Flute Without Borders

Pedro Estache at the 2026 NFA Convention

This past August I flew out to Portland, OR, for the National Flute Association’s 2026 convention, held August 6-9 at the Oregon Convention Center. I was there to compete in the finals of the NFA High School Soloist Competition, and my round happened to fall on the same day as the opening gala concert. I walked in still keyed up from performing, half-expecting the gala to be a pleasant way to come down before the real business of the week continued. Instead, it was the thing I kept thinking about.

Pedro Eustache, this year’s keynote artist, walked onstage with a small forest of instruments arranged around him, and for the next hour he moved between them without ever losing the bread of a single musical idea. A phrase would start on the Indian bansuri, bend into the breathy, almost vocal tone of a Japanese shakuhachi, then shift to the Persian ney, distinguished by its unique interdental blowing technique. I remember thinking that I had never seen a flutist treat the instrument as one voice among many rather than the whole of the conversation.

Eustache was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1959, and his musical life started inside El Sistema, the country’s famous public music education program; he was a founding member of El Systema’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. From there, his training split in two directions that never really separated again. On the classical side, he earned diplomas in flute from Héctor Berlioz Conservatoire and the École de Musique d’Asnières in France and studied privately with Aurèle Nicolet in Switzerland. On the jazz side, he holds a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in jazz performance from CalArts. Alongside both, he sought out master musicians from traditions far outside the Western flute repertoire: Hindustani classical music with Ravi Shankar and Hariprasad Chaurasia, Armenian duduk with Djivan Gasparyan. He has also worked directly with acousticians John Coltman and Peter Hoekje, researching how wind instruments actually produce sound. It’s a strange, wide-ranging education, and I think it explains why his playing never sounds like someone doing an “impression” of a tradition; he studied each one from the inside.

The list of instruments he actually plays is, honestly, absurd. Alongside the Western concert flute and saxophone he trained on formally, Eustache performs on the global indigenous flutes, such as Indian bansuri, Armenian duduk, Arabic and Persian ney, Chinese dizi (transverse bamboo flute) and xiao (vertical bamboo flute), Japanese shakuhachi, Australian didgeridoo, and Andean quena and quennacho, among dozens of others. Working with Coltman and Hoekje, he has also built or modified more than a hundred instruments and mouthpieces of his own, including hybrids he’s given his own names to. Somewhere in the middle of the Portland gala, he lifted one of his custom-built instruments to his mouth and turned the whole gala into as much a lesson as a performance, since half the instruments he reached for weren’t ones I’d have recognized on my own.

Most film audiences have heard Eustache without knowing it. He was the principal woodwind soloist on John Debney’s score for The Passion of the Christ, played Armenian duduk and Middle Eastern flutes on John Williams’ score for Munich, and won a 2007 Film & TV Music Award for his soloist work on Hans Zimmer’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. His playing also appears in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Kung Fu Panda, The Jungle Book, The Lion King 2, and more recently, Hans Zimmer’s scores for Dune and Dune: Part Two.

But it’s his own compositions where his voice comes through most clearly, because they’re really the only place he gets to be all of his instruments at once. His best-known concert work, “Suite Concertante for World Woodwinds & Symphony Orchestra,” is structured as a kind of world tour: twelve movements, each one built around a different family of instruments. An India-inspired “Raga Todi” opens the piece on bansuri; a Middle East and North Africa movement moves through Arabic and Persian ney, Tunisian mezoued, and an instrument of his own invention he calls the Oryx-o-phone; an Armenia-inspired movement features duduk and blul; a Spain-inspired movement turns to flamenco flute; a pair of South American movements for Andean quenacho and a customized double-tarka; and the suite closes with movements for shvis (Armenian flutes), fujara (Slovakian flute), didgeridoo (Australian lip-reed), and vocal percussion. He composed it in 2008 and premiered it the following year as composer-soloist with the Simón Bolívar orchestra under Gustavo Dudamel, playing all twenty-one solo woodwind parts himself. His recorded catalog as a bandleader reads more like a jazz discography than a classical one: albums recorded in Venezuela that rework the traditional piano-led Latin-jazz format around guitar, flute or bass clarinet, paying tribute to John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy through Venezuelan Afro-rhythms. He also spent ten years as a featured soloist in Yanni’s touring band, which is probably where a lot of people who have never set foot in a symphony hall first heard him without learning his name.

He is also a minor celebrity to people who have never set foot in a concert hall. In 2022 he performed a medley of that year’s Game of the Year nominees, including Xenoblade Chronicles 3, at The Game Awards, switching instruments so fast and with such visible joy that clips of the performance went viral.  Online, he is often just called “Flute Guy.” I mention this because his playing lands with an audience: the same instinct that makes a medley pop for a gaming audience is the instinct that made a convention ballroom full of flutists lean forward at his gala performance. He doesn’t perform world music as a genre exercise. He performs it as one continuous, curious conversation between traditions, inviting the audience into it rather than lecturing them.

I left that gala thinking less about repertoire and more about range, about how much room there still is on the flute for a musician willing to spend forty years listening. Sitting there just hours after my own round, still replaying every note I’d second-guessed onstage, I found myself less worried about playing my piece perfectly note-for-note and more interested in why I’d chosen it in the first place. I don’t play a fraction of the instruments Eustache does, and I’m not going to start learning duduk. But I did come home wanting to spend more time with the folk and non-Western material that usually sits at the edges of my practice. That, more than any single melody from the concert, is what has stayed with me.