Flute Music Instruments
Flute Fast Facts
The flute is 26 1/3 inches (67cm) long and is made in three sections, with a total of 13 sound holes. Its range is just over three octaves, starting at middle C. Flutes are divided into two types, the end-blown and the side-blown flutes. The side-blown, or transverse, flutes appear in the orchestra. The end-blown flutes are now part of the recorder family. By the 17th century the transverse flute had become a common instrument in the opera or court orchestra. In the late 17th century the French Hotteterre family began to improve the design of the instrument. The German Theobald Boehm developed the modern flute from 1832 onwards, changing the position of the holes, making them larger and developing a system of keys and pads.
A Brief History of Flute Musical Instruments
The word flute has been given such a variety of different derivations that its true etymology remains a mystery. Sir John Hawkins, who wrote the celebrated General History of the Science and Practice of Music, published in 1853, and republished in facsimile in the U.S. in 1963, provides the following charming but questionable illumination: ‘The word flute is derived from fluta, the Latin for Lamprey or small eel taken in the Sicilian seas, having seven holes, the precise number of those in front of the flute, on each side, immediately below the gills.’
The first flutes did have but seven holes or less,
but they didn’t have gills. Anyway, their cradle is unlikely to have been
Sicily. The history of the transverse or cross flute is wonderfully confused
by the wild enthusiasm of flute historians themselves, who have named
every blown tube whether it is held vertically, diagonally, and with or
without reed, by the sacred name of flute. Even the recorder has been
confused with the flute. Two thousand and more years BC the Chinese played
the transverse flute, and still do in the traditional music that survives
there. But that stray fact leads nowhere. Existence of the flute in early
Greek and Roman times is skimpy and confused by scholars who translated
tibia and aulos – both vertically held reed pipes –
as flute. It is only from the late 12th century onwards that there is
definite proof that the transverse flute existed in Europe. If is illustrated
in a work by the Abbess of Hohenburg called Hortus Deliciarum and I labeled
a tibia.
For the fullest description of the early flute and all the other instruments
of the period, Harmonie Universelle, published in Paris in 1636-7 by Father
Marin Mersenne, is the most important book; reference is regularly made
to Mersenne by scholars burrowing into the past for information about
ancestral music and musical instruments.
From the 17th century onwards the flute gained increasing
importance in music and began to attract the attention of innovators.
A landmark in its history was the publication in about 1699 of the first
book of instruction: Principes de la Flute Traversiere ou Flute d’ Allemagne,
by the instrument maker Jacques Martin Hotteterre. By now the flute had
acquired one key, for the little finger. And such is the mounting interest
in early music and instruments in this century that the work was translated
and republished in the U.S. in 1968.
The highly mechanized flute we know today was developed by Theobald
Boehm (1793-1881). By this time, with the increase in the size of the
orchestra and concert halls, a more powerful sound was needed, as well
as a wider compass and greater agility. Moreover, equal temperament, in
which the octave was divided into steps of almost equal spacing, had been
adopted, and the old system of boring the holes according to mean tone
tuning (a fact that has led some people to declare that early flutes were
out of tune) had to be abandoned.
Boehm, an apprenticed goldsmith as well as a glautist, eventually came
to study the physics of music. This enabled him to redesign the
flute completely. Jean Hotteterre, grandfather of the author of
Principes, had introduced the conical bore; Boehm returned to
the cylindrical with a parabolic head joint. He also changed and
enlarged the positions of all the finger holes and the embouchure and
added the complicated keywork mounted on rods along the body of the instrument.
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