THE JAMES PAPPOUTSAKIS FLUTE COMPETITION

The following article first appeared in The Flutist Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 3 (Spring 2000) in a slightly different format.

A beautiful, living sound:
a tribute to James Pappoutsakis

John Ranck, D.M.A.

“When I was a boy and received my first flute, I found a new means of expression. That I could blow across a silver pipe and produce a beautiful, living sound and say something with that sound was deeply gratifying. To me, it was a miracle.” The pursuit of that miracle, that beautiful, living sound, was to occupy James Pappoutsakis for the rest of his life.

While the actual birth date of James Pappoutsakis is shrouded in mystery, his widow, Louise, said he picked August 15th as the date and the year was “either 1910 or 1911.” He was the youngest of three boys and was born in Cairo, Egypt. The Pappoutsakis family moved to Boston when James was 4 years old. His eldest brother, Michael, was a librarian at the Boston Public Library, and his other brother, Ippocratese, was a theory/composition teacher and orchestral conductor at the University of Vermont at Burlington. Neither of his parents was involved with music.

Pappoutsakis began his music studies in his local high school when he was in 8th or 9th grade. His early training was with Harry Moskovitz, a pupil of Georges Laurent, principal flute with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a student of Philippe Gaubert. Early in his career, Pappoutsakis was a featured soloist with the Zimbler Sinfonietta. The Zimbler Sinfonietta was a string orchestra that played without a conductor. Bernard Zighera, principal harpist of the BSO, heard him play at the Boston Public Library in 1936. Mr. Zighera asked his student, Louise Came, to get word to Jimmy that Koussevitzky was looking for a flutist and Mr. Zighera would like to arrange for Pappoutsakis to play for him. In those days the conductor apparently had sole responsibility for hiring new personnel. Pappoutsakis’ memory of the audition was that he played the a minor Bach sonata and the Chaminde Concertino. When Koussevitzky asked his librarian to “go get Daphnis”, Pappoutsakis told him he knew the excerpt from memory and played it for him. In 1937 Pappoutsakis was invited to join the BSO. As a thank you gesture, he invited Louise to dinner. Four years later they were married.

Louise’s father was in the leather business and her mother was a housewife who played piano and violin. She was a Salzedo student at the Paris Conservatory during 1932-34. Upon returning to Boston, she began study with Zighera. While Pappoutsakis and his wife both joined the BSO in 1937, they never performed together in recital. When I suggested, in a recent telephone conversation, that this might have kept the marriage together, Louise replied “I think so.” The Pappoutsakises had a daughter, Anita, who studied piano and harp as a child.

Mr. Pappoutsakis appeared as soloist several times with the BSO (see below), including performances on their tour of Asia. In addition to his orchestral playing, Mr. Pappoutsakis taught at the Boston Conservatory, Wellesley College, Brandeis University, Longy School of Music, Boston University and the New England Conservatory. He was a member of the Berkshire Woodwind Ensemble and the Eric Simon Ensemble.

Pedagogic principles

As indicated in the opening quotation, tone quality was of paramount importance for James Pappoutsakis. One of his strongest memories of Laurent’s playing was his tone, which Pappoutsakis described as “expressive and warm, capable of varied inflections and nuance changes. It was as though he was using the voice. It was a beautiful sound that just soared up in an effortless way. If you were sitting in the second row of the second balcony in Symphony Hall, if he had just a few notes to play, it would be like a shaft of sunlight soaring over the audience through the orchestra; it was absolutely breathtaking.” Laurent achieved this luminous tone through his strong belief that the instrument should be treated with the same feeling as the human voice. His whole theory was that you sang into the instrument and that you didn’t blow into it.

Pappoutsakis believed that tone should not be pushed, that it should be “self-propelled like a feather that is carried on the breeze endlessly, whereas something that is forced,even though at first it may have the drive of a bullet, the bullet will spend itself at some point, whereas a feather can go on forever.”[Quarterly p. 3-4] He felt that articulation or finger technique was just a matter of hard work, whereas tone is conception, tone is something that applies to everything. For Pappoutsakis, it was a combination of imagination and searching yourself from within — playing the instrument “with affection as opposed to fighting it, so to speak,” and that, to Pappoutsakis, came first. After all, he said “quality of tone is the first thing anyone hears.” [Quarterly p. 19]

Pappoutsakis also had good ideas regarding practice. He said “In order to get 4 or 5 hours of practice, you have to have an elapsed time of several more hours. You cannot sit down for 5 continuous hours and do any kind of practicing that requires thinking as well as just practicing through the notes. You have to have an afternoon, an evening, or a morning to sit down and explore how to produce various tone colors, better phrasing, produce a better tone. You have to have time to think things out and to explore possibilities of tone color. I suggest to students that at the end of the day, when they are in top condition and everything is working beautifully after practicing, that they get in a room by themselves and improvise.” [Quarterly p. 16]

Repertoire

Pappoutsakis felt the French school of composition was important to teach. He felt that, “although it’s not the greatest music in the world, [it] offers such a challenge to flute players, that it is important to teach for variety of tone colors, imagination and finesse. It’s almost as though you’re dealing with pastel or water colors, instead of paint.” [Quarterly p. 18] He would assign the Paganini Moto Perpetuo, arranged by Safranow, to be practiced with a variety of tonguing. He felt that daily practice of this six-page etude would “keep the tongue in shape” (!).He would also assign simple studies saying “when you are trying to work on good articulation, you shouldn’t have to be fighting with the notes. You want to concentrate on the quality and speed of the staccato, as well as the various types such as portamento, louré, marcato, sortié, etc.” [Quarterly p. 18]

He didn’t teach contemporary music although he felt “the works of Persichetti, John Heiss, Muczynski, Schuller, Joyce Makeel, Robert Dick and some others fall into that category which does not distort the tone quality or degrade the player.” In his interview with Ms. Lawrence, he singled out Robert Dick’s The Other Flute as a good source for “the electric flute, the multiple sounds and other new techniques.” [Quarterly p. 18]

The Winning Audition

According to Pappoutsakis, quality of tone is of overriding importance in the audition setting. Tone “is the first thing that anybody hears and therefore appraises you by it. I have been on many audition panels . . and after awhile they all sound good . . . Then all of a sudden, someone behind the screen will play and you will listen to someone whose tone quality is so sparkling, so alive, with such personality and you say, forget all the others, and he becomes a finalist. After a few days you may find 3 or 4 who had that electrifying quality. [I]t is only at that point that a superior technique may determine the results since they all have superior tones in order to be a finalist.” [Quarterly p. 19]

It was important for Pappoutsakis that a winning candidate had a gorgeous quality of tone as well as accuracy in playing dynamics where they are marked and a good rhythmic sense. Further elements were musicianship and a knowledge of traditions of the orchestra excerpts. This awareness of tradition needs to be coupled with flexibility to be able to adjust to suggestions from the conductor. He also thought the flutist should have an “’intangible’, confidence you might call it. I won’t say aggressiveness, because that to me is deplorable, but a confidence that it’s right. Because after all, a conductor is helpless up there, he just has a stick, so he has to depend on the confidence of the player to be there with him every time. He doesn’t like to feel you are asking ‘was that ok’ when you are playing.” [Quarterly p. 19]

Perhaps the most enduring memory among Pappoutsakis students was his generosity as a man. Lois Schaefer says “[a] side of him that was perhaps more important [than his flutistic theories] was the kind of man he was. To me, personally, as a new member of the orchestra [in 1965], he was tremendously supportive, giving me advice when I asked for it, but always bolstering my sometimes faltering confidence.”

After his death, his widow received letters from former students that uniformly praised his teaching, but also expressed gratitude for what he had taught them about living, about being a good, decent human being. His “warmth, kindness, support and concern.” Another anecdote from Rick Soule, a former student: “Mr. P. often ran late with his lessons due to BSO schedule, and he unfailingly completed his teaching day before heading home. If he kept us late in lessons, he would always pull out his wallet and try to hand us money for a cab ride home.” Clearly, Mr. Pappoutsakis was a warm, caring teacher and man.

Tributes to Mr. Pappoutsakis

After Pappoutsakis’ death in 1979, less than a year after he retired from the Symphony, a Pappoutsakis award for Excellence in Flute Playing was established at Tanglewood and is awarded to students in The Young Artist Program each summer. Eleanor Preble and Chris Krueger established a scholarship in Pappoutsakis’ name for flute lessons for one student yearly at the Wellesley College. His students honored him with a chair bearing his name in Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory and the Powell flute company donated a flute to NEC in his memory.

He had 18 students who received Fulbright or other foreign study awards, former students played in the Baltimore, Cleveland, Montreal, Oakland and Seattle symphonies. One is a flute maker, another a professor, another a former member of the Dorian Wind Quintet. Two of his students made the finals at the audition for his position.

The Pappoutsakis Competition

In addition to these tributes, friends, students and colleagues founded the James Pappoutsakis Memorial Fund to honor their beloved associate. Since Mr. Pappoutsakis was unfailingly supportive of his students, the group decided to form an organization that would stimulate activity among young players who exemplify the excellence in performance that James Pappoutsakis demonstrated in his playing and nurtured in his teaching. Thus the James Pappoutsakis Flute Competition was born. Since 1981 the group has organized the annual event, which is open to flutists at the Boston-area schools at which Mr. Pappoutsakis taught and the Berklee School of music. In 1982, the board decided to commission a new piece for the final round of the competition each year, thus contributing to the flute repertory.

The first round of the competition is held “in camera” with participants playing behind a screen. Four competitors are chosen for the final round, which is open to the public. First and second cash prizes are awarded, with the winner also playing a public recital that includes the commissioned work for that year. For the past several years, this recital has taken place during the Greater Boston Flute Association’s Flute Fair in the spring.

In addition to the competition, the Board of the Pappoutsakis Memorial Fund has undertaken the following new projects:

• a tribute to Mr. Pappoutsakis at the National Flute Association convention in Washington, D.C. in August, 2002 that will include a recital by former students, an overview of the recordings of this wonderful player, and a panel of former students who will share their memories of Mr. P and talk about his teaching;
• recording a CD of Mr. Pappoutskakis’ playing as way to reacquaint flutists around the world to the playing of this wonderful musician;
• publishing an anthology of the pieces commissioned during its first 20 years. These pieces represent some of the finest new writing for the flute and will be an invaluable collection for people interested in contemporary music.
• we have developed this web page to present information about Mr. Pappoutsakis, notes on former winners and commission composers and information on the current competition.

Calling all friends of James Pappoutsakis

The Pappoutsakis Memorial Fund board would like to include a section in our anthology called “I Remember Jimmy”. Anyone who knew him and has a favorite memory they would like to share, please send it to the James Pappoutsakis Flute Competition, Attn: I Remember Jimmy, 16 Tremlett Street, Boston, MA 02124. Tax deductible donations to support our work can be mailed to that address as well.

APPEARANCES WITH THE BSO AS SOLOIST

• 8 July 1960 - Tanglewood - Bach Concerto for piano, flute and violin
• 29/30, December 1967 - Boston - Telemann Concerto in A for flute, violin and cello
• 14 July 1968 - Tanglewood - Telemann Concerto in A for flute, violin and cello
• 12 July 1974 - Tanglewood - Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 in C

Bibliography

Lawrence, Eleanor. “Inverview with James Pappoutsakis.” The National Flutist Association Newsletter III:2 (February, 1978): 3, 16-20.

Schaefer, Lois. “A Tribute.” The Boston Globe (March 11, 1979).

© 2000 John Ranck, D.M.A.

The Competition is being funded in part by contributions from local flutemakers:

Brannen Brothers, Verne Q. Powell Flutes,
NNI, Inc./Nagahara Flutes, Burkart-Phelan Flutes, Mancke Flutes,
Emmanuel Flutes, Falls House Press, Keefe Piccolos,
Music Espresso, Spectrum Music, and Yesterday Service.