The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum

Rolf Hempel (1932-2016) composed the work "Dialog, for flute and organ" in 1966. The same year the composition was awarded the composition prize of the city of Stuttgart (Germany). But the score was never published and the work fell into oblivion over the years. I now have typeset the score of this award-winning composition and it can be downloaded free of charge from my website:

www.tobias-broeker.de (https://www.tobias-broeker.de/rare-manuscripts/g-l/hempel-rolf/)


Here a short biography I wrote about Rolf Hempel:

Rolf Hempel was born on 23 June 1932 in Reichenbach im Vogtland (Germany). Already as a pupil at the Gymnasium he attended university courses for piano, trumpet and composition at the Robert-Schumann-Konservatorium in Zwickau. Rolf Hempel then moved to West-Berlin and studied composition and music theory under Boris Blacher, Heinz-Friedrich Hartig, Josef Rufer and Ernst Pepping at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik from 1952 to 1957.
After his studies Rolf Hempel first became lecturer at the Hochschule für Kirchenmusik in Tübingen, then music director at the Württembergische Landesbühne. In 1971 he was appointed lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart, in 1980 he became professor and from 1990 to 1997 president of this insitution. Beside this work Rolf Hempel co-founded a music school and was its director from 1971 to 1976 and also co-founded the Esslinger Studiokonzerte für Neue Musik in 1985. He was the choir master for several ensembles in Esslingen and Stuttgart and was involved in the work of the Deutschen Tonkünstlerverband. In 2005 he became the honorary president of the German Composers Society.
Rolf Hempel died on 18 October 2016 in Esslingen (Germany).

Beside his work as a teacher Rolf Hempel also composed music for all instrumentations: works for orchestra, concertos like the Violin concerto "Duell", chamber music, choral music and songs. Rolf Hempel received several awards for his compositions, among them are the Johann-Wenzel-Stamitz-Preis in 1987, the first prize of the Mozartverein Darmstadt in 1985 or the Esslinger Kulturpreis in 2008.

How many compositions have ever been written for flute and organ?

hundreds! does the instrumentation sound so weird to you?

It's actually not a terribly common combination, to be honest.

IMSLP only lists 11 compositions (https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:For_flute,_organ) with this instrumentation.

In contrast to, say, the violin and piano combinaton (https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:For_violin,_piano) has 3,971 pieces are listed.

Obviously even IMSLP is limited in scope (only public domain scores, and probably not even all of these) but I doubt the ratio would change that much even if all other works were included.

The only piece I can recall hearing for that combination is Frank Martin's Sonata da chiesa, which is an arrangement the composer made of the original for viola d'amore and organ.

Are these catalogued somewhere?  What's your source?

I searched for "for flute and organ" in worldcat, focussed on musical scores and got more than 200 hits. There are surely a few doubles of course, but on the other hand my search misses all entries written in other languages and other writings (flute & organ; without the "for"; etc). Therefore I thought "hundreds" would be a serious answer. But I didn't investigate that deeper than the one minute it took me on worldcat, so maybe you are right.