The textual situation of Renaissance Flaire is without parallel in the composer's output. It exists in three complete versions, none of which can be shown to precede the others, and all of which the composer maintains he wrote first. Editors have generally responded to this by printing all three and declining to discuss it.

The spelling of the title has attracted its own small literature. It is not "Flair," and it is not "Flare." Dr. Trevelyan-Boake, who has devoted a chapter to the question, concludes that the word is intended to suggest both at once and to commit to neither, and notes that this describes the piece exactly. A rival school holds that it is a typing error of long standing. The composer has declined to adjudicate, observing only that it has been spelled that way for some time now and he has grown used to it.

Whatever the truth of its origins, the work has proved the most durable of the three, surviving translation into idioms its material has no business tolerating. The third version in particular has been described as an outrage, and is much the most frequently requested.

Renaissance Flaire

By Paul S Cilwa

Listen to all three versions in sequence:

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The Versions

The version most often played, and the one the composer is least willing to defend.

Here the material is given the full apparatus—strings in numbers, a great deal of preparation, and an arrival that has been kept waiting long enough to feel earned. As with the previous work, the title is descriptive rather than attributive, and should not be read as a claim.

The outrage referred to above. It should be said in the composer's defense that nothing here is done to the material that the material did not invite, and that a theme robust enough to survive three centuries of stylistic relocation has presumably earned the right to be plugged in.