Flute

The flute is the first and last sound the audience hears in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, a small, fine melody that "tells of grass and trees and the horizon" before a single word is spoken. It is the play's originating musical signature, a sound that belongs to no character in the present but haunts the entire action. The flute carries the memory of Willy Loman's father, a man who made and sold flutes as he traveled with his family across the American frontier in a wagon. That father abandoned Willy when he was a small child, and the flute thus becomes the audible trace of a lost paternal origin, a promise of adventure and self-reliance that Willy can never quite reach but can never stop hearing.

The Flute as a Sonic Link to the Past

When Willy's memory of his father surfaces, it is the flute that triggers it. All he can recall is "a man with a big beard, and I was in Mamma's lap, sitting around a fire, and some kind of high music." Uncle Ben, Willy's brother, identifies the instrument: "His flute. He played the flute." Immediately, new music is heard—"a high, rollicking tune"—that evokes the father's wild-hearted, itinerant life. The father would toss the whole family into a wagon and drive across Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and all the Western states, stopping in towns to sell the flutes he had made on the way. The flute, then, is not merely a sentimental relic; it is the sound of a mode of existence that was creative, self-sufficient, and mobile—everything Willy's life as a fixed, indebted, commission-based salesman is not. The flute's melody stands in direct contrast to the "angry glow of orange" and the "solid vault of apartment houses" that now surround the Loman home.

The Flute's Structural Role in the Play

Miller uses the flute as a structural device to mark transitions between present reality and Willy's interior memories. The melody is heard distantly when Willy, in the present, suddenly realizes he had been thinking of the 1928 Chevrolet as if he were driving it that very day—a moment of temporal dislocation that the flute sonically confirms. The flute also accompanies the appearance of leaves that cover the house and surroundings, signaling the shift into the remembered past. In the original production, there were some twenty-two minutes of music, and the flute was central to that score. The composer Alex North wrote the incidental music, and the flute's theme became the play's most recognizable aural motif. At the end of the play, after Willy's funeral, as Linda stands at the grave unable to cry, the flute begins again, "not far away, playing behind her speech." The sound lingers on the darkening stage as the hard towers of the apartment buildings rise into sharp focus, the natural world the flute once evoked now entirely eclipsed.

The Flute as a Symbol of Lost Craft and Connection

The flute is also the only object in the play that is both made and sold by the same person. Willy's father was a "great inventor" who could make more in a week with one gadget than a man like Willy could make in a lifetime. This stands in stark opposition to Willy's own work: he sells nothing he creates, only himself, and he has no tangible product to leave behind. The flute represents a kind of labor that is integrated, artisanal, and connected to the land—a world where a man could build something with his hands and trade it directly. Willy, by contrast, is a man who "never knew who he was" because he had no craft, no thing he could point to and say, "I made that." The flute's melody, small and fine, is the ghost of that lost possibility, a sound that Willy hears but is never fully aware of, just as he is never fully aware of the father who abandoned him or the path not taken.