The melody was written in a folk style by the Norwegian composer, pianist and music critic Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981). Tveitt was a prolific composer of piano and orchestral music, and he also compiled and arranged a large amount of traditional music from the Hardanger district. Unfortunately, a considerable number of his finished manuscripts were lost in a house fire in 1970; after that disaster he was left unable to compose and gradually succumbed to alcoholism. The text of the piece is a poem by Jakob Sande (1906 – 1967), who wrote only in Nynorsk, the less commonly-used of the two official Norwegian written languages. The poem describes how on a spring day a willow branch is ready for use as a flute for a little boy’s hands. The distance sound of a flute is heard, and “the riddle of life lies hidden in it.” A child in the garden laughs, wondering what it is, while an old man remembers the time when he too ran barefoot in the mountains. “The tones play in his mind; his eyes look far away with a dimly-veiled shine against the pale memory of childhood.”

Fløytelåt has been arranged and recorded many times, but as far as we know this is its only choral version.