Chiff and Fipple Forums

Check out this rare historic footage from the moment in time when Frederic the Great met JS Bach. Note how he plays the theme that Bach requests for a fugue.

Obviously we have been fingering and playing our flutes all wrong!!! Note how the 3rd fingerhole is merely a vent hole. The 1st finger just covers solid wood. Thus it can be placed close to the 1st and 2nd holes that are played by the 2nd and 3rd fingers. This makes so much more sense to me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdmcabpiGYU

Casey

I’m often amazed at how badly actors fake it, but I suppose the actor is more convincing if he or she is relaxed and making it look easy rather stiffly trying to play it right

HaHa. It was sort of OK until the close up. I recently saw a "behind the scenes" clip from the series Victoria, in which piano playing performs a central role for a character or two. I applaud their efforts. They really pulled that off successfully. I know Russell Crowe and Paul Bettanny put in a number of months practice for the role of the violin playing captain and his cellist friend in the Master and Commander film. And on a non-instrumental note, George Clooney and his cohorts tried to convince the Cohen brothers that they could sing as the Soggy Mountain Boys (with no success, thank goodness for the rest is history.) While the actor playing their guitar player is a Grammy Award winning blues musician who had no need to pretend to play.

That's bad, but not as bad as the lead actors of the movie "The Boys And Girl From County Clare" with Colm Meany (from Star Treck NG), Andrea Corr (of the Corrs) pretending to play fiddle, and Shaun Evans pretending to play flute.

It's actually a cute movie about rival Cèilidh bands at a competition, but egad... you have to ignore the faux bowing and fluting. Andrea Corr looks the worst... the bowing isn't anywhere in the neighborhood. Colm Meaney does a better job of it. I looked for some clips on YouTube that used to be there, but apparently the copyright owners have scrubbed everything but the official trailers.

It does have Colm Meany saying the immortal line during a band practice, when the flute player gets a little too improvisational: "We are not playing Jazz! Leave that to the Beatles."

Conical bore wrote:That's bad, but not as bad as the lead actors of the movie "The Boys And Girl From County Clare" with Colm Meany (from Star Treck NG), Andrea Corr (of the Corrs) pretending to play fiddle, and Shaun Evans pretending to play flute.

I had quite forgotten about that film until you described it. I do love a good Colm Meaney performance, such as when he played "Morgan the Goat" in "The Man Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain." Or that Leprechaun movie a few years ago.