10 hard flute songs to learn

For all its grace and delicacy, the flute has inspired an abundance of intensely challenging music. Music that’s as challenging to take on as a performer as it is to reflect on as a listener. At the upper end of the repertoire, flute music gets very serious indeed.

And this article makes straight to that upper end, and doesn’t stray from it. It presents ten of the most technically, expressively, and musically demanding pieces ever written for the instrument. 

Whether you’re new to the game with big aspirations, or an advanced player looking to take on a fresh challenge, you should find your needs met by this selection of the most severe masterpieces. 
 

Hard flute songs to play
 

1. Flute Concerto by Jacques Ibert
2. Etude No. 21 in D by Marcel Moyse
3. Quartet by Sofia Gubaidulina
4. A Pierre by Luigi Nono
5. Density 21.5 by Edgard Varèse
6. Flute Sonata by Sergei Prokofiev
7. Voice by Tōru Takemitsu
8. Couleurs du vent by Kaija Saariaho
9. Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux by Elliott Carter
10. Oxygen by Julia Wolfe

1. Flute Concerto by Jacques Ibert

The music of Jacques Ibert is championed for its eclecticism. It’s hard to say something about his style as expressed in one work that’s just as true of his approach to another. He was a composer that went his own way, and did so each time he picked up the pen. 

He certainly did just that with his Flute Concerto, whose soundworld seems to exist in a realm of its own - echoes of Claude Debussy aside. Ibert wrote it for a slimline orchestra, but these reduced forces take away none of the piece’s power. That’s partly because the soloist does so much of the heavy lifting, with its dense passagework and vivid melodic colour. 

The first movement is far from easy, but the finale is the most audibly testing. Endless cascades of notes dart around the stave, requiring breathtaking acrobatics on the keys. What’s more, many of these rapid sections are marked staccato, and separating notes when you’re playing at this speed needs flawless control of breath and tongue.

2. Etude No. 21 in D by Marcel Moyse

Where better to look next than the work of virtuoso flautist - and dedicatee of Ibert’s concerto - Marcel Moyse? The legendary player did it all, performing in orchestras, as a soloist, and on countless recordings. A graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, he played in the French style, with a distinctively powerful tone sustained by quick vibrato.

He also worked long and successfully as an educator, guiding many great names of the generation of virtuosos that came after him. As part of this work, he composed numerous studies, many of which are compiled in he 24 caprices-études. All the etudes in this set are supremely tough, but the 21st is especially beastly.

It consists almost entirely of a stream of semiquavers. At least rhythm’s easy, but that’s all the help you get. You have to navigate enormous, sudden leaps in phrases that combine slurred and staccato articulation in an awkward and counterintuitive way. And if all that isn’t enough, it’s marked ‘presto’. Semiquavers in that tempo are unbelievably quick.

3. Quartet by Sofia Gubaidulina

Sofia Gubaidulina is responsible for writing some of the most boundary-pushing music of the modern era. In 1977, she applied this notorious experimental sensibility of hers to the relatively unfamiliar setting of the flute quartet. The result? A work that asks four flautists to bring nothing less than everything they’ve got to every moment of every performance.

Her Quartet can be performed on either four concert flutes or four alto flutes. It comprises five diverse movements, which together explore every possible way in which four of these instruments can combine. From the sparse conversations of the second movement to the sustained ethereal harmonies of the fourth, it’s all there.

Those fourth-movement harmonies are a good example of the piece’s toughness. These harmonies aren’t constructed by the ensemble, but by individuals playing multiphonics, an extended technique that produces several notes at once. One player even has to tremolo between one multiphonic and another. This really is as hard as it gets.

4. A Pierre by Luigi Nono

Like Gubaidulina above, Luigi Nono is a name synonymous with complex, imposing music. His experiments made a massive impact on the classical music scene in the 1950s, driving many composers to completely rethink everything they thought they knew.

1985’s A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum has that explosiveness, but it’s a brand of explosiveness marked by great technical difficulty. It’s composed for contrabass flute, contrabass clarinet and live electronics. And in true Nono style, it deprioritises parameters like harmony, rhythm and form in favour of timbre, space and effect.  

Usually picked up by players more at home on a concert flute, the contrabass can often seem a tricky prospect. With the addition of Nono’s demands, toughness reaches new levels. Once you’ve deciphered his cryptic notation, you’ll discover bewildering directions, such as: ‘seamlessly shift between pitchless air flow to a musical tone and back’. That isn’t easy.

5. Density 21.5 by Edgard Varèse

Ever the hard figure to pigeon-hole, Edgard Varèse for once seems a natural fit in the context of challenging music. He had a totally unique way of thinking about music and composition, preferring to think of his work as ‘organised sound’. Many dismissed it in the early 20th century, but they knew little of the influence he would have on musicians to come.

All that said, Density 21.5 does see Varèse operating on slightly more conventional territory - but that’s not to suggest that there’s anything ordinary about this standout work for solo flute. In the piece, motifs come and go in what seems like a musical stream of consciousness. In spite of the massive variety of ideas, it all flows so seamlessly. 

But only if they’re handled properly. And that is arguably the greatest challenge that Density poses to the player - stringing this material into a coherent artistic statement. And that certainly takes both masterly technique and a seasoned musical awareness. 

6. Flute Sonata by Sergei Prokofiev

There are few things that Sergei Prokofiev did better than write highly virtuosic sonatas. It’s said most often about his numerous works for piano in the genre, but the same applies to the sole sonata that he composed for flute - Op. 94 (later transcribed for violin). It’s one of the finest and hardest flute sonatas out there.

In 1943, Prokofiev was engrossed in writing music for the epic film Ivan the Terrible. In the midst of his work, he felt compelled to find some respite in a quite different, more intimate project. This was the four-movement sonata, and he composed it quickly and excellently - and his equally excellent film score suffered not one bit. 

There’s a lot to take in with this sonata. It’s a roller-coaster of musical gestures, each an obstacle that’s immediately replaced by another one - and this process goes on for over 20 minutes, encompassing an unbelievable amount of material. Perhaps more than any other piece on this list, it pushes the player’s stamina to the brink.

7. Couleurs du vent by Kaija Saariaho

The typically immersive and enigmatic experience of Kaija Saariaho’s music comes with particular vigour in Couleurs du vent, for solo alto flute. Composed in 1999, when chamber music was still just about top of her agenda, the work's nebulous form gives it an organic quality. It sounds, moves, feels like a living thing.

At least it should, and does in the right hands. That’s the task facing every player brave enough to take on this composition - to breathe life into this beast. It’s a big work, too. A rendition lasts sixteen minutes, which is a lot for a solo wind instrument. Especially when there’s barely a pause in the performance. 

Saariaho’s notation is exquisite but intimidating. Sometimes a second stave appears, marked with vocal intonations that the player has to supplement musical notes with. This makes passages that are already technically difficult even harder to execute. Not to mention the algebraically complex rhythms, snap multiphonics, glissandi, overblowing…

8. Voice by Tōru Takemitsu

From sweeping film scores to Irish folk-song arrangements - and by way of everything in between - the unflappable Tōru Takemitsu has done it all, and done it his way. And his distinctive way always seemed to suit composition for solo instruments. 

That might be down to his ability to explore vast soundscapes, despite being restricted to one instrument, or the performative character of his music might just thrive in that setting. Whatever it is, it works phenomenally well in Voice, a work that, through the sculpture of sound, even of spoken word, empowers the flute with a unique way of communicating. 

Once again, before the playing even starts, careful study of the notation is required to understand how Takemitsu makes all this possible. For starters, barlines mark intervals of time, not beat groupings, so rhythm involves an entirely different way of thinking. And there’s the small matter of incredibly dense material that’s ridden with unfamiliar extended techniques.  

9. Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux I by Elliott Carter

Always smiling, always jovial; Elliott Carter doesn’t seem to be the kind of personality that would be behind the intensely powerful music that bears his name. Founded on fusions of avant-garde techniques with an idiosyncratic handling of harmony, his work is marked by a really distinctive compositional language that has won many admirers.

Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux I was completed in 1984, and written to mark the 60th birthday of composer Pierre Boulez. The work, a duet for flute and clarinet, establishes an unrelenting contrapuntal dialogue between the two, each of them having to make spontaneous gestures of extreme shape and intensity. Boulez would have loved it. 

The clarinet doesn’t have an easy time, but the flute’s challenges will be plenty for now. It has some of the most intricate rhythmic notation that you’ll see in these ten works, and when there are only two players, it’s as hard as it is crucial to play it exactly as written. The title translates to ‘rough breathing/slow breathing’. Safe to say it’s mostly rough.

10. Oxygen by Julia Wolfe

To round things off, we’re going all out. And few compositions go all out like Julia Wolfe’s masterpiece, Oxygen. There are pieces that give a flautist a hard time, and then there are pieces that give 20 flautists a hard time. Oxygen is one of those pieces - though two of those flautists are actually playing piccolo.

Wolfe is another for whom writing volatile music is a speciality, and in Oxygen she’s in her comfort zone. Zoom in on the detail and you’ll notice that much of its constructed from the smallest - and simplest - of motifs. But repeat them, adapt them, and spread them across 20 staves, and soon a multi-layered, rippling musical edifice will appear before you. 

In performance it strikes as a great torrent of sound. So much happens that it’s impossible to take it all in. But that’s the point - you should experience the overall effect, not hear the individual notes. To create and sustain this condition, 20 players are working absolutely flat out, ploughing through never-ending textures, barely stopping for breath.

Your next steps for flute music
 

As far as difficulty is concerned, these pieces can be found at the summit of nkoda’s collection of flute sheet music, which contains a lot more than just eye-wateringly hard pieces. The app’s works span various genres, periods and skill levels. And if you are just starting out we have created an article just for you with some easy flute songs anyone can learn

If you’ve no interest in dry eyes though, you’ll find these works and others like them in the advanced flute music playlist. It’s curated by nkoda’s musicologists, and tailored to flautists ready to take on the greatest challenges in the flute repertoire. 

But, if you’re keen to take a step back, that’s quite understandable too. You’ll find some works that are easier to swallow on in the intermediate flute music playlist. 

The finest flute music in history might also be of interest - you can see what made the cut in the best flute songs and best flute players blog article. Poulenc and Nielsen feature, along with classics such as Debussy’s Syrinx and André Jolivet’s Chant de Linos. And there’s some Baroque repertoire, too - sorely missed in this article.If you are just starting out, we have also created a list of easy flute songs anyone can learn.