Young Flautist

Such amateurs of the flute as Rockwell Kent and Charles Gates Dawes know how hard it is to play correctly. Great flautists like New York's Georges Barrere or Philadelphia's William Kincaid have taken years to perfect themselves. Flute technique is hard because a flautist cannot see his lips or the air coming from them, but none the less his lips must be properly shaped, his wind properly directed. A flautist does not blow through the flute, but across its mouthpiece to the opposite edge. The edge vibrates, sets the whole column of air in the flute vibrating. Flute tones are made by this vibrating air column, just as violin tones are made by a vibrating string. Their pitch, similarly, depends upon the length of the air column. If a flautist wants a high note, he shortens his air column by opening one of the flute holes nearest the mouthpiece.

To play even simple compositions an artist must do more than tootle scales. He has to produce overtones, color, play loud & soft. Violinists depend on "bowing" technique. A flautist depends on "lipping." By shaping his lips differently, altering the quantity and speed of the escaping air, making it strike the mouthpiece at different angles, he can produce ingenious tonal colors, change the volume, manage the most difficult harmonics. The quality of the tone is affected too by what the flute is made of. Thirty years ago most flutes were wooden. Nowadays all but five U. S. flautists use instruments of silver or some cheaper metal. Flutes have also been made of bamboo, ivory, jade, porcelain, crystalline glass, rubber, papiermache, wax and human bones.

For the last two years a young Greek-American has been astounding Europe with his proficiency on the flute. People looking at his trim beard and heavy, horn-rimmed glasses can hardly believe that Lambros Demetrios Callimahos is only 26. People hearing him pipe harmonics and flying chromatic scales think he must be twice that age to have mastered such a clean technique. Yet young Callimahos never bothered with the instrument till he was 14, when somebody gave him a tin whistle. Callimahos went on to a flute, played it all through high school in Asbury Park, N. J. where he has lived since he was 4. He was also interested in electrical research, studied law at Rutgers, left to flute instead.

Munich heard his first public performance, called him the "flute Paganini." Athens last summer crowned him with laurel. Last week Lambros Demetrios Callimahos made his U. S. debut in a Manhattan recital publicized as an "attempt to restore the flute as a solo instrument."

As always, young Callimahos played a silver flute. But it had two more keys than the ordinary flute, could play half an octave higher. Callimahos played on it everything from Bach to Rimski-Korsakov and Ravel. He included the Manhattan premiere of a Sonata by Paul Hindemith, now visiting the U. S. for the first time (TIME, April 19). Nobody wondered that Callimahos should have been appointed the youngest teacher at the Mozarteum Summer-Academy in Salzburg. Even in Debussy's The Little Shepherd and Paganini's Caprice he was perfectly at home. But critics smitten with his precision admitted that Callimahos sometimes played monotonously and often with so little volume as to be almost inaudible.

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