Q&A with Superstar Flutist Emi Ferguson

You've been called "perpetually boundary-pushing." How do you think about balancing historical performance practice with your own artistic voice?

When people call me “boundary-pushing” I think it’s often because we’ve inherited this modern idea that ‘historical performance’ is being as faithful to the notes on the page as possible, when in reality, it should be about being as faithful to the spirit of 18th century music making as we can.

One of the many wonderful things about historical performance practice is that one’s own artistic voice is essential to making the music both come alive, and be “historically accurate.” In much Baroque repertoire, composers designed their scores to be more like a blueprint than a fully built, decorated home. And if they are the architects, they intended for the musicians to be the builders and interior designers, completing the music in performance through actively “realizing” the score with choices of harmony, rhetoric, articulation, ornaments, pacing, dynamics, and colors.

It’s important to me that we don’t treat historical performance as reenactment, but more a living performance practice. Our job is to let the sources give us the structure, and then to make choices that are true to ourselves (and our intentions) for today’s listeners.

The fun, and discipline, of it all, requires “HIP” performers immerse themselves in the language, and regional accents, of Baroque styles so that one can move between French, Italian, and German worlds as if a “native speaker,” even improvising in those styles.

It’s important to me that we don’t treat historical performance as reenactment, but more a living performance practice. Our job is to let the sources give us the structure, and then to make choices that are true to ourselves (and our intentions) for today’s listeners.

Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2 ends with the Badinerie, one of the most famous flute showpieces ever written. What's your relationship with that movement after years of performing it?

I LOVE this movement. It was included at the back (i.e. the hardest piece) of a book of flute pieces that I had as a six-year-old. The book came with a CD with accompaniment that you could play along to and I loved playing along with the CD piano recording of the Badinerie! I’ve always felt that this movement is such a fantastic precursor to Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from a Midsummer Night’s Dream—light, fantastical, and full of fairies! So that’s what I’m always thinking of, and it’s so much fun at the end of the suite to fly through Bach’s magical writing.

Telemann was an immensely popular and prolific composer in the Baroque, but modern audiences may not know as much about him as Bach or Handel. What makes him special?
Telemann was truly one of the most revered and respected composers of his time. He has an amazing gift for character and color, and because he was proficient on so many instruments (flute, oboe, violin, viola da gamba, recorder, double bass, and more!) he wrote works that truly showcased each instrument’s unique colors and special qualities. 

Telemann composed over 3,000 works, living to the age of 86 and continually absorbing new styles and writing for new instruments. He spent the last 46 years of his life as a music director and teacher in Hamburg. Funnily enough, many works of Telemann were mistakenly attributed to Bach for many years. And Bach loved him, not only as a composer, but as a friend, making him the godfather to his son Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, whose concerto you’ll also hear on this program.

Your favorite Baroque-era instrument that isn't the flute?
The musette! One of the only wind instruments women were allowed play!

Do you have a pre-concert ritual or superstition?
I do not.

What's your oddest interest?
Well, I just spent the day fingertips deep in the 4,500+ year-old flutes from the Ancient Sumerian city of Ur in the Penn Museum’s Middle East collections. I love history, and am so lucky that I’m able to find so many pathways into different parts of history through music. I don’t think it’s weird … but I also do a lot of research about the impact of Syphilis on classical music (and society at large) in the 19th and early 20th centuries—which almost never makes for good party talk!

What are your favorite concert-day snacks?
Onigiri!