What is an Irish flute? (Part 1)

This page was getting so long, I've split it into parts. It seems to be turning into a sort of history of the development of the flute. The "Irish flute" has its own place in this long history, of course. If you want to, you can avoid all the history and just skip ahead to the simple answer about the Irish flute.

The following pages have been pulled out and set up on their own. They are also referenced at the corresponding point in this page.

Boehm, Nicholson and the English flute style

Internet flute guru discussion

Flute vibrato

When Krishna plays the flute the whole world is filled with love. Rivers stop, stones are illumined, lotus flowers tremble; gazelles, cows and birds are entranced; demons and ascetics enchanted. (Bhagavata-Purana)

Traditional music is not unaffected by changing trends in art music. The use of readily available instruments from the much larger classical marketplace is an important factor. The modern violin and bow, for example, seem to fit the needs of the traditional fiddler. However, in order to speak the language of traditional music, they are used with techniques much different than the norms of 20th century violin technique (which features a wide constant vibrato and the use of higher playing positions rather than lower, for example). Frequently, the language of traditional music preserves the usage of classical music from centuries earlier. The flute is a particularly interesting example, because traditional flute players have gravitated to a particular historical period, the early 19^th century, as providing the optimal instrument for their needs. One interesting question is whether there was any native tradition of flute playing in Ireland before this period.

I also quote (in translation) the key figure in the development of the modern flute, Theobald Böhm (or Boehm for people who don't have umlauts), who published in 1871 a classic book summarizing his life's work. Interestingly, his opinions are not what many in the modern classical music world would expect. And he even had a good word for traditional Irish and Scottish music!

The fact that only document 4 [Manesse manuscript, c. 1340] shows a right-held flute demonstrates the prevalence of the left posture in the Middle Ages. All flautists of antiquity, as we have seen, played to the right, whereas in Asia in the first millennium it was only in India and in Central Asia that the flute was held to the left. This permits us to go a step further and state that in the West the transverse flute fell into oblivion after a modest flowering in prehistoric times and in antiquity, to be reintroduced through Byzantine civilization around AD 1000.

Raymond Meylan
The Flute
translated from the German by Alfred Clayton
Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 1988
pp. 50-52


The famous miniature of the Manesse manuscript probably depicts a scene from the musical life of a monastery in northern Switzerland at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The flute, this time held to the right, is joined by the fiddle, possibly also by a voice.

Ibid., p. 53

The flute is rarely found in pictures of the fifteenth century, but is depicted with increasing frequency in those of the sixteenth. These pictures suggest that the flute had a twofold usage, as a military instrument and in chamber music. It is difficult to know today how military flutes differed from those for chamber music. In discussion on this subject, it has been hypothesized that the extant instruments with wider bores, and in some cases quite odd tuning (at least using fingering from the extant sources), were for military use. On the other hand, instruments with a narrower bore would have played more easily in the higher register and produced a more piercing sound which perhaps would have been more suited to military usage.

John Solum
The Early Flute
Oxford University Press, 1992
pp. 12-13

Medieval and Renaissance flutes were cylindrical tubes. On these instruments the higher octave was not in tune with the lower. So generally flutes were made in families of differing sizes. A number of Renaissance instruments had only a one octave range, such as crumhorns, bagpipes, etc. These instruments were normally used as part of a group. In this period, recorders were much more common than flutes. One of the first descriptions was given by Martin Agricola in his Musica instrumentalis deudsch (1529).

Agricola is the first to discuss a consort of "Schweizerpfeiffen". Here he gives fingering charts for a bass in D, tenor/alto in A, and descant in e ... The range of each instrument is said to be three octaves, greater than that mentioned by any other author.

John Solum, op. cit., p. 17

The following is a sample composite fingering table for Renaissance flute (fingering tables from the period vary substantially). The pitches are given an octave lower than the sounding pitch, i.e., the notation is the same as abc notation, not the way most music books (such as those quoted below) give it. The irregularities of the fingerings show an attempt to correct the intonation; nevertheless, in additional to this, the performer was required to compensate the intonation to a much great extent than on an instrument of the Baroque period or later.

According to Jambe de Fer the transverse flute could rise a fifth above d''':

The transverse flute has 15 to 16 notes obtained very naturally and without too much effort of pressure. Beyond this, to the nineteenth note, the notes become rough and coarse on account of the amount of breath required and for this reason are little used. (p. 47)

The fingering for these last notes does not appear in his chart. Agricola includes them and in the first edition of his treatise even goes up to d''''. One is inclined to think that Agricola had been dazzled by an extraordinary virtuoso, but the fact that he does not mention those very high notes in the 1545 edition shows that he had originally gone too far. His zealous desire to say everything is so great that he overestimates his experimental ability. ...

I confess that I have never managed to produce notes 21 and 22 using Agricola's fingering; but my experience is confined to the sixteenth-century flute in the Basle Historisches Museum (Musical Instrument Collection 1907-1908), and to certain modern copies of Renaissance flutes in the museums in Brussels, Vienna and Leningrad.

Raymond Meylan, op. cit., pp. 72-75

Renaissance flutes in replica should be designed to play in mean-tone tuning, which was in general use at the time that Renaissance flutes were played. Essentially what this means in practical terms for today's player is that major thirds are pure, smaller than in equal temperament. A player must hear and play a lower E,B, F#, C#,G#, a higher Bb and Eb. Moreover, Eb must be played higher than D#, and Ab must be higher than G#. Mean-tone tuning was more or less forgotten in the nineteenth century and has made a come-back only relatively recently, a result of the studies of historical tuning and temperament which have been made as a critical part of the early music revival.

John Solum, op. cit., p. 134

Now you might ask, if cylindrical Renaissance flutes were out of tune between octaves, why is a cylindrical bore whistle in tune with itself between octaves? I'm afraid the theory is a bit beyond me. But as I understand it, it has to do with the relationship among the diameter of the tube, the thickness of the tube and the size of the fingerholes. A whistle has a fairly thin tube and large fingerholes. If you scale a whistle up so it sounds an octave lower, in flute range, it would be difficult to scale the fingerholes by the same amount, because they would be larger than your fingers. Also, if you made such an instrument out of wood, you would have to use a good thickness of wood or it would be too delicate. Such were the problems facing the old flutemakers. (Also, it has to be said, many whistles are not really in tune between octaves.)

Looking at modern instruments, the modern cylindrical Böhm flute has thin metal walls and very large holes which are closed by a key mechanism, not directly by the fingers. We have conical bore whistles, such as those made by Clarke and Copeland, which have a characteristic breathy tone. We also have low whistles, played in the same range as the flute, which are made with thin metal walls, and are notoriously cranky instruments to play, although they have been turning up on a lot of recent recordings, usually supplied with copious amounts of reverb. Now back to the flute …

At the beginning of the baroque period it was discovered, some say by one Jacques Hotteterre (this is a topic of debate), that by giving a conical taper to the bore of the flute, the second octave could be brought in tune with the first. This suited the new needs of the baroque composer, who had given up the old polyphonic ensemble style for an accompanied melody style, which needed a wider range of notes from a single instrument. Thus began the decline of the recorder and the ascendancy of the flute.

The transition from cylindrical to conical bore leads to two distnct kinds of fingering. The conical bore makes it possible to play the octaves a'-a'' and b'-b'' simply with the lips, as was the case on the Renaissance flute with the notes e, f and g. On a cylindrical tube this was impossible above g; a'' and b'' were too flat using the fingering of notes a' and b', and this could not be remedied.

Now that I have described the development of the flute in terms of the changes in fingering the reason for this should have become apparent. Flautists wished to use the same fingering in the first two octaves in order to be equally agile in both. Instrumental music requiring a greater range than in the sixteenth century was in the first instance written for two favoured instruments, the violin and the cornett, though other instruments soon began to emulate them.

When the notes that we have just mentioned became easier to obtain their sound also became brighter. An instrument was no longer supposed to merge in the overall sonority of a particular group; rather, the player strove to stand out and demonstrate his individuality. One senses the influence of opera, whose heroes call upon instrumental partners.

Raymond Meylan, op. cit., pp. 95-96

The baroque flute emerged around 1670 and gradually evolved through several stages before becoming the classical flute in the second half of the eighteenth century. … the baroque flute consisted of three or more pieces, had one or more keys, and was for the most part of conical bore (that is, the diameter of the bore of the cylindrical head piece was greater than that of the foot piece, and the section or sections in between had a bore of decreasing diameter from head to foot). The tapered bore not only improved the tuning of the upper (overblown) notes but also effectively flattened the scale; in compensation, the fingerholes were moved closer together. ... The invention of the D# key on the foot piece around 1670 was an important achievement; it enabled the little finger of the right hand to push a lever (the key) to vent a hole out of reach of the finger and placed between the bottom end of the flute and the first hole. The newly bored hole produced d#'.

The extant original baroque flutes generally have pitches that range from A=392 to about A=415. They tend to play most satisfactorily in the first two octaves, from d' to d''', although low-pitched and so-called 'd'amore' instrument have easily played third octaves because the bore tends to be narrow relative to the length of the instrument.

John Solum, op. cit., pp. 34-35

Continue to part 2 of this document
Top of document
Flute links
Boehm, Nicholson and the English flute style
Internet flute guru discussion
Flute vibrato

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