I came of flute-playing age in a world where everyone was trying to sound like Julius Baker. My teacher and his generation of Baker students had successfully "cloned" what people referred to as "the Baker sound." People even referred to his students as coming "out of the Bakery."
I started that way too. I prepared for my Juilliard audition by listening very carefully to a recording of Julius Baker playing the slow movement of a Mozart concerto, and made a little mark every time he changed color. During my audition I changed either my tone color or my dynamic to something different from what I had been doing at crucial points. I guess it worked. He took me as a student.
Julius Baker taught by example. He phrased by instinct, while playing the notes exactly as written with excellent rhythm, excellent intonation, and a beautiful sound in every register and every dynamic. He never talked about musical structure, physical form, support, or breathing.
His secret to teaching was being able to pick students he thought would be successful. He loved being surrounded with adoring students, and was particularly impressed with the ones who could play the piano, as well as the ones who were attractive. He valued appearances, and encouraged me to dress better than I did. He was right: people judge female flutists by how they look. I had no clue how to dress.
Julius Baker was a beekeeper who lived with his wife and children on a small farm (Baker’s Acres) growing mostly wildflowers for the bees. He learned to weld from his hospital roommate (he was there recovering from a heart attack). He jogged every morning, and encouraged his students to do the same. He was a ham radio operator, and communicated with people all over the world. During the late 1940s and mid 1950s he had his own recording company (The Oxford Recording Company). I saw the library of recordings in his basement. I believe he was also a pilot.
He wasn't much of a reader, except of the newspaper, and someone told me that he was kind of a genius with the stock market.
Julius Baker's first instrument was the violin, but he found more success as a flutist (his father was a flutist--and they wrote letters to one another in Yiddish after he left home for Eastman). He told me that the reason he went into music was so that he could get an education. He was a unique human being who was respected and adored by his colleagues, at least from what I saw. He loved being "a regular guy," and would (and did) start conversations with anyone about anything.
Julius Baker’s favorite musicians were Jascha Heifetz, David Nadien, and Emil Gilels. He found ways to make the flute sound like a violin (a passion that I shared with him), and he could blend with any instrument in the orchestra. He had an array of colors on the flute including some that were kind of brassy and buzzy in the low register, and had a beautiful rolling vibrato that, unlike other flutists of the time, involved the whole air column (like the vibrato of a singer) and not the mouth and throat (you can listen to John Wummer for an example of that). I can’t stand listening to Wummer, who, as the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic, represented the state of the art before Baker.
Julius Baker was a beekeeper who lived with his wife and children on a small farm (Baker’s Acres) growing mostly wildflowers for the bees. He learned to weld from his hospital roommate (he was there recovering from a heart attack). He jogged every morning, and encouraged his students to do the same. He was a ham radio operator, and communicated with people all over the world. During the late 1940s and mid 1950s he had his own recording company (The Oxford Recording Company). I saw the library of recordings in his basement. I believe he was also a pilot.
He wasn't much of a reader, except of the newspaper, and someone told me that he was kind of a genius with the stock market.
Julius Baker's first instrument was the violin, but he found more success as a flutist (his father was a flutist--and they wrote letters to one another in Yiddish after he left home for Eastman). He told me that the reason he went into music was so that he could get an education. He was a unique human being who was respected and adored by his colleagues, at least from what I saw. He loved being "a regular guy," and would (and did) start conversations with anyone about anything.
Julius Baker’s favorite musicians were Jascha Heifetz, David Nadien, and Emil Gilels. He found ways to make the flute sound like a violin (a passion that I shared with him), and he could blend with any instrument in the orchestra. He had an array of colors on the flute including some that were kind of brassy and buzzy in the low register, and had a beautiful rolling vibrato that, unlike other flutists of the time, involved the whole air column (like the vibrato of a singer) and not the mouth and throat (you can listen to John Wummer for an example of that). I can’t stand listening to Wummer, who, as the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic, represented the state of the art before Baker.
While I was in my twenties you could hear the Baker Sound in the flute sections of every American orchestra, and also in orchestras all over the world. But during the last decade of the twentieth century flute playing took several post-Baker turns.
One big factor was that instruments improved. During the Baker era there were basically two great American flute makers: Haynes and Powell. Then there were spinoff companies like Brannon (my Powell flute was made by Bickford Brannon before he started his own company) that made all kinds of improvements. Japanese companies started making flutes that were easier to play, and spoke particularly well in the low register (so there wasn't a need to buzz).
Along with physical improvements to the instrument, excellent teachers of the post-Baker generation found new ways to teach, and a lot of new repertoire appeared involving the whole flute family. Suddenly flute players had an enticing array of musical and intellectual challenges.
Flutists (and all musicians) have been able to record themselves easily, as part of regular practice, for half a century. We can slow recordings down and scrub messy passages clean through careful practice. We can even look at images of the sound waves on our phones, and work on the contours to make everything sound perfect. Clean playing that is perfectly in tune and in perfect rhythm wins auditions, and a conservatory education is all about teaching students to win auditions.
I have heard some of that audition-winning clean-as-a-whistle flute playing in person, and have certainly been impressed. The current generation of teachers working in colleges and conservatories (people who began teaching in the twenty-first century) have done an excellent job at training highly capable flutists.
But I doubt that I would be able to distinguish the unique voice of one pristine flute player from this generation of flutists in their twenties from another from behind a screen or on a recording. And there is something kind of sad about that.
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