Learn to Play Recorder

Lesson 19: Music from Around the World

  • Play three folk melodies in contrasting modal and rhythmic styles.
  • Hear how different scales — pentatonic, major, minor — colour different traditions.

Every culture that has a duct flute has a body of music for it.

The duct flute family — recorders, tin whistles, ocarinas, quenas, shakuhachis — appears in nearly every musical culture on earth. The melodies developed for them share a fingerprint: stepwise motion, pentatonic or modal scales, ornamentation that lives in the breath. This lesson presents three short tunes from three traditions, each fully playable on what you have learned.

The key and note names below are soprano-staff names; your alto staff shows everything a fifth lower — the Japanese tune rooted on A, the Irish tune in C major, the Russian tune in G minor. The fingerings are what matter.

Japan — pentatonic mode

The Japanese in scale is a five-note scale whose F–E semitone at the cadence gives the music its colour. The melody is the opening of Sakura, the cherry-blossom song.

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Ireland — G major with ornament

A true Irish slip jig moves in 9/8; here the idea is folded into 4/4 with a short–long lilt so you can feel the lift before tackling compound meter. Notice how each phrase springs off its downbeat — the rhythmic signature of the style.

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Eastern Europe — D natural minor

A Russian-style folk melody spanning the D natural minor scale. Plaintive, modal, with the falling phrase-ends characteristic of Slavic folk.

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Now play these

Sakura
The complete song, played without vibrato.
Sakura Sakura
A longer, more ornamented arrangement.
Kalinka
Modal, ornamented, increasingly fast through the verses.
Hotaru Koi
Almost entirely pentatonic.

When three of the songs above play end-to-end at performance tempo without restarting and without missed notes in the upper register, move on to Lesson 20.