pure in timbre, a recorder quartet playing in harmony is capable of producing music that calms the soul. But that’s not what the QNG’s most interested in.

‘We met ten years ago while studying the recorder in Amsterdam,’ says Fröhlich. ‘Our first goal was to play only contemporary music [music written by living classical composers] and for three years we did that. But because we also wanted to participate in competitions, we also started to play early music.’

A typical QNG concert juxtaposes the very old – such as 16th-century composer John Bull’s serene, church-like ‘Hexachord Fantasia’ – against the very new – 20th-century Kazimierz Serocki’s ‘Arrangements’, which features some of the most novel uses of the recorder, vividly conjuring images of spooky birds fluttering wildly and trilling to each other amid eerie murmurs and animal cries. Think learning to play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ was a big deal? Try these virtuoso pieces, which employ lightning-quick finger work and sophisticated breath control that lies far beyond the reach of most recorder players, even the most dedicated amateurs.

Like the famous Kronos Quartet, which premiered pieces by such luminaries as Philip Glass, QNG has worked in close proximity with many contemporary composers in an effort to modernise the recorder repertoire. ‘Some of the music written by young composers for us uses elements of other music. For example, “Wicked” by Dutch composer Michiel Mensingh uses drum ’n’ bass music. In that piece he also recorded drum loops, which we play on the stage from a CD player while we perform,’ Pape says. In Singapore they will play the second part of this work, ‘Space Odyssey’, which QNG promises will sound exactly like its title.

For early music, the girls use traditional baroque recorders, which look much like your garden-variety recorder but are made of wood and in different sizes. The modern works, on the other hand, call for exciting, percussive sounds that one can only get with the contemporary bass recorders, made by Herbert Päetzold. Resembling a totem pole more than a musical instrument, the largest – a skinny two-metre-long behemoth – dwarfs practically all performers and weighs 15kg; the smallest measures a mere 10cm. The full set of recorders weighs in at 60kg.

The ladies love their music and the audiences they play for – the experience is anything but tortuous, so discard those childhood notions. Dwell instead on Schwarz’s recollection of a concert in Japan last year: ‘It was Christmas and we were a little sad that we weren’t home with our families, but when we played “Silent Night” the audience sang together in Japanese with us. We were so touched.’

The Quartet New Generation Recorder Collective will perform on 17 & 18 Jun see here for more information.