Demystifying Flute Headjoint Alignment with PremAligner
Prema Kesselman was Principal Flute with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Santiago, Chile in the Municipal de Santiago - Opera Nacional de Chile, for nine seasons, performing opera, ballet and symphonic programs and was flute professor at the Universidad Mayor, Conservatorio de Musica. She has been Adjunct Flute Faculty, Artist-in-Residence at Temple University, Boyer College of Music and Dance since 2017. In the 2022-2023 season, she performed as Principal Flute in Opera Philadelphia.
Are you a professional flute player and are tired of painstakingly aligning your headjoint every time you put your flute together? Or have you resorted to drawing guide-lines or dots in black marker on the headjoint and barrel of your flute for the quintessential set-up? Or are you simply a student who cannot replicate putting your flute together like your teacher did in your last lesson? Perhaps you played in a masterclass and had a prominent teacher change the setup of your headjoint, and your flute playing was transformed, yet you've found it difficult to duplicate on your own.
Having become completely obsessed with the proper set-up for both myself and my students of the headjoint position in relation to the body of the flute, I developed the PremAligner for flute players to demystify the goal of a consistent position every time one assembles their flute.
Beginners and professionals alike can benefit from the PremAligner as a simple and effective tool for flawless positioning of their flute head joint, which can have a huge impact on the response, intonation, projection, dynamics, tone colors, correct hand positioning, and the overall ergonomics of the correct flute to body ratio. Most importantly, beginners can align their flute headjoint properly after their first lesson!
