Flute sheet music

With or without piano

As with all melody instruments, the first thing to check is whether the accompaniment is included. Sonatas and concerti are commonly sold as a piano score with a separate flute part, but the flute part alone is also sold separately and is much cheaper. Unaccompanied works — the Debussy Syrinx, the Bach A minor Partita, the Telemann Fantasias — are complete as a single line.

Baroque sonatas add a wrinkle: a figured-bass original may be published either with the bass line unrealised, which needs a continuo player who can improvise from figures, or with a written-out keyboard realisation. The second is what most players want.

Transcriptions and original repertoire

Much standard flute repertoire is transcribed — violin sonatas, oboe concerti, vocal arias. This is entirely legitimate and often the composer's own doing, but a transcription may sit in a different key from the original and may adjust passages that do not lie well on the flute. If you are working with a recording, check that the edition matches the key you are hearing.

The original literature is deep enough that this is a choice rather than a necessity: Bach, Telemann, Quantz, Mozart, Doppler, Reinecke and Taffanel all wrote substantially for the instrument, and nearly all of it is free.

Studies and graded material

The standard study sequence — Köhler, Andersen, Taffanel and Gaubert — is out of copyright and widely available free. Modern graded albums from the exam boards are not, and they are usually the better purchase for a student because they are sequenced and include the pieces on the current syllabus.