Rosanna Ter-Berg: the curious flautist

Rosanna Ter-Berg has never been exactly sure where she fits in. Not that this is a problem for her – quite the opposite. An accomplished classical solo flautist with a stack of awards and prizes to her name, Ter-Berg is also an improviser, MD, singer, teacher and facilitator working in a range of genres from klezmer to Brazilian music.

At a recent gig at Bristol's Ham Farm Festival, I gave up counting the number of different flutes she had on stage, along with a loop pedal and an even larger selection of percussion.

Ter-Berg created an Amazonian soundscape, layered harmonies using Brazilian pífano flutes and taught the audience to sing a wordless klezmer-style Nign. We were invited to contribute to an eerie, overtone-filled soundscape featuring Ter-Berg's solo Romanian kaval, before she performed variations on Les Folies d'Espagne from memory and finished it all off with Steve Reich's trance-like Vermont Counterpoint, using her own 10-part backing-track. ‘Well, you have to do something in lockdown’, she explained.

The wind whisked away her score, but she didn't miss a beat: ‘This is why you all need to learn to improvise!’

A modern musician?

Ter-Berg warns me at the start of our conversation that she loves to go off on tangents.

After her performance, I thought ‘connections’ was a better word – she drew these between the different genres and instruments, and encouraged the all-ages audience to make their own. ‘I don't think that all the world should be so separate. I think it's very old fashioned [that view]’, she explains, before expanding on this: ‘If you look at classical training and musicians from the past – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach – they were improvisers, they were show people, they were orators. A lot of them were using their voice; they were composers. There was no distinction between instrumentalists and everything else.’

First steps

I ask when she first heard the flute. ‘I remember someone coming to my primary school and I was just attracted to the fact that it was shiny’, she explains. She ended up being given a violin but was not a fan. ‘I was learning with another boy around the corner and his mum taught the flute. She would be teaching the flute underneath where we were doing the violin. I could hear that the violin sounded bad, because of the intonation.

‘I asked to play the flute, but I was really small as a child and so wasn't allowed. As soon as someone tells me I can't do something, I just decide, well, that's what I'll do!’

She waited until she was nine before finally getting flute lessons. ‘I was at a state primary school, and there were four of us in a group sharing a flute – it was disgusting!’

Despite this less-than-ideal start, Ter-Berg quickly progressed. But as she ticked off milestones and exams, she sensed there was something more to flute playing that she was missing.

The late musician and educator Francesca Hanley, herself a flautist, heard Ter-Berg practising one day. ‘I was about 16’, Ter-Berg recalls. ‘She showed me some things which blew my mind. I just had no idea of what you could do – sound production, looking at harmonics, ways of understanding how to get a better lower and higher register. It was only 20 minutes, but wow! I think something drew us together and I ended up learning with her for a year.’

Of no fixed abode

A few years later, torn between studying music and art, Ter-Berg chose music. She took the performance course at the University of Leeds, partly for the Erasmus year abroad, which she completed at the Strasbourg Conservatoire.

‘When I was in France, I had this chamber music teacher’, she recalls. ‘One day, he just put his head in his hands as if he was going to start crying. It was very strange. Eventually, he came out with: “you just don't sound like a French flute player!”’

Many conservatoire students would be disheartened, but Ter-Berg's curiosity kicked in.

‘I started thinking: what does a French flautist sound like? I was very classical then, and was really listening to the sound-worlds of the classical music industry there. He was right that their vibrato is thin and quick; the sound is super neat. They don't make big sounds, they make beautiful sounds. And I'm not scared of making what some people might deem ugly sounds.

‘I just started hearing things very differently. Oh, that's an American sound; oh, that's a French sound; oh, that's a German sound.’

Still seeking ‘something more’, once back in the UK, Ter-Berg studied for a Master's in flute performance at Trinity Laban, finding an inspiring example in Anna Noakes. ‘She wears what she wants; she says what she wants. There aren't that many classical music teachers or players that are like that.’

Facing the competition

Ter-Berg experienced great tension between her search for expression and the expectations of the classical music world. ‘I was learning that you don't need to fit into a box’, she explains, ‘but also struggling with feeling like I had to fit in to be taken seriously or to get anywhere. I was finding my original sound, but then also hearing from other people that you shouldn't have an original sound’.

She spent several years on the classical soloist track, entering national competitions and auditioning for young artists’ schemes, winning more than 10 and performing in the Park Lane Group and Countess of Munster programmes. ‘Ahead of and above everything was competition’, she says. She experienced ‘a combination of getting pushed and then doing well’, adding: ‘That's very confusing – to know if you're enjoying that or if you're not.’

On the other hand, she sees the benefits: ‘There are many good things that you can get from this, actually. And it did put me in a position where I was getting noticed in ways that, had I not gone down that route, I probably wouldn't be where I am now.’

Flute players face some of the most intense competition in classical music. ‘If there was a flautist on the panel, often I wouldn't even get through the first round – if there wasn't, I would win. Flute players didn't like what I was doing, but everyone else did. I wasn't doing what I should be doing; I was taking risks.’

Ter-Berg has thought a lot about the effects, positive and negative, of this intense competition. ‘It's so fierce with flautists, and that starts at such an early age. If you're just looking at where you can play, you're told “orchestras”. There are two spots, potentially three. So, the competition starts very, very young.’

She draws a comparison with gymnastics. ‘If you look at what they were able to do a hundred years ago versus what they're able to do now – competition makes people stretch. You don't even realise what's humanly possible, and I think that happens with music: faster, louder, higher.’ This also extends to new or different techniques. ‘Just because you hear someone else do that, you want to do that too, and do that better.’

Ter-Berg realised this intense focus came at a cost; she didn't want to stop paying attention to art, design, colour, or other genres of music.

‘[The flute is] my tool in order to enter a much bigger world with artists, dancers, improvisers and in comedy’, she explains. She sought opportunities to learn about different traditions, finding affinities with the klezmer tradition and music from the north-east of Brazil. ‘You have to do your own homework!’

The facilitator

Just as she sees herself as a musician rather than a flautist, Ter-Berg describes her education work as ‘facilitating’ instead of ‘teaching’. ‘You're not there to be the best’, she explains, referring to her role alongside students. ‘You're there to hold and to create whatever else is needed.’

Ter-Berg trained as a music leader with Spitalfields Music, and she has led projects for City of London Sinfonia and the early-years project London Rhymes.

I ask her what advice she has for teachers and learners, and she refers again to the idea of a tool. ‘Ask yourself, why?’, she says; ‘Why are you doing all this? It could be storytelling, which is great. What is it that the child or adult wants to get out of this?’

This desire to serve others and get to the truth seems instinctive, as is her drive. ‘I got told the whole time: the flute is too hard, don't do it! Quit! And I think I'm just really stubborn.’

Stubbornness combined with wide-ranging curiosity seems to be Ter-Berg's magic fuel. She might not fit into a tidy box, but it strikes me that if she's creating and listening, she'll always be in exactly the right place.

rosannaterberg.com