Homepage Frits Leffef (English).

Hello plodding surfer, slaving away on the Internet.

On this page I want to tell things about myself and what I think about music and other interesting stuff.

Who I am?

You know my name now. I was born 28 September 1948, so I'm an old chap. But don't worry, I'm still millenniumproof. I was born in Apeldoorn (the Netherlands) and I'm still living there.

Am I still good looking?

Judge for yourself.

What I do for a living?

Making music as a composer, performer and teacher.

Teacher

I give private music lessons in flute, trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba and BBass.

Composer and arranger

These activities last from the passed 5 years or so. I made a lot of compositions, arrangements and more than 100 books with sheet music for f.i. flute, saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, French horn and tuba. Some of them are a method for learning to play. There's music for 1, 2 (duet), 3 (trio) and 4 instruments (quartet).
Many books have accompaniment on CD, so you can play along with f.i. an orchestra. You will meet all kinds of styles, like pop, rock, latin, jazz and classical.

All this work was done with help of the computer so I've spend a lot of hours working with the bloody thing, writing music, editing the books, drawing illustrations, and making homepages. I think that the moment is not far away that I will stop doing this unhealthy work. I want to spend more time on playing, and walking in the woods.

Musician

The instruments I play most of the time are the flute, trumpet, trombone and BBass. I played the bass in De Koninklijke Stedelijk Harmonie in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, and their jazzband (see photo's). I also play the trombone in The Diksie Streetjazz Band. This is a cool gang playing original New Orleans style.
For several years I accompanied (mostly flute) the singer John Adams who lives in the US now. He made two CD's and I'm also on them playing the flute and alto flute.

In the nearby future I will spend more time playing baroque music on the flute more intensively. Years ago I played a lot of that stuff with flute and guitar, but one day the fun was gone. An important reason was that the interpretation of the bassa continuo in the existing sheet music wasn't able to inspire me anymore.

About Bassa Continuo

For those not knowing the concept of Bassa Continuo here is a brief explanation.
Many compositions of the old masters only consist of a melody and a bass part with instructions for the harmony. This part is called the Bassa Continuo. The harpsichord player and / or other accompanists had to make up their own part based on this continuo. You can compare it with classical jazz where a complete band played only with the melody and chords as a base.

Properly working out the continuo isn't always an easy job to do. Often you'll come up with something fitting but not sounding well.

In other cases you will have one brilliant
idea after another, but none matches the composers instructions. Therefore you will often find interpretations which don't fully consider the Bassa Continuo of the composer. I don't like those. In my opinion a composer that can create such beautiful melodies is also capable to cook a nice accompaniment to it. So if one cannot find the solution then there's something wrong with him, not with the composer!

So often I keep slaving away at a piece until I find what I was looking for. It's my discovery channel!


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