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- Abbreviation
- flaut.
How is flautando played?
Use a fast, light stroke with little pressure—sometimes with tilted hair—to thin and soften the tone toward a breathy, glassy or near-harmonic colour. The term has two documented emphases: bowing near the fingerboard, which can sound mellow and velvety, or reducing pressure for a quiet, flute-like, slightly whistling sound. It therefore overlaps strongly with sul tasto but does not always name exactly the same contact point: sul tasto specifies bowing over the fingerboard, while flautando can foreground the resulting colour or pressure. Keep the state for the marked span until ord. or another bow-position or pressure instruction. Composers often combine it with sul tasto and actual harmonics; Saariaho's Petals moves among normal, sul ponticello, sul tasto, tremolando and flautando as a continuous palette of weightless cello sound.
How does flautando sound?
A soft, breathy, flute-like or whistling tone, drained of edge and grain — close cousin to a harmonic but on an ordinary stopped note. Floating and transparent; pushed further it shades into the pure glassiness of sul tasto and the ghost-tone of true harmonics.
In context
Flautando is Italian for “flute-like” and is also called flautato. The Cambridge Guide to Orchestration distinguishes near-fingerboard and low-pressure realizations, while noting that flautando and sul tasto may be perceptually indistinguishable for many listeners. Contemporary scores by Vladimir Vlaev and Fernando Rincón Estrada directly define flaut.; because the manual prints the complete word, the short form is best treated as an attested score-legend convention rather than a universal standard.