Hi, I'm Keith Bragg
and I'm the piccolo player in the Philharmonia Orchestra.
This is my instrument, the piccolo.
It's the smallest instrument in the flute section
and it's roughly half the length
of an ordinary concert flute.
The notes that it plays are an octave higher than those
of the concert flute.
And it's a transposing instrument
which means that when you read on the stave say a C,
the third space of the treble stave
and play that,
the note that is actually heard is an octave higher,
two ledger lines above the stave.
It has three distinctive colours of register.
The low register is soft and mellifluous.
(piccolo playing a scale)
In the middle register,
it becomes rather sprightly, perky.
Quite pretty.
(piccolo playing)
And then in the high register it can become very strident
and actually can cut through the sound
of an entire orchestra playing at full volume
and add a kind of edge to the sound.
(piccolo playing)
It's really an orchestral instrument,
more than a solo instrument.
There are some solo works written for the piccolo
but in culinary terms I think of the piccolo
as being like the spice in the orchestra,
like the chilli.
And whereas people would like to eat a meal
that has chilli in it,
they'd rather not eat a meal which is entirely chilli
and for that reason I think it is at its best
when played in the symphony orchestra.
It's made of African blackwood,
the keys are silver.
And although it's in the flute family
and it's half the length of a flute,
it's actually very different
to the flute in terms of construction
because the concert flute has a cylindrical body
and a conical head which tapers.
And the piccolo is the opposite way around,
the head is cylindrical and the body tapers.
And so it comes down to a thin point there
and just flares at the end.
So, although it looks exactly the same,
it's actually quite different.
People have tried to make flutes on the same bore as...
Piccolos on the same bore as a flute.
That's to say with a cylinder body.
And whilst that does a lot of things very well,
it just doesn't quite play in tune as well
as this old system which is basically from further back
from when the flutes where made in the 18th century.
Which is, this is the way they were made
and no one's really managed to come up with a schematic
for the body of the piccolo
cylindrically which works as well.
The embouchure is very similar to the flute
and that's very similar
to blowing across the top of a bottle.
So if you basically cover half the top of a bottle
with your lower lip
and blow against the opposite edge,
you create a fipple which splits the air
and starts the air vibrating
and that's how the sound on the flute is made
and the sound on the piccolo is made in the same way.
You're simply covering some of this hole
and blowing against the opposite edge.
Some people think the piccolo should be played
with a much tighter embouchure because it's smaller.
I rather favour the method which...
where you simply apply pretty much the same embouchure
that you use on the flute to the piccolo
and produce the sound that way.
When I was 12 I was asked in a school class
what instrument would you like to play
if you could play anyone
and I put my hand up and said the piccolo.
And they said well you can't do that,
you can't learn the piccolo first, you have to start
with the flute.
Because that's the way people are taught,
always on the flute first.
So eventually I started the flute,
more or less forgot about the piccolo
and throughout my college years I was a flute player
and just looking to be a flute player
but I ended up getting a job
as a piccolo player in a ballet orchestra.
Now the ballet repertoire is very specific
and has an awful lot of piccolo solos in,
so this was the perfect job,
in which to learn to become a professional piccolo player.
And eventually I did and the job in the Philharmonia came up
and I auditioned and got it.
And then it sort of hit me at that point that
that had been my starting point when I was 13,
when I first stuck my hand in the air to say
that was the instrument I wanted to play.
There's an old adage,
it's the traditional role of the piccolo
because you get a lot of rest
there are a lot of times when you're not playing,
when you're simply counting the bars
and then you get these little rushes
where you're suddenly terribly audible.
And the old adage is that you're either scared to death
or bored to death
as a piccolo player
because you're counting,
you know you could be counting for ages
but then when you actually play it's kind of quite scary.
If you take the full symphony of Tchaikovsky,
you do not play in the first two movements at all.
The first thing that you play is in the Scherzo
and it's a very hairy solo
that comes rattling in.
You need to start on the flute,
you need to become a good flute player first of all
because the flute's the instrument,
it's the kind of base instrument of the family
and it teaches you all the basic principles
of how to play the flute
and how to make the family work,
if you like.
Then you need to have the chance
to have experience on the piccolo.
And you need to have good pitch
because you're so often stuck at the top of the chord
and if your pitch is wayward
then you really can be very difficult.
They're are similar skills to those of a flute player
but this idea,
this notion of being prepared to sit for a long time
and keep your concentration
so that when you do finally come in you can play your best.
So I suppose that's a fairly distinctive skill
that you need as a piccolo player.
Because of this thing I was saying earlier about the bore,
being not quite so well sorted out,
if you like, as the flute,
you do need to have more flexibility
in using different fingerings
so because not all the notes naturally fall
in the right place in the way they do pretty much
on the flute.
So high C for instance tends to be quite a flat note
unless you're playing it very loud.
So I have quite a few fingerings for top C
so I would start with...
(piccolo playing C)
then... (piccolo playing C).
That one's a little bit sharper.
Or high C-sharp would be...
(piccolo playing C-sharp)
Each one of those is just a fraction higher
than the previous one
and that enables me to play the C-sharp
in the place it fits,
in the dynamic within the chord
without having to do too much with my lips.
So in general I'd say you use a lot more unusual fingerings
on the piccolo than you do on the flute.
(piccolo playing single tonguing)
It would be single tonguing with me just saying,
ta ta ta then double tonguing it would be,
(piccolo playing double tonguing)
that's going taka taka taka taka ta, in two.
And then triple would be
(piccolo playing triple tonguing)
and then two against three,
double against triple will be
(plays flute music)
Those are all absolutely standard for the flute
and for the piccolo.
And indeed for the alto and the bass,
the other instruments in our family.
- [Narrator] If you've enjoyed learning
about the instruments in the orchestra,
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(orchestra playing Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique)
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