Different Theory Definitions in Flute vs Piano

I’m a little bit of a music theory nerd. I love the math inside of the music and seeing how it all fits together. Once you know your music theory, a piece of music looks like a beautiful puzzle.

Because of the way that different instruments make different sounds, the definition of some of the terms are different. Being a doubler, I see the differences in piano and flute definitions. I’d like to share them with you.

The Slur vs Legato

In flute, legato means to lightly tongue the passage, using a “la” syllable in your mouth. It sometimes says legato in the music and sometimes the composer uses a tenuto.

In flute, a slur means to not tongue at all in the passage indicated.

In piano, legato and slur are the same thing – smooth and connected – because every note is a strike of the string(s). There’s no way for the piano to not articulate every note.

The Accent

In piano, an accent simply means to play that particular note louder.

In flute, an accent means to play that particular note with a hard, somewhat explosive attack. The accent is all about the attack.

Piano as a whole is all about the attack. That’s why some consider us percussionists. We don’t have very much control over how the entire note is played, we only have control over the attack.

In the flute, we have control over the attack and the duration of the entire note, so if we were to play an accent the same way we were instructed on the piano, we would just play that note forte, which would sound funny.

Tone Color

In piano, people talk about tone color as purely the emotion that you want to portray.

In flute, tone color is involved with the emotion, but not the whole thing. We can have both purple noble and blue noble sounds. I talk more about tone color on flute here.

Let’s Work Together.

These are the differences that I see the most often, I’m sure there are more. I feel that when we know the differences, it helps us to come together more as musicians. We play together. If we know how our vocabulary differs, we can understand each other better.