Four Fipple-Flute Friends (FF-FF) in concert

The concert will offer a sampler of music arranged for a quartet of recorders of various sizes, including music from different historical eras, folk music from around the world, Yiddish klezmer songs, and musical representations of birds.

About (FF-FF)

Every Friday afternoon in Duluth, Bill Bastian, Shelley Gruskin, Karen Keenan, and Penny Schwarze meet to play fipple flutes, aka recorders. (“Fipple” refers to a construction feature of end-blown flutes such as recorders.) Together, these four friends explore music from the 13th through 21st centuries, representing the wide span of time in which the recorder has been in use.

Owing to the widespread use of the recorder in elementary-school music instruction, some may think of it as a children’s instrument. But throughout its history, the recorder has been played by professional musicians at the highest levels of skill. Between the extremes of school-age beginner and virtuosic professional lies a range of opportunities for the adult amateur to take up recorder as a tool for discovering musical repertoire.

Shelley Gruskin, an internationally-recognized professional recorder player, leads the group. The other three players, though accomplished musicians in other areas, took up the recorder only recently. They discovered in their retirement years that learning new instruments is not only possible, it’s stimulating and fun!