The Babel Flute

by Yulia Berry

The Babel Flute turned exactly one year old! But what is exactly The Babel Flute?

• The Babel Flute is a multilingual platform where flutists from many countries share their unique research and articles with the global flute community.
• The platform offers instant and exceptional quality translations in over 100 languages ​​and aims to connect flute players from all over the world.
• The Babel Flute has a magazine, forum, classifieds, job/collaboration board, online store, calendar of historical flutists, quizzes and flute games.

Since the launch of The Babel Flute project on March 20, 2021, over 75,000 people from 136 countries have visited the platform in 15 months (according to Google Analytics).

Since the magazine is purely for flute players and narrowly focused on flute topics, this is an absolutely incredible result, which also reflects the huge interest and demand for this project among flute players in many countries. Thanks to the powerful and very high-quality translation function, the magazine can be read in more than 100 languages, erasing any language boundaries.

Celebration

To celebrate the first anniversary of our flute unity and success, in May 2022 we held “International Babel Flute Days” for the first time! The event was free and took place at the Web Flute Academy, the parent company of The Babel Flute.

On May 18 and 19, 2022 we took a ride in a time machine and walked together through Ancient Babylon, visiting its famous sights: the Tower of Babel, the Babel Bridge, the Babel Temple and the Babel Castle.

There we met dear friends from all over the world who came to celebrate the unique Babel Flute project! We had 98 guests from many countries!

The music for the event was written by our dear friend Manuel Carranza Cueto, a famous composer and flutist, regional director of The Babel Flute for South America and its active contributor.

Watch the video below:

The International Babel Flute Days kept doors open for a whole month after the event.

Our speakers

On Day 1 we first met at the famous Tower of Babel. In the categories “Analysis & interpretation”, “Playing in concert”, and “Career & management” our speakers had the following presentations:

• Dr. Heidi Kay Begay “Building Collaborative Relationships: Initiate, Cultivate, and Scale” (in English)
• Ebele The Flutist “Career of a Performing Flutist in Nigeria” (in English)
• Ebele’s performance: “Tomorrow -The roots”
• Eileen Gilligan “Guide to Lensky Aria by P.I.Tchaikovsky” (in English)
• Sofia de Salis “Effective organization of flute practice in preparation for a performance” (in Russian)

After the Tower of Babel we moved to the Babel Bridge with the categories “Composers & biographies”, “Ensembles & repertoire”, “Flute history”, and “Ethnic flutes” and the following video presentations:

• Marco Felicioni “Traditional Chinese Flutes” (in Italian)
• Manuel Domingo Carranza Cueto “Peru: Music For The World” (in Spanish)
• Vilma Campitelli “Women composers – Women who wrote the music history” (in Italian)

On Day 2 we met at the Babel Temple, where our speakers presented topics in the following categories: “Contemporary music”, “Artificial intelligence” and “Flute making & repair”:

• Yulia Berry “Holograms – The Future of Performance” (in English)
• Marco Gaudino “Device to improve the sound of the Flute” (in Italian)
• Ludwig Böhm “Theobald Böhm: Munich inventor of the modern flute!” (in German)
• Monica Moroni “Songs of the electric dragonflies by Gabrio Taglietti” (Music performance)

Then all guests were cordially invited to the Babel Castle to watch video presentations and discuss topics in the categories: “Pedagogy”, “Flute technique”, “Physiology”, and “Children education”.

• Enrico Sartori “Flute methods to use with intermediate level students!” (in English)
• Onorio Zaralli “How to approach a new repertoire” (in English)
• Lea Pearson “The Missing Piece in our Musical Training: The Body” (in English)
• Mirella Pantano “Vibrato according to psychokinesthetic vision” (in Italian)
• Cate Hummel “The Hidden Flute Pieces in Tone Development Through Interpretation” (in English)

Day 2 ended with a live session, where our speakers answered why they chose their topics for the video presentations.

Special gift

All participants of the live session received a special free gift: The Babel Suite by Onorio Zaralli for flute quartet, written by Onorio Zaralli to celebrate the anniversary of the first year of the Babel Flute!

The Babel Suite begins with disharmony. The voices of the flutes go through individual paths of development, sometimes arguing and disagreeing with each other, but merge in perfect harmony at the end of the Suite. It symbolizes the triumph of unity while remaining unique.

The idea of the Suite reflects the idea of the Babel Flute to turn the history of the Tower of Babel around, calling instead of disunity, rejection and misunderstanding  to unite in the beautiful art of playing the flute, despite any differences, help each other and interact in harmony.

Day 3: After the party

We invited all participants to sign the guest book and download a personal Certificate of Participation.

We received a wonderful feedback from our guests:

Personal certificates of the participants:

International Babel Flute Days were very interesting and passed with incredible success. They were filled with a huge amount of interesting and useful information and allowed us to simultaneously get in touch with the unusually interesting history of Ancient Babylon, which gave the name to our project.

We want to thank our speakers and guests for making this event unforgettable!

Yulia Berry

Web Flute Academy | The Babel Flute | | New England Flute Institute

Yulia Berry is an American flutist of Russian origin, founder of Web Flute Academy, The Babel Flute and New England Flute Institute, creator and developer of the popular “All about Flute” Mobile app, highly experienced flutist and mentor teaching at all levels, with a Doctor of Music Arts degree focused in Flute Performance, Pedagogy and Music Education from the Saint Petersburg State Conservatory named after N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov (Russia).