Flute Lessons with Maria Tamburrino

Halloween concert. San Jose. Happy fall to all returning flute pupils everywhere. A few suggestions for surprising your teacher: Check yourself out in the mirror Are your thumbs right? Left thumb overlaps. Right thumb under the flute and back. Curved fingers... Posture? Right arm swings forward a bit. And don’t forget your feet. Left foot forward and right back a bit and to the right Review your reading. Put a new piece on your stand. Track it with your finger, then your eyes.. from a good performance on YouTube Pitch: take one phrase each day..loud, soft, high, low. Tune every note in the phrase at the correct volume. Use your lips, air direction, and air speed. Use a tuner. Play a few tapers and harmonics And lastly Take that alcohol swab and clean and polish your flute daily, especially in this warm muggy weather. There...you’re ready for your lesson! See more

Happy 33rd wedding anniversary to my dear departed husband, George Cleve. Remembering your perpetual love, unsurpassable musical taste, and your creative energy. Here in Winnipeg, 1968.

Tomatoes in Berkeley? A bumper crop of sweet delicious cherry tomatoes...sending them to friends and neighbors. But, Along with that is intense heat which sears through stucco in an hour, heating my house to an unbearable 85 degrees in no time. Looking at portable ACs. For the first time in 35 years! In Berkeley! Thank God an engineer is living here!

My dear pupil Kareena Wu is graduating. She has studied with me since 2014! She has never once had a bad lesson and is a lovely person inside and out. Here is her little blurb for our year end recital program on April 27. More on this later Kareena Wu will be attending UC Berkeley in the fall. She is planning on studying Economics or Pre-Business with an intent to study at Haas School of Business. She was also accepted at UCSB, UC Irvine, and UC Davis, among others. She hopes... to continue her flute-playing, whether it be as a minor in Flute Performance or participating in the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. Kareena says that "Mrs. T instilled my love for music and flute-playing in me, and I will forever be grateful for everything that I have learned from her. My musical journey would not be the same without Mrs. T, and I am especially glad that I will be close-by next year! Kareena

This is a blast from the past! Here I am at age 8 sitting between my two loving protective brothers. It was a good Christmas. I think Santa brought me 10 dolls. Larry on the left, an electronics wizard, had just joined the national guard and would soon be deployed to the Berlin crisis. He was lucky enough to receive a new-fangled reel to reel tape recorder, the play-back of which totally entranced us in this picture! ALFREDO on my right received a typewriter that Christmas, and an electric one at that. He became an award winning physicist and musician! As I gaze at the picture I remember how listening was a huge part of our existence. We need to rediscover the art of listening to Music and also to what people say...