The making of the almost perfect flute.(Critical essay)

From ancient times people have listened to the sound of flutes with special fascination and delight. Classical mythologists ascribed the instrument's invention to the gods: Osiris in Egypt, Pan or Athene in Greece, and Krishna in India. (1) Flutes operate on a simple physical principle: the player blows air at a sharp angle into a long tubelike form, producing a sound that the player modulates into various musical notes by opening and closing finger holes suitably placed along the tube. Over the centuries, a large variety of musical instruments operating on this basic principle have been made. The oldest known examples--bone whistles and pierced shells played by the Indus and Sumerian populations--date back about five thousand years. (2) This article is concerned with transverse flutes, those the player holds horizontally, the origin of which has been traced to the Chinese civilization between the fourth and the ninth centuries BC, (3) and to the Etruscan civilization in Europe in the second century BC. (4)

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Considering its primitive beginnings, the flute is arguably the most improved of all musical instruments, due in large measure to work by outstanding European flute makers between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This article sketches the flute's development into the modern instrument we know today, focusing on leading makers in France and Germany who played major roles in its evolution. Most of the instruments considered here are from the collection of Mark Leone, who owns what is perhaps the largest private collection of antique flutes in the United States, with more than two hundred examples made between 1700 and the early twentieth century. (5)

European manuscripts from as early as the fourteenth century illustrate the transverse playing of slender, unadorned hardwood, one- or two-piece instruments with six holes. A dominant feature of these instruments, now known as Renaissance flutes, is their more or less cylindrical inner bore. A common challenge then was achieving a standard pitch, which, as many reported, varied from place to place, or even "from church to church." (6)

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