|
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ART OF FLUTE MAKING IN
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
by Ardal Powell
Word count: 7250. Download size (text only): 51,000
bytes.
Author's note: This article first appeared in The
Flutist Quarterly 19.3 (Spring 1994). For the
present version dates and page references for articles
that were not yet published in 1994 have been supplied.
Author-date references are to publications listed
at the end of the essay.
TODAY'S FLUTISTS look back on Theobald Boehm's re-invention
of the flute in the middle of the last century as a
sensational triumph of scientific method in the then
relatively new field of acoustics. We might be surprised
to find that Boehm's inquiries were not conducted in
a rigorous scientific spirit (Rockstro 1890, para. 911),
but that he "finally called science to [his] aid" only
in 1846 and began to study scientific principles of
flutemaking and acoustics as opposed to simply pragmatic
ones (Boehm 1871, 12). Since the waning of the seventeenth
century, when science had first become a model for intellectual
activity and worked its way into many aspects of life,
the flute's design had been continuously subject to
change in a number of distinctive and cross-fertilizing
traditions. The rationalism which arose in the seventeenth
century took two full centuries to work out its effect
on the flute, and it has taken still longer to bring
about the general acceptance of the Boehm flute and
the relative uniformity in instrument and playing technique
that we see today.
I. SCIENTIFIC WRITINGS
The first attempts to formulate "scientific" laws of
tube acoustics and to apply them to the flute were made
during the Enlightenment. Johann Heinrich Lambert's
1777 essay dealing specifically with the acoustics of
the instrument of that period may perhaps have been
written at the personal instigation of Frederick the
Great, who was deeply involved with current ideas as
well as with the flute. Lambert's paper attempts, in
the classic manner so succesful with astronomy and physics,
to deduce natural laws from practical experiment, using
the tools of minute observation and mathematics. He
gives a critical survey of previous work on acoustics
by Euler (1725) and Bernoulli (1762), and makes precise
measurements of his own flute, which produces a pitch
of a=415.25cps, as opposed to Bernoulli's standard of
a=392cps. He reports on basic experiments and calculations
with tubes; gives precise details of lip placement (half
the embouchure hole should be covered) so as to arrive
at a mathematical constant for the end correction of
the embouchure hole; and studies the effects of cork
placement. Remarks on his own flute refer to the relationship
of tonehole size to bore diameter, and the effect of
undercutting the toneholes (see below). Attempts like
Lambert's to describe the behavior of the flute in scientific
language continued into the nineteenth century with
works of Johann Heinrich Liebeskind (1806), Heinrich
Wilhelm Theodor Pottgiesser (1803), and Karl Franz Emil
Schafhäutl (1833), Boehm's teacher in acoustics.
Figure
1. P.C. Plumier minime, L'Art de Tourner en Perfection,
Paris: Jombert, 1749, plate 1
But the work of Lambert and other theorists serves as
a contrast to the lack of any significant technical
information about woodwind instrument building left
by the makers themselves. In this period Art, Craft
and Science were not as distinct as they are today,
and flute design was guided by a personal or regional
concept of the instrument's sound and character, and
by the current requirements of musical taste. Flute-makers
in this period had no call to write down their design
criteria or their thoughts about instrument-making.
For most of the century, the practice of writing technical
descriptions of design features in order to gain patent
protection for them would have seemed absurd: the best
protection was complete secrecy (Heyde 1993a, 599).
But the ideas of the makers are revealed in the instruments
they made. To equip ourselves to interpret these "documents",
we should be aware of the tools and working practices
of the times, and the circumstances and environments
of the individuals concerned.1
Musical considerations naturally had a most important
effect on instrument design, but are beyond the scope
of this article.
II. FLUTEMAKING METHODS, TOOLS AND ORGANIZATION
TOOLS AND MACHINES
The tubes of woodwind instruments were made on the lathe.
This machine, which was driven by a treadle as early
as the middle of the 13th century (McNeil 1990, 26),
is a device for rotating, or "turning" the workpiece
so that a hand-held chisel positioned by a toolrest
can be used to make it cylindrical. Two driving mechanisms
for the lathe were in use in the eighteenth century.
A simple kind, in which a cord wrapped around the workpiece
was attached at one end to the treadle and at the other
to a springy wooden pole, allowed only a limited number
of rotations in one direction before the tool had to
be removed and the workpiece left to wind up the cord
again by spinning in the opposite direction. A more
sophisticated variety with a flywheel could maintain
constant rotation in the same direction (Genta 1985).
A machine with both a pole drive and a flywheel is shown
in Figure 1, but the example in Diderot's encyclopaedia
(Figure 2) is of the rather less advanced bi-directional
type. Devices existed to regulate the tension of the
flywheel's belt drive to adjust for changes in the air's
humidity, and to alter the turning speed with the same
treadle movement (Singer et al., Vol.5, 384). Still
more sophisticated machinery for ornamental turning
(Adkins 1990) existed throughout the period, but it
was probably rare in instrument-making shops.
Toneholes coul be drilled in the turned tube with a
strap drill (Singer et al., Vol.5, 381, Fig. 207-8).
By the second half of the century hand-braces with bevel
gearing existed, so that a drill could be rotated by
turning a handwheel at right-angles to the shaft of
the tool.
Figure
3. Reamers for woodwind instruments (Diderot 1781)
Diderot's Encyclopaedia shows the reamers used
to make the internal bore of an instrument section (see
Figure 3), after a pilot hole had been drilled through
the center of the billet. While it is sometimes possible
to see marks showing that the bore was cut with a succession
of short reamers such as the ones shown, some makers
seem to have used a single-piece tool for each section
of the flute (Tromlitz 1791, 26-7). The advantage of
one- piece reamers is that mass-production of instruments
with identical bores is made faster and more reliable.
By minimizing variation this reduces the time taken
to finish an instrument.
The process of "finishing" a flute involved using files
and scrapers to shape and undercut the embouchure hole,
and to complete the tuning by undercutting the toneholes,
if necessary making small adjustments to the bore. As
Lambert observed (1777) the amount of wood removed from
inside each tonehole, and the precise shape of the resulting
walls, is a critical factor in the tone and response
of the instrument. Styles of undercutting range from
the almost imperceptible to cases where so much wood
is removed that the walls of the tonehole are invisible
from the outside of the flute. But because even very
small variations in undercutting can have such a large
effect on an instrument's playing qualities, files and
scrapers are not the most reliable tools for undercutting.
|
Figure 2. Wood turning shop (Diderot 1781)
|
An accurate and repeatable way to remove a determinate
amount of wood is provided by fraises. These are small
metal cutters passed up inside the bore and engaged
by a threaded rod through the tonehole to cut away its
underside. Various types were used by different makers.
August Grenser used fraises instead of scrapers and
files to undercut the toneholes of his flutes; others,
among them John Just Schuchart in London and Paul Villars
in Paris, used a combinbation of the two techniques.
One of the most effective ways to achieve consistency
and to speed up the finishing process is to develop
an instrument design in which undercutting plays little
part. By the time flutes with added keys had begun to
be accepted, tonehole undercutting was almost universally
much less than had been common on most one-keyed flutes.
The change in undercutting style went hand in hand with
a alteration in sound ideal, from fullness and resonance
toward brightness and penetration.
METALS FOR KEYS AND SPRINGS
A steady expansion in the mining of minerals other than
coal and iron took place in Europe between 1500 and
1750. Metallurgy developed from an art dependent on
trial, experience and rule of thumb into a combination
of art and science involving knowledge of the principles
underlying the behavior of metals.
The key of the one-keyed flute was usually made of silver,
a metal produced in Saxony, Bohemia and the New World.
The key was forged by hand out of a flat sheet, with
flaps bent over to take an axle pin on which the key
rotated. Keys made of brass, which had been developed
commercially in the previous century, become more common
on Continental flutes from the end of the period. The
ancient process of investment casting of brass greatly
reduced the work required to make keys, but it does
not seem to have arrived in flutemaking until around
1800.
The key, with its leather pad held on with sealing-wax,
was kept closed with a spring under its touchpiece.
In clockmaking, the introduction of the balance wheel
escapement by Hooke in 1656 made the production of reliable
springs an urgent priority. Well- behaved clock springs
were short-lived and hard to make, so that producing
them quickly became a highly specialised art. We have
eighteenth-century recipies for spring-making only from
the end of the century (Leutmann 1772; Blakey 1780),
when competition in the clock industry had become most
fierce, and it was in these times that the Swiss watchmaking
city of Geneva offered a prize to anyone who found a
way to make springs of comparable quality to the British
ones of crucible steel. This material, invented in c.
1740 by Benjamin Huntsman (1704-1776), the Doncaster
clock- and instrument-maker, was made at his Sheffield
plant under conditions of extreme secrecy. However it
is a measure of the contemporary lack of concern for
legal protection that he did not patent the process
and it was later copied by others, though only after
a monopoly of half a century.
Flute keys throughout the eighteenth century were usually
sprung with brass. At first the spring was attached
to the wood or ivory, with its free end in contact with
the metal key. But a thin piece of brass let into the
sides of the keyway had a tendency to work loose as
the wood expanded and contracted, and because the keyway
floor had to be lowered to accommodate it, and it exerted
pressure on the sides of the keyway, there was some
tendency for the wood to crack at that point. A more
secure and lasting way to fix the spring was to rivet
the brass to the touchpiece of the key, or sometimes
to fix it with a tiny watchmaker's screw. With this
method the spring hardly bends at all when the key is
depressed (Myers 1980, 59-60), and because of the reduced
mechanical displacement the spring feels less spongy
and lasts longer. Though fixing the spring to the key
seems to have been used on flutes as early as the 1730s
in Paris, it did not entirely supplant springs set into
the wood for at least half a century.
Leipzig virtuoso, teacher and flutemaker J.G. Tromlitz
was an advocate of steel springs, whose action on some
of his surviving instruments is more convincing than
his description:
The springs beneath the keys are made either of
brass or of steel. [Tempered] Steel or clock-springs
are more elastic, and consequently better, than those
of brass. They should not be set into the wood, but
riveted to the touchpiece, and allowed to contact
the wood. But since steel springs easily rust where
they touch the wood, they must occasionally be cleaned
and oiled lightly. . . Since a clock-spring has too
little strength under the key, especially if it is
long, you can put another, somewhat shorter one underneath
it, so that it is stronger and more elastic than a
single strong spring.(Tromlitz 1800, 138)
The invention of pewter plugs, cast to make an airtight
fit in a metal bushing let into the surface of the wood,
was intended to overcome the problem of leather pads
which became leaky after contact with oil or moisture.
They may well have been invented in England: the tin
which along with lead was an important component of
pewter had been mined in Cornwall since prehistoric
times. Tromlitz calls the pewter-plug keys "Tacett"
keys,2 and in 1794 J.F. Boie of Göttingen advertised
flutes made "after the masterpieces of Grenser
in Dresden and Potter in London", with the same
"very little-known invention of the Englishman Tacett".
3 But just a few years later in 1800, Tromlitz,
who found many faults with the device (Tromlitz 1786)
wrote (Tromlitz 1800, 139) that pewter plugs had "been
rejected for many reasons, and are now quite abolished"ÄÄa
premature obituary for a material that continued to
find favor, in London and Vienna at least, for many
decades.
GUILDS AND TRADE
As the astronomer Copernicus wrote: "The shortness of
life, the frailness of reason, and the dull routine
of senseless activity do not allow us to gain much knowledge.
And what we do learn we all too soon forget." Tradition
records that the stonemasons who gathered to build the
ancient Temple of Solomon were the first to form a corporation
or society to preserve specialised knowledge and skills
from one generation to another. In mediaeval Europe,
the principal crafts likewise became organised into
guilds, or self-governing associations holding the right
to conduct a trade under legal protection from competition
(Heyde 1993b).
Masters of a craft passed on their knowledge to apprentices,
who learned by repeatedly performing simple tasks, and
freeing the master's time to be spent where his skill
was best put to use, in finishing and tuning instruments.
After serving an apprenticeship, typically six or seven
years, an apprentice might work in the master's shop
as a journeyman, or "day-worker", until he was in a
position to open his own business, or succeed to his
master's.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, trade activity
in most cities was governed by guilds. In eighteenth-century
Paris, two officers in charge of the Guild of Musical
Instrument-Makers administered its rules, which included
stipulations that only apprentices who had served six
years under a Paris Master, fulfilled their duties,
lived a moral life and paid their dues were entitled
to work for a wage; and that a Master might take on
only one apprentice at a time, until the apprentice
had studied four years, when an additional one might
be taken. Anyone who attempted to poach on the Guild's
territory would be punished by law, though internal
difficulties could also be caused by the strict closed
shop arrangement.4
Guild organization differed from one city to another:
Johann Christoph Denner, a Nuremberg maker who applied
to the town council in 1696 for permission to make the
new-style oboe and recorder developed in France (Nickel
1971, 204-5), was a member of the guild of Duck Call-
and Horn-Turners, though his son Jacob was disbarred
from becoming a master under the guild's strict moral
code because of his "shotgun" marriage (Kirnbauer &
Thalheimer 1995). In Leipzig, instrument making seems
to have been a "free trade", and it appears there was
no guild for woodwind makers at all. The activities
of merchants like Matthaus Hirschstein and the city's
annual trade fair provided an essentially continental
market for Saxon wind-instruments (Heyde 1985).
The craft of woodwind-instrument making benefited directly,
both in the development of materials and in workshop
techniques, from the diversification and growth in demand
for scientific instruments during the late seventeenth
century. In this period these sophisticated precision
tools began to be made by mass- production (Singer et
al., Vol.4, 629).
Figure 4. Batch marks in a flute by F.G.A. Kirst (St
Petersburg 1136)
In flutemaking workshops, mass-production techniques
were used from the earliest years of the eighteenth
century. Inventories of the Paris workshops (whose documents
have been most closely studied in modern times) show
that large numbers, sometimes hundreds, of flutes were
in production at the same time. 5 Flutes from the workshop of Thomas Lot (fl.
1734- 1787), though not all identical in appearance,
show very small differences in essential measurements
over the large number of flutes that have survived,
indicating that the same workshop standards for many
stages of production were in force over several decades.
Roman numerals carved in the tenon ends, ivory mounts,
keys and keyways of flutes by J.J. Quantz, F.G.A. Kirst
and August Grenser (see Figure 4) are batch numbers
to help identify the parts during production, indicating
that the instruments to which they belonged were made
in a series. Surviving Quantz flutes are functionally
identical, as are a certain number of those by August
Grenser and many of Lot's.
The London makers of the latter part of the period not
only had a progressive approach to the division of labor,
but they also benefited from the British preeminence
in industrial production of high quality steel for tools.
Small files were mass-produced in Prescot and were readily
available in London. Labor was divided not just within
the workshop but farmed out to specialists, and so in
this period a maker's stamp is no certain indication
of who made which parts of the instrument; dealers and
even teachers seem to have stamped instruments made
by others with their own names. John Hale, (fl. 1785-1804)
whose name appears on a number of surviving flutes (Young
1982), made keywork in brass and silver for woodwind
instruments by Cahusac and Collier (Byrne 1964), flutes
by Joseph Florio, Richard Potter (Waterhouse 1993, s.v.
Hale), [Proser,] and one dated 1769 by Caleb Gedney.
Figures available from the clockmaking industry provide
a clear illustration of the economic effects of the
move from workshop to factory production (Landes 1983).
In the last quarter of the century, Britain produced
150,000-200,000 watches a year, half the total for all
of Europe. Small shops in the North of England made
rough actions, and sold them in quantity to London shops
for finishing. As a result, a watch movement that had
cost œ20 a century earlier was now reduced in price
to œ1. The boom in the flute's popularity in late eighteenth-century
England would not have been possible without similar
effects of increased production and falling prices--or
without a surge in the size and prosperity of the upper
middle class, associated with the success of the British
navy and the expansion of British trade.
In 1796 a rare written mention of the mass-production
of flutes occurs, in a piece of sales literature by
Tromlitz:
Those who employ a number of people, and have
their wind-instruments made by their journeymen and
apprentices, can of course offer them cheaper than
I, who do everything myself, and have to do it myself
if it is to be what I advertise. Such factory-made
instruments cannot possibly be what they should be;
this is easy to understand, and yet there are people
who think the opposite.
Tromlitz evidently considered the factory system to
be normal among contemporary instrument-makers, a class
from which he wished to exclude himself:
To classify me as an instrument-maker is not correct,
for I am not one; I only make instruments as a scholarly
musician and flute-player. I do not know any of the
ordinary instrument-makers who works from principles,
all just imitate, inside and outside Germany. Therefore
such flutes are only usable in a few keys. (Tromlitz
1800, 133)
III. CHANGES IN THE DESIGN OF FLUTES
During the early eighteenth century the flute rose to
be the most popular of wind-instruments. Its expressive
potential surpassed that of the recorder from the first,
but it was not as easy to play in tune, and the player
needed a command of embouchure and breath control as
well as tonguing and fingering. The inexhaustible diversity
of surviving instruments demonstrates that makers were
continually trying to increase and refine the flute's
ability to be expressive. Changes in musical composition
and performance made changing demands on the type of
expressivity the instrument was required to produce.
At the same time the flute was attracting a large number
of amateur adherents, who required that it be made easier
to play audibly and in tune. These are the major reasons
for the constant experimentation of the eighteenth-century
flutemakers.
The "baroque" flute had a conical bore as its distinguishing
feature. It is the bore's degree of taper and how regularly
or irregularly it contracts that determine the basic
visual and acoustic proportions of the instrument: the
length of the tube, and the size, position and undercutting
of the toneholes. For at least the first sixty years
of the eighteenth century all makers were experimenting
with the bore, in conjunction with other aspects of
the flute: the size, undercutting and spacing of embouchure
and toneholes, and the materials and wall thickness
of the tube. Even in the same city at the same period
no theoretical standard existed for many important aspects
of flute design: often makers had different approaches
at various points in their careers, evidently with dissimilar
results in mind. As a result the flutes of the eighteenth
century, even before the addition of keys, are acoustically
and functionally very diverse (Spohr 1992).
Two surviving instruments with slightly conical bore
and a single key prefigure the arrival of the true conical
bore: an anonymous one of unknown origin (Puglisi 1984),
and one by Richard Haka (Amsterdam: 1646-1705) (Solum
1993). Of the true three-joint baroque flute itself
we have two dozen surviving examples by makers from
Berchtesgaden, Berlin, Leipzig, London, Nuremburg, and
Paris (Powell and Lasocki 1995), each of whom had a
strong personal style and very highly developed skills.
Though the "Hotteterre" style instrument is generally
cited as the archetype of the early baroque flute, it
is by no means certain where or precisely when the three-joint
instrument with a conical bore and one key first appeared
(see note 8 below).
The process of designing wind-instruments is illustrated
by a description of the development of the recorder
and oboe in France in the 1680s, by the famous flutist
Michel de la Barre:
...the Filidors and the Hautteterres. . . spoiled
so much wood and played so much music that they finally
suceeded in making [the oboe] usable in ensembles.6
The statement supports what we can learn by studying
surviving three-joint instruments, which are quite different
from one another: that each maker arrived at the design
of his flutes by independent experiment.
In his autobiography J.J. Quantz describes the state
of composition (outside France) for the flute in the
years before 1720:
At that time there were few compositions written
especially for the flute. One had to make do for the
most part with compositions for the oboe and violin,
which one had to arrange as well as possible for one's
purpose.7
An obstacle to playing oboe or violin music on the flute
was that the flute's low register ended at D'. Downward
extensions of the range were hailed as a novel invention
by London flutemakers John Mason and Caleb Gedney in
1756.8 But a response to their claims by another London
maker, Charles Schuchart, shows that such extensions
had been known to his father John Just in Germany before
1720. Independent confirmation that they were used in
England is given by visitors to Pierre Jaillard Bressan's
shop in London in 1725 (Byrne 1983), and in Germany
by an illustration in Majer's 1732 treatise and a mention
by Quantz (1752, 34). A sole surviving such instrument
by Jacob Denner, with a low C but no C#, is in the Germanisches
Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg; a second one has gone missing
from the Berlin museum. Such lower extensions could
have been quite widely practised, but did not catch
on.9
Around 1720 the three-joint flute was divided into four.
The long middle section with six holes was replaced
by two shorter ones, joined by a tenon and socket in
the middle, and having three holes each. Why, and precisely
when and where this occurred remain uncertain. The event
was first mentioned by Quantz, who wrote in 1752 that
it had taken place "about thirty years ago".10 According to Quantz, the purpose of the division
was to allow interchangeable middle joints, or corps
de rechange, to vary the pitch of the flute, but
this explanation has been questioned since 1791 (Tromlitz
1791, 25). A four-joint flute by Amsterdam maker Thomas
Boekhout, now unfortunately lost, was catalogued in
1922 (Sachs 1922, 1.643), and since Boekhout's business
shut down when he died in 1715, it is possible that
flutes in four sections were made half a decade before
Quantz, still principally an oboist at the time, got
to hear of it. The division had the effect of allowing
the maker greater access to the central part of the
bore (Powell 1995): whether this was cause or effect,
enlargements of the bore at the top of the heartpiece
are found in some early 4-joint flutes, a further sign
of experimentation.
The possibility of supplying corps de rechange
to alter the pitch is first documented in a promissory
note from the flutist Desjardins to the widow Naust
dated December 30th 1721, referring to a flute with
three "cors"(Giannini 1993, 9). At least two
Paris makers were accustomed to making instruments for
use in other cities where different pitch standards
were in use: J.J. Rippert made instruments for customers
in London and Frankfurt, with those made for LondonÄÄto
supplement ones by Nicolas (Colin) Hotteterre already
in useÄÄtuned to the higher pitch standard there (Giannini
1993, 44-46 n.11). As more and more establishments began
to adopt the higher of two common chamber-music pitches
(a=408-415cps) in preference to the lower (a=390-400cps),
makers were faced with the problem of reinventing the
instrument to work well at the higher pitch, or even
to work well at several pitches. The earliest dated
instrument with corps de rechange to survive
to the present is one stamped "1736" by Charles Bizey
(Paris: fl. 1716-1753) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum
in Nuremberg.
When changing the pitch of a flute by replacing the
upper middle joint with a longer or shorter one, it
was necessary to move the cork in or out in relation
to the embouchure hole so as to keep the octaves in
tune (Quantz 1752, 32; Tromlitz 1791, 32-38). The first
mention of a screw device for moving the cork is by
Quantz (ibid.), at which date he also refers
to the invention of the foot-register "not very long
ago" (op. cit., 33). Antoine Mahaut claimed that
both were invented by Quantz's teacher, the Royal Saxon
flutist Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin, not known as a maker
himself (Mahaut 1759, 1). Tromlitz claimed to have made
independent improvements in the devices, such as adding
a gauge to the screw-cork to indicate its position,
but he may not have been the first to do so. And the
screw-cork and register were not in universal use: Thomas
Lot (Paris: 1708-1786), whose workshop made instruments
for countless fashionable and noble customers, as well
as for flute virtuosi Blavet, Philidor, Piéche,
Naudot and Wendling, (Giannini 1993) is survived by
thirty-one flutes, not one of which is equipped with
screw-cork or register.
Another innovation which did not gain general acceptance
was the D# key. Quantz had such a key added to his flute
while in Paris in 1726, and though he explains the reason
for this in the Versuch, (Quantz 1752, 46), he
appears to have been largely ignored, or misunderstood,
ever since. Tromlitz, perhaps because he felt the principles
of correct meantone tuning were so little heeded by
most musicians forty years on, places greater emphasis
on the subject, and gives us a more thorough explanation
(Tromlitz 1791, 65ff.). The two-keyed flute was considered,
at least by some, to be the most advanced and rational
form of the flute late enough to be included in the
Supplement to Diderot's Encyclopedie (Halfpenny
1956).
The headjoint tuning slide, a tenon and socket arrangement
in the headjoint to enable it to be pulled out to lower
the pitch, is associated with the name of Quantz. In
fact it was not new in the mid-eighteenth century: a
bass Renaissance flute by Jacopo Neni was made with
a tuning slide quite some time before the conical- bore
instrument was thought of (Young 1980, 30). By the end
of the eighteenth century, Tromlitz thought it a very
poor idea, as it would have the effect of enlarging
the headjoint bore at the point where the tenon was
pulled out, spoiling the flute's tone (Tromlitz
1791, 32). Late eighteenth-century English flutes by
Richard Potter (1726-1806) and others commonly had metal-lined
tuning slides in the headjoint, a device he patented
along with the pewter plug keys, graduated screw-cork
and register, and added keys, in 1785.11
Headjoints entirely lined with brass became
commonplace, especially in England, before the end of
the century, though German writers disapproved heartily
on account of the hardening effect on the flute's tone.
Fully-lined heads made it possible to make a tuning
slide only as thick as the metal itself, which minimised
the disturbance to the bore. Seamless thin-wall brass
tubing became generally available about 1800 (Sydenham
1979, 68); even after this makers fabricated their own
tubing by soldering a sheet of brass on a mandrel.
ADDITION OF KEYS
The history of lower extensions to the flute's range
and of the D# key shows that the addition of keywork
to the flute did not present any technical obstacles
which might have prevented still further keys being
added as far back as the 1720s. 12
But we have no evidence that any attempts were made
in this direction, except for the use of open-standing
keys on bass flutes to enable the player to reach the
very widely- spaced holes (Smith 1979, 4). Instead makers
seem to have been concentrating on finding exactly the
right combination of bore, wallthickness, tonehole spacing,
size and undercutting, to produce the results they wanted.
They must have believed that a solution to the few outstanding
problems of the flute existed in Nature and that such
a solution, though it was too complicated to be advertised
by any natural law such as the ones Lambert was seeking,
could be found by experiment. This view was still held
as late as 1811 by a man who was a both brilliant inventor
and had, ironically enough, become famous for his keyed
flutes. Saxon court instrument-maker Heinrich Grenser
believed that "the greatest art consists in building
flutes on which everything may be done without keys":
"Not in the multiplication of keys, no, in the
utmost simplicity of the flute, without sacrificing
anything to fashion, must this beautiful instrument
be brought to true perfection."13
The addition and acceptance of additional keys was a
complicated and gradual process, an accurate history
of which can only be approached when the history of
the one- and two-keyed flute is better understood than
it is today. Many professional wind players avoided
the new keys until the ends of their lives. They met
with resistance for many reasons (Burgess unpublished):
they do not make more slurs possible; they leak, and
can be hit by mistake; they may be useful for solos,
but orchestral parts are too easy to require them; and
finally--and this is a point which reminds us that the
flute is only a utensil for making music of whatever
kind--the player's technique must be of a level that
makes the instrument itself seem insignificant.
Ardal Powell is a partner with Catherine Folkers
in Folkers & Powell, makers of historical flutes,
and editor of the baroque flute newsletter, TRAVERSO.
He is a 1993-4 Fellow of the National Endowment for
the Humanities' program for Independent Scholars.
His study project is entitled "The Keyed Flute: Tehcnology
and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenth Century."
REFERENCES
Adkins 1990 Adkins, Cecil, "Oboes Beyond Compare: The
Instruments of Hendrik and Frederik
Richters", Journal of the American
Musical Instrument Society XVI (1990),
50-57
Baines 1965 Baines, Anthony, Woodwind Instruments
and their History, New York: Norton,
1957. Edition cited is: Rev. ed., 1965
Bate 1969 Bate, Philip, The Flute, London:
Ernest Benn, and New York: Norton, 1969
Blakey 1780 William Blakey, L'art de faire les
ressorts des montres, Amsterdam, 1780
Boehm 1871 Boehm, Theobald Die Flöte und das
Flötenspiel, 1871. Edition cited
is trans. by Dayton C. Miller as The
Flute and Flute-playing, New York:
Dover, 1964
Burgess unpublished Gustave Vogt, Méthode de
Hautbois, MS, Paris Conservatoire,
unpublished translation by Geoffrey
Burgess
Byrne 1964 Byrne, Maurice, "The Church Band at
Swalcliffe", Galpin Society Journal
XVII (Feb. 1964)
Byrne 1965 Byrne, Maurice, "Schuchart and the
Extended Foot-Joint", Galpin Society
Journal XVIII (March 1965), 7-13
Byrne 1983 Byrne, Maurice, "Pierre Jaillard, Peter
Bressan," Galpin Society Journal
XXXVI (March 1983), 2-28
Diderot 1781 Diderot, Denis Encyclopedie, ou
Dictionnaire Raissoné des Sciences,
des Arts et des Métiers,
Lausanne/Basel, 1781
Genta 1985 Genta, G., Kinetic Energy Storage:
Theory and Practice of advanced Flywheel
Systems, London: Butterworths, 1985
Giannini 1993 Giannini, Tula, Great Flute Makers of
France: the Lot and Godfroy Families,
1650-1900, London: Tony Bingham, 1993
Halbig 1924 Halbig, Hermann, "Die Geschichte der
Klappe und Flöten und
Rohrblattinstrumenten bis zum Beginn des
18 Jh.", Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft Leipzig: Fr. Kistner
& CFW Siegel, 1924
Halfpenny 1956 Halfpenny, Eric, "A French Commentary on
Quantz", Music & Letters XXXVII
(1956), 61-66
Heyde 1985 Heyde, Herbert, "Der Instrumentenbau in
Leipzig zur Zeit Johann Sebastian Bachs",
in 300 Jahre Johann Sebastian Bach
ed. Ulrich Prinz, Tutzing: Hans Schneider,
1985
Heyde 1993a Heyde, Herbert, "Die Werkstatt von
Augustin Grenser d. ä. und Heinrich
Grenser in Dresden", Tibia 4/1993
Heyde 1993b Heyde, Herbert, "Makers' Marks on Wind
Instruments", in William Waterhouse,
The New Langwill Index, London:
Tony Bingham, 1993
Karp 1978 Karp, Cary, "Woodwind Instrument Bore
Measurement", Galpin Society
Journal XXXI (1978), 9-31
Kirnbauer and Thalheimer 1995
Kirnbauer, Martin and Peter Thalheimer,
"Jacob Denner and the Development of the
Flute in Germany", Early
Music 23.1 (1995), 82-100
Kirnbauer 1992 Kirnbauer, Martin, "überlegungen zu
den Meisterzeichen Nürnberger
"Holzblasinstrumentenmacher" im 17. und
18. Jahrhundert", Tibia 1/92, 9-20
Lambert 1777 Lambert, Johann Heinrich, "Observations
sur les Flûtes", Nouveaux
Mémoires de l'Academie Royale,
Berlin: C.F. Voss, 1777
Landes 1983 Landes, David S., Revolution in Time:
Clocks and the Making of the Modern
World, Cambridge MA and London:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1983
Leutmann 1772 Johann Georg Leutmann,
Vollständige Nachricht von den
Uhren, Erste Continuation oder zweiter
Theil, Halle, 1772, Pt.2, Ch. 10
Loubet de Sceaury 1949 Paul Loubet de Sceaury, Musiciens et
facteurs d'instruments de musique sous
l'ancien régime, statuts
corporatifs, Paris: A. Pedone, 1949
McNeil 1990 McNeil, Ian, ed., An Encyclopaedia of
the History of Technology, London and
New York: Routledge, 1990
Mahaut 1759 Mahaut, Antoine, Nouvelle Méthode
pour Aprendre en peu de tems a Joüer
de la Flute Traversiere/Nieuwe Manier om
binnen korte tyd op de Dwarsfluit te
leeren speelen, Paris: Lachevardiere,
[1759] and Amsterdam: Hummel [1759].
Facsimiles by Geneva: Minkoff, 1972, and
Buren: Frits Knuf, 1989. Edition cited is
A New Method for Learning to Play the
Transverse Flute, trans. and ed.
Eileen Hadidian.
Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana
University Press, 1989
Majer 1732 Majer, Joseph Friedrich Bernhard Caspar,
Museum Musicum Theoretico
Practicum, Schwäbisch Hall: Georg
Michael Majer, 1732. Facsimile:
[Michaelstein]: Kultur- und
Forschungsstatte Michaelstein, 1991
Myers 1980 Myers, Herbert W., "The Practical
Acoustics of Early Woodwinds", D.M.A.
dissertation, Stanford University, 1980
Nettl 1951 Nettl, Paul, Forgotten Musicians,
New York: Philosphical Library, 1951
Nickel 1971 Nickel, Ekkehart, Der
Holzblasinstreumentenbau in der Freien
Reichsstadt Nürnberg, Munich:
Emil Katzbichler, 1971
Pierre 1893 Pierre, Constant, Les Facteurs
d'instruments de musique, les luthiers et
la facture instrumentale, Paris, 1893
Powell 1995 Powell, Ardal, "Die Eichentopf-Flöte:
Die älteste erhaltene vierteilige
Traversflöte?" Tibia 1/95
(1995).
An English
version, "The Eichentopf Flute:
the Earliest Surviving Four-joint
Traverso?", can be accessed on this web
site.
Powell and Lasocki 1995
Powell, Ardal with David Lasocki, "Bach
and the Flute: The Players, the
Instruments, the Music", Early
Music 23.1 (1995), 9-29
Prod'homme 1912 Prod'homme, J.G., ed., Ecrits de
musiciens, Paris, 1912
Puglisi 1984 Puglisi, Filadelfio, "A three-piece flute
in Assisi", Galpin Society Journal,
XXXVII (March 1984), 6-9
Quantz 1752 Quantz, Johann Joachim, Versuch einer
Anweisung die Flöte Traversiere zu
spielen, Berlin: Johann Friedrich
Voss, 1752. Edition cited is: On
Playing the Flute, trans. and ed.
Edward R. Reilly, Second edition, New
York: Schirmer Books, 1985
Rockstro 1890 Rockstro, Richard Shepherd, A Treatise
on the Construction the History and the
Practice of the Flute, London, 1890.
Reprint, 3 Vols., Buren NL: Frits Knuf,
1986
Sachs 1922 Sachs, Kurt, Sammlung alter
Musikinstrumente bei der staatlichen
Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin,
Berlin, 1922
Singer et al. 1957 Singer, Charles, E.J. Homlyard, A.R. Hall
and Trevor I. Williams, eds., A History
of Technology, 8 Vols., Oxford: OUP,
1957
Smith 1979 Smith, Catherine P., "Changing Use of the
Flute and its Changing Construction 1774-
1795", American Recorder XX.1 (May
1979), 4-8
Solum 1993 Solum, John, The Early Flute,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993
Spohr 1992 Spohr, Peter, "Konische
QuerflötenbohrungenÄÄhistoriche
änderungen und musikalische
Auswirkungen", Bericht über das
10. Symposium zu Fragen des
Musikinstrumentenbaus, Michaelstein,
10.-11. November 1989, ed.
Eitelfriedrich Thom, Michaelstein, 1992,
39-47
Sydenham 1979 Sydenham, P.H., Measuring Instruments:
Tools of Knowledge and Control,
Stevenage and New York: Peregrinus, 1979
Toff 1979 Toff, Nancy, The Development of the
Modern Flute, New York: Taplinger,
1979
Tromlitz 1786 Tromlitz, Joahnn George, Kurze
Abhandlung vom Flötenspielen,
Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1786
Tromlitz 1791 Tromlitz, Johann George,
Ausführlicher
und gründlicher Unterricht die
Flöte zu spielen, Leipzig: Adam
Friedrich Böhme, 1791. The edition
cited is: trans. and ed. Ardal Powell,
The Virtuoso Flute-Player,
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991
Tromlitz 1796 Tromlitz, Johann George, An das
musikalische Publikum, Leipzig, 1796
Tromlitz 1800 Tromlitz, Johann George, Ueber die
Flöten mit mehreren Klappen,
Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme, 1800
Waterhouse 1993 William Waterhouse, The New Langwill
Index, London: Tony Bingham, 1993
Young 1980 Young, Phillip T., The Look of
Music, Vancouver [BC]: Vancouver
Museums and Planetarium Association, 1980
Young 1982 Young, Phillip T., Twenty-five Hundred
Historical Woodwinds, New York:
Pendragon Press, 1982
Notes
1Examples of the
need to understand contemporary tooling and methods
in the study of historical woodwinds are found in Karp
1978.
2Tromlitz 1786, referring
to Joseph Tacet (?-1801), London flutist.
3Solum 1993, 64, claims
Boie invented the pewter plugs. This seems to rely on
Rockstro 1890, para. 384, where the assertion
is made without citing a source. Boie's own attribution
to Tacet would seem to dispose of any possibility that
he may have invented them himself.
4Statuts, ordonnances,
lettres de création, arrests de sentence de la
communauté des maistres faiseurs d'instruments
de musique. De la ville et faubourgs de Paris. Paris:
Grou, 1741. Extensive documentation of Paris guild activity
is in Loubet de Sceaury 1949. See also Sentence de
Monsieur le Lieutenant General de police, rendé
en faveur de la communauté des maŒtres faiseurs
d'instrumens de musique. Contre la communauté des
maŒtres tabletiers. Du quatorze juillet 1741. Gilles
Lot obtained judgement in a 1752 lawsuit against Charles
Bizey, Thomas Lot, Paul Villars, Denis Vincent and Jacques
[de] Lusse, master instrument-makers, who had conspired
to prevent him being admitted as a master. G. Lot's
qualifications were: he had served 5 years as an apprentice
with Thomas Lot, his cousin, one year with Bizey, then
worked for Leclerc and married his daughter (Pierre
1893, 40-60).
5Inventory listings
are given by Marcelle Benoit and Norbert Dufourcq in
various volumes of "Recherches" and in Giannini
1993
6"Mémoire de M.
de la Barre: sur les musettes et hautbois &c.",
cited in Prod'homme 1912, 244. The wind-instrument playing
families of Philidor and especially Hotteterre are still
given credit by most modern writers with having invented
the conical-bore flute at about the same time as the
oboe was developed, largely on the strength of de la
Barre's testimony. But we are to rely on his statement
at all we must actually rule out this possibility, for
it continues:
From that time on, bagpipes were left to shepherds;
violins, recorders, theorboes and viols took their
place--for the transverse flute did not come along
until later.
Thus de la Barre did not credit any member of the Hotteterre
family with introducing the baroque flute, and does
not himself seem to know where it came from.Quantz (Quantz
1752, I.5) merely guesses that the flute underwent the
same changes as the oboe and bassoon at the same time
and place; and he only guesses after admitting that
"who its originator was cannot be fixed with certainty,
although I have spared no pains to discover reliable
answers."
7"Herrn Johann Joachim
Quantzens Lebenslauf, von ihm selbst entworfen",
in F.W. Marpurg, Historisch-critisch Beyträge
zur Aufnahme der Musik, I (1755), 197-250. Translated
in Nettl 1951.
8 Byrne 1965. Toff 1979,
25- 6, mistakenly asserts that Florio, Gedney and Richard
Potter revived the lower extension "in about 1774".
This piece of conjecture seems to have originated with
Baines 1966, 294. But it is contradicted not only by
the Mason and Gedney announcments of 1756 cited in Byrne
1965, but also by the existence of the Gedney flute
dated 1769 mentioned above and in Bate 1969, 97.
9 SeePowell and Lasocki
1995. 40% of the German 3-joint flutes surviving
to this century had a C-foot. An advertisement appeared
as late as 1748 for what seems to be a flute with a
C-foot: "A Denner traverso in ivory, with gilded keys
[sic], can be had together with its case lined with
red cloth" (Kirnbauer and Thalheimer 1995). In the thinly
veiled piece of sales propaganda headed "Newly invented
means for the improvement of the flute" [Neu erfundene
Vortheile zur bessern Einrichtung der Flöte] in
Tromlitz 1786, Tromlitz says he used to make foot extensions
to low C twenty or thirty years before, but gave up
as they did not become popular in Germany owing to their
detrimental effect on the flute's tone.
10Quantz 1752, 31. Quantz
has been followed by nearly all subsequent authors.
11Rockstro 1890,
para. 473. Almost certainly, none of these was Potter's
own invention.
12Halbig 1924. On
p.43 Halbig cites a Sourdeline depicted in Mersenne's
Harmonie Universelle II, Proposition XXX, 293ff.,
having an extensive system of closed chromatic keywork.
A similar system was used on the musette, popular at
the French court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Smith 1979 points out that the Hotteterres were making
heavily keyed musettes at the same time as they were
(supposedly) contributing to the genesis of the baroque
flute.
13Nicht in der Anzahl
der Klappen, nein, in der möglichsten Einfachheit
der Flöte, ohne Eleganz etwas aufzuopfern, muss
die wahre Vervollkommung dieses schönen Instruments
gemacht werden. H. Grenser, letter to Allgemeine
Musikalische Zeitung 46, 13 November, 1811, col.775.
|