When I was young, I played the flute. It wasn’t something I enjoyed very much, or felt I was very good at: when I first brought it home in third grade and tried to make a sound, I quickly gave up, dismissing my ineptitude as the fault of the instrument (I decided it needed valve oil, something I now understand is only necessary for brass instruments). I never blame the instrument now — if I can’t play something, I assume at once that the fault is my own — but playing the flute has come to mean so much more than a search for perfection. It’s about how the instrument feels when I’m holding it, what it does to my body, how it makes me breathe; the body made living by the inanimate object of the instrument.

             It’s not that flute-playing is a matter of codependency. Perhaps, though, it is a symbiosis. Nowadays, when I pick up the flute, the fact that I can’t play in certain complex keys, master difficult runs, or reach the highest or lowest registers gives me a sense of myself as an imperfect being. The fact that I must manipulate something outside myself to make a sound that I alone cannot, reminds me that the body, too, is an instrument, something that can be wielded. Then, there is the aspect of poise: when playing the flute, you must sit up straight, find the right embouchure, and breathe deeply. You must also be frugal with the commodity of breath— sometimes, the score demands an exorbitantly long sostenuto, and you must draw upon reserves you didn’t know you had or risk interrupting the music.

             The flute — an edge-blown aerophone dating back to prehistory — has been a polarising instrument for centuries, subject to both animosity and worship. In India, Krishna is traditionally depicted playing the bamboo bansuri, symbolising his aristocratic nature and ability to produce heavenly music. In Germany, there’s the pied piper of Hamelin, luring plague-ridden rats from the town and drowning them in the river before doing the same to the children. And for Native Americans, the Hopi diety Kokopeli lives in the common imagination as a famous flute-playing seducer. These mythologies present the flute as a twofold symbol— on one hand, of heavenly, eternal love, and on the other, of seduction and evil. Historical perspectives on the flute are equally mixed. Mozart claimed that it was unable to properly emulate the human voice given its limited emotional palette, and only wrote a handful of flute pieces during his long and prolific career. Long before that, Plutarch wrote that Alcibiades, the Athenian general, “Refused to play the flute, holding it to be an ignoble and illiberal thing… the lyre blended its tones with the voice or song of its master; whereas the flute closed and barricaded the mouth, robbing its master both of voice and speech.” Indeed, there’s something alluring about the way the sound produced by string instruments resonates within the body of the performer. The body merges with the organic material of the wood; in contrast, the modern flute, made of silver or nickel, resonates outwards. It’s warmed by the breath, its hollow is made resonant.

             The flute, when I came to play it, was considered a “girly” instrument. So, while I enjoyed playing orchestral music in my teenage years — the camaraderie of it, the excuse it was to get out of the house in the volatile after-school hours — I always wished that I’d chosen a “neutral” string instrument instead of the effeminate flute. This makes sense. In middle school, I began to understand that being a girl meant being perceived as a human being with an asterisk. Playing the instrument became something I did reluctantly, the way one perpetuates an embarrassing but comfortable affair. The more I grew into an awareness of gender, the more the act of telling non-musicians that I played this instrument made me cringe. Often, this revelation was met with raised eyebrows and effusive exclamations that locked me into some claustrophobic, unwanted identity. Still, perhaps as a rebellion, I continued to play. I even played my way into a conservatory, where other instrumentalists pursued their craft with a doggedness I neither possessed nor envied. It’s no wonder that, in the interim after graduating and before attending my MFA, I abandoned the flute altogether. I threw away my scores and my cleaning rag, tucked my music stand into a forgotten corner, and stored the flute deep in my storage closet, resolving to devote myself to capital-W Writing. After all, I had been doing that all along in the practice rooms where I was supposed to be preparing for juries. To be taken seriously, I believed I couldn’t play the flute.

             The flute wasn’t always considered a feminine instrument. In ancient Greece, it was considered improper for women to play the flute: aulêtrides were considered mere prostitutes. Besides, it disfigured the face. According to Plutarch, even Athena threw away the flute because she saw her puffed and swollen cheeks reflected in the water of a spring. In 16th century France, the harp or piano was considered much more conducive to showcasing the qualities of elegance and grace so favored for intimate salon performances and, at the height of the German classical music scene, flutists were almost exclusively male. In 1752, German composer Johann Joachim Quantz stated that the player must “strive as much as possible to acquire the tone quality of those flute players who know how to produce a clear, penetrating, thick, round, masculine, and withal pleasing sound from the instrument” (emphasis mine). Still, ambivalence prevails: in The Art of Playing the German Flute (1793), John Gunn refers to two opinions regarding the manner in which the instrument should be played. First, that it should be done with “fullness of tone throughout.” Second, that “this kind of tone is contrary to the very nature of a Flute; the character of which, from its affinity to the female voice, is softness, grace and tender expression.” Gunn goes on to ridicule this dichotomy, but his language implies that grace and tender expression are antithetical to fullness of tone, fullness of being. There’s a suggestion that those who present as feminine are not capable of encompassing the full range of human experience— that they are derivative. There’s certainly no acknowledgement of the fact that femininity is not always soft, graceful and tender. We may forgive him these misconceptions without denying that they have persisted into the present day.

             Nowadays, I have found myself being drawn to the flute again. It isn’t, I think, only the fear of wasted effort, or an attempt to embrace my femininity in a way that was impossible before. Simply put, playing the flute makes me a better writer. Here’s a confession: sometimes, when I’m writing, I am afraid to breach the “fullness of tone” of which Gunn speaks, which in reality has nothing to do with gender at all. Part of me is convinced that depicting suffering in my work will infect the reader with suffering. When I pick up the flute, I am reminded on a visceral level that this is a bunch of baloney: it’s impossible, without the full range of human emotion, to animate the instrument at all. Putting pain into the object of the instrument and being applauded for it rather than reviled is something that I need, a piece of evidence about the true order of things. I remember it’s possible to transmute sorrow into fullness of tone, into grace, and into tender expression. Whenever I play, I sense that taking human experience and moving it through the parameters of an instrument is a valuable thing, something another person might find essential.