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The Teachers Who Taught Me: Part Two – My Calling

By the time I was finishing middle school and had been without a consistent flute instructor for more than a year, I was faced with a very difficult decision. Do I walk away from playing flute? My parents had already invested so much time, energy, and, quite frankly, money, fostering my pursuit of music. I felt guilty anytime I considered walking away after all they had done for me. Perhaps turning my focus toward choir and toward private voice lessons would do the trick? Alas, this pathway was closed off to me when, by the end of middle school, I had gone from being a boy soprano with an almost freakish 4 octave vocal range to a very deep bass that struggled to go beyond even 2 octaves. No… Maybe I needed to just sing in choir and focus on creative writing (a new hobby I was beginning to enjoy).

                The answer to this question would ultimately come in the form of my next great flute instructor, Ms. Ruth McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy had a youthful exuberance, having just finished her own college studies. I found her very relatable and down to earth. But, perhaps most importantly, for the first time in any of my studies, she gave me CHOICES. She allowed me to work on the pieces that appealed to me the most. She still pushed me to learn and to appreciate standard flute repertoire, but when it came down to what I performed, I was able to choose for myself.

                That may sound obvious, but I suppose a lot of life’s greatest breakthroughs are plainly obvious. By being permitted to choose what I performed, I felt like I could take charge and take control, creatively, of my music. It was my music now. Something I could take pride in, something I could fashion and form with a sense of personal responsibility. This simple change in approach gave me a massive boost in motivation and overhauled my personal work ethic. Practicing didn’t feel like a chore anymore, and I began to enjoy playing flute in a way I never had.

                Unfortunately, my time with Ms. McCarthy was short lived, as she only taught at YMV for a little more than a year. But her impact was tangible. She helped me to light an inextinguishable passion for flute music. So much so that as soon as I found out she was going to be leaving YMV, I was despondent. In my mind, there was no way I could find another teacher who would inspire me so much. I was entering high school and for the first time the thought of studying music began to feel like a tangible goal to me – it would only be possible if I had an absolutely excellent teacher, though.

                It was around this time that my family had started attending a new church. As had been the case with my first teacher, Mrs. Lowe, there was a flautist in the congregation who would play special music. However, in this case, she usually played along with her husband, a cellist. I recognized them both because they had performed at YMV several years before with a harpist colleague, a trio known as The Adagio Trio. Their names were Michael and Kathy Daniels. Michael, it turns out, was the principal cellist for the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, while Kathy had served as a substitute for the orchestra’s flute section and had previously performed with all kinds of ensembles after finishing her studies at the Cincinnati Conservatory, where Michael had also studied. My parents and I believed that Mrs. Daniels might just be the Godsend we were in sudden need of. After a quick conversation with her, it was discovered that she also homeschooled her two daughters, and that she had been hoping to find a good science teacher for them. Since my mom was a science teacher, they were able to quickly strike up a deal where I would receive flute lessons from her in return for science lessons for her daughters.

                To say that Mrs. Daniels was a foundational teacher for me would be a drastic understatement. She and I hit it off immediately – she knew exactly how to coax out the best in me as a musician. Throughout the remainder of my time in high school, she introduced me to orchestral excerpts, helped me prepare for competitions and auditions, and she eventually expanded our flute lessons to two hours from one so that I could have the extra training I would need to prepare for college auditions. Comically, she also tried her best to break my habit of apologizing anytime I made a mistake. “Don’t say sorry,” she would say – to which I would inevitably respond, “sorry.”

It brings me great joy when I recall the genuine joy in her eyes when I received my acceptance letter from the Liberty University School of Music. By the time my lessons with her were complete, I had been studying with her for nearly 4 years – the most time I had ever spent with a single flute instructor. It made our final lesson a very bittersweet experience. If my memory serves me correctly, we spent our final lesson playing some of my all-time favorite duets – duets we had played together throughout my studies. To this day it makes me smile when I pull out Kuhlau or Muczynski duets – and I’m left reminiscing about those old golden days.

An Introduction – Why The Flute?

Posted on by David Stoeltzing

     Welcome! This is my first foray into the exciting world of blogging. I thank you in advance for having patience and understanding if there are some clunky and awkward elements in this first post. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

Deep breath.

 

      My name is David Benjamin Stoeltzing, and I play the flute. I have played the flute since I was about nine years old, but my desire to play began long before then. My earliest memories of the flute and wanting to play begin when I was a young boy attending a mega church with my family outside of Jacksonville, FL called Trinity Baptist Church. The enormous church had a notably diverse and multi-stylistic worship service. Their music and worship program ran the gambit of featuring some of the most notable contemporary worship of the time (i.e. Keith Green and Amy Grant) to some of the most beloved hymns in the Christian tradition (It Is Well, Come Thou Fount etc.) The music pastor was a man with a deep furrowed brow (I remember thinking as a young, five-year-old, that he didn’t have any eyes. Sitting hundreds of feet up in the balcony even the large projection screens were hard to see, and the shadows would completely mask his eyes. I was indignant when my mother, Christine, broke down in a fit of laughter when I asked her what happened to his eyes.) At some point during my family’s long tenure at the church, Trinity dabbled in having a flute choir, a program with which my mother readily agreed to participate. After all, she had played the flute as a young girl/teenager, and she had been eager to have an opportunity to play again. After several weeks of rehearsals, they began playing during various services. I remember during their performances, I would sit with rapt attention, absolutely mesmerized by the colorful and shimmering sounds emanating from these relatively small instruments. I would watch the large screens on either side of the stage closely, waiting for the camera to pan over so I could see my mom “on tv.”

 

      My mother also had an eclectic love for films featuring beautiful musical scores. “Beautiful,” in my mind, seemed to always mean that there were a lot of incredible flute solos. A personal favorite was (and continues to be) Thomas Newman’s sparkling winterscape score for Little Women. Performed by the London Philharmonic, this particular soundtrack utilized flute over and over again on theme after theme – Newman’s masterful composition nuanced and stunning. Even though mom usually played this score to set a calm tone during our monthly deep-cleaning around the house, I would be transfixed listening to the subtle alterations of tone color the flautist used to paint all kinds of different pictures. Another favorite, the score to Steven Spielberg’s Hook, composed by John Williams, featured a breathtaking flute solo on the track “You Are The Pan.” (SPOILER ALERT) This scene is the pivotal moment in the plot when a young boy, the Lost Boys’ oracle, puts his hand on Peter’s (Robin Williams’) face, and declares triumphantly that this is, indeed, THE Peter Pan. My young self would sit in front of the TV absolutely glued to the sheer artistry, wishing I could also make something so achingly beautiful. That I could also make music that moved others so deeply.

 

     When I was around seven or eight years old, my family went to a huge flea market in the Hampton Roads Area of Virginia. While perusing the shelves of a huge VHS video collection, my brother Austin and I found VHS copies of “The Lord of The Dance” and “Riverdance.” Both shows starred Michael Flatley, and were designed to tell a story through elaborately choreographed Irish step dancing numbers. Both scores, Riverdance by Bill Whelan, and The Lord of The Dance by Ronan Hardiman, are made up of traditional Celtic folk music. Because the flute is the oldest known instrument in the history of human kind, it features prominently in most forms of folk music around the world, and Celtic music is no exception. Composed largely for dancing and festivals in ancient Ireland, it’s rich with fast-paced jigs, reels, and gentle lilting lullabies. The melodies are almost always handled by the flute or by the accordion because of their dexterity and ability to handle the quick turns and ornaments that folk music demands. With this latest discovery, I started to realize just how vast the expressive capabilities of the flute really were.

 

     As a young boy with a burgeoning desire and need for an expressive/artistic outlet, I felt like the flute really presented itself as a natural extension of who I was supposed to be. Picture the scene from Harry Potter when Olivander tells the eleven-year-old Harry “the wand chooses the wizard!” Music, in my mind, was nothing less than magic, and the flute was a wand I could wield to make the world just a little bit more beautiful. As a young Christian, I was raised believing that touching one life with the love of God, just one life, is absolutely priceless. In the same vein, if beauty is just a reflection of a beautiful loving God, couldn’t music be a tool that touches someone’s life? Even if it’s just one other person? This isn’t to say that my humble beginnings with the instrument weren’t a fierce daily struggle. I had to take the top of the flute (the head joint) off of the instrument and work for over an hour every day just to get a sound to come out at first. Then the next week I was left doing the same thing when I suddenly couldn’t get any sound to form after the head joint was reattached to the rest of the instrument. In all actuality, there was a time when I wanted to give up on the flute. When I realized that it was going to be much harder work than I had realized and that it was going to take serious commitment if I was going to actually be any good at it. But the more I thought about giving up, the more I realized I couldn’t just give up. I had invested too much time and too many of my parents’ resources to just throw in the towel. So I stuck with it and started having my first real breakthroughs. With each breakthrough, with each bit of growth I was able to tangibly see (or rather, “hear”) I became more and more excited, and more committed to see this thing through.

 

     Eventually, around the end of my sophomore year in high school, I realized that this was a passion I could see myself pursuing as a career. Although I also deeply loved English and enjoyed both reading and writing, I soon realized that I wanted to study and pursue music. I couldn’t meaningfully see myself doing anything else with my life. My flute professor, Alycia Hugo, at Liberty University, once told me (when I asked her what her best piece of advice would be to someone considering a career in music), “It has to be the only thing you can do.” I believed that was true for me. And I still do.