Noah's Notes: musings of a 17-year-old musician (no.8)

One of the more interesting experiments on prejudice involves disseminating among a group of children various instruments and asking them which one they should like to play. If they are old enough then they will gravitate towards the trinity: piano, violin and cello, and in that order. Though I cannot claim to have tried this out myself in any rigorous or scientific way, I will also bet that the younger children will create a far more random data pattern, responding individually to the sonority of each instrument.

But why should exposure weight our subjects towards these three? For while there have been as many great works written for the piano as there are bones in a butcher's shop, most of the important works for flute remain children of the baroque and early classical. If a flautist wants to play something that isn't Mozart, they must either find a transcription of some other great work or transcribe up something themselves (a veritable pursuit). Yet the lonely flute, parched but for the tone poems and harp collaborations fed by the French, is not a universal template.