Flute

• 1. Introduction

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  The flute is the instrument behind the oldest sound humans can still identify. In the Swabian Jura of present-day Germany, archaeologists pulled flutes from the earth dated to roughly 53,000 to 45,000 years ago. These are the earliest identifiable musical instruments known anywhere. One of them, found in the Hohle Fels cavern, was carved from a vulture wing bone with five holes and a V-shaped mouthpiece. It lay near the Venus of Hohle Fels and a short distance from the oldest known human carving. How did a hollow tube blown across an opening become a tradition stretching from Ice Age caves to Krishna's hands to the silver instruments of the modern orchestra? And why, after all these millennia, do flutists still disagree about what a flute should be made of?

• 2. Bones In The Caves

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  A fragment of a juvenile cave bear's femur, pierced with two to four holes, surfaced at Divje Babe in Slovenia and was dated to about 43,000 years ago. Some argue it may be the oldest flute of all, though the claim is disputed. The Hohle Fels flute near Ulm, Germany, dated to at least 35,000 years ago, held the title of oldest confirmed musical instrument until a redating shifted the honor. Flutes from the Geißenklösterle cave were reassessed at 42,000 to 43,000 years old, pushing them ahead. The same Geißenklösterle cave gave up an 18.7 centimeter flute with three holes, made from a mammoth tusk and dated to 30,000 to 37,000 years ago, found in 2004. A decade earlier, two flutes carved from swan bones came out of that cave, dated to about 36,000 years ago. When the Hohle Fels discovery was announced, scientists wrote that the finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time modern humans colonized Europe. They went further, suggesting the flute might help explain the probable behavioural and cognitive gulf between Neanderthals and early modern humans.

• 3. Asia's Long Inheritance

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  In a tomb at Jiahu, archaeologists recovered a playable Chinese Gudi, a bone flute 9,000 years old, alongside 29 similar specimens. They were fashioned from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes, each pierced with five to eight holes. Written records of flutes in China appear from the Zhou dynasty, dated roughly 1046 to 256 BC. The oldest sources show the Chinese using the kuan, a reed instrument, and the xiao, an end-blown flute often of bamboo, in the 12th to 11th centuries BC. The chi followed in the 9th century BC and the yueh in the 8th century BC. The bamboo chi stands as the oldest documented transverse flute. The earliest surviving Chinese transverse flute is a chi from the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at the Suizhou site in Hubei province, dating from 433 BC. It is made of lacquered bamboo with closed ends and carries five stops on its side rather than its top. India holds its own claim, with literature from 1500 BC making vague references to the cross flute. The musicologist Curt Sachs called the cross flute, in Sanskrit the vamshi, the outstanding wind instrument of ancient India. The Indian bamboo cross flute, the Bansuri, was sacred to Krishna, who is shown holding it in Hindu art.

• 4. Words Older Than Records

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  A Sumerian cuneiform tablet dated to about 2600 to 2700 BC carries the earliest written reference to a flute. The instrument also appears in a recently translated tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem whose development spanned roughly 2100 to 600 BC. A set of cuneiform tablets called the musical texts give tuning instructions for seven scales of a stringed instrument, assumed to be a Babylonian lyre. One of those scales is named embubum, an Akkadian word for flute. The Bible, in Genesis 4:21, names Jubal as the father of all those who play the ugab and the kinnor. The former term is read by some as a wind instrument, which makes Jubal, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the inventor of the flute. Elsewhere in scripture the instrument is called chalil, from the root word for hollow. The word flute itself entered English in the Middle English period as floute, flowte, or floyte, possibly from Old French or by way of Middle High German and Dutch. Attempts to trace it to the Latin flare, meaning to blow, have been called phonologically impossible. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first known use in the 14th century, in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Hous of Fame around 1380.

• 5. How Air Becomes Tone

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  A stream of air directed across a hole sets the air at that hole vibrating, and the flute begins to sound. The airstream creates a Bernoulli or siphon effect that excites the air inside the resonant cavity, usually cylindrical. A flutist changes pitch by opening and closing holes, altering the effective length of the resonator and its resonant frequency. By varying air pressure alone, a player can also make the air resonate at a harmonic rather than the fundamental, shifting pitch without touching a single hole. Head joint geometry appears especially critical to tone, yet manufacturers share no consensus on a shape. The acoustic impedance of the embouchure hole is the most critical parameter, shaped by the length of the chimney between lip-plate and head tube, its diameter, and the curvature of its ends. There is even a designed restriction in the throat of the Japanese Nohkan flute. One stubborn question is whether the metal matters at all. Professional flutists were blindfolded and asked to tell flutes of different metals apart. In the first listening no flute was correctly identified, and in a second only the silver flute was named. The study concluded there was no evidence the wall material has any appreciable effect on sound color or dynamic range.

• 6. A Family Of Many Shapes

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  In its most basic form a flute is an open tube blown into, yet the family splits along several lines. With most flutes the player blows across the edge of the mouthpiece, about a quarter of the bottom lip covering the embouchure hole. Others, including the whistle, recorder, tin whistle, ocarina, and fujara, use a duct called a fipple to direct air onto the edge. The fipple gives a distinct timbre and makes the instrument easier to play, but takes control away from the musician. A second division separates side-blown or transverse flutes, like the Western concert flute, piccolo, dizi, and bansuri, from end-blown flutes like the ney, xiao, shakuhachi, and quena. Flutes may be open at one or both ends. The ocarina, xun, pan pipes, and bosun's whistle are closed-ended, while open-ended flutes carry more harmonics and brighter timbres. Most have a single tube, though pan pipes hold many resonators played one at a time and double flutes sound more than one at once. Air sources vary too. Conventional flutes are blown with the mouth, some cultures use nose flutes, and the flue pipes of organs are blown by bellows or fans.

• 7. The Boehm Revolution

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  Between 1832 and 1847, Theobald Boehm reshaped the Western concert flute, reworking the size and placement of its tone holes, its key mechanism, and its fingering system. He greatly improved the instrument's dynamic range and intonation over its predecessors. A descendant of the medieval German flute, the concert flute is a transverse treble flute closed at the top, with circular tone holes larger than the finger holes of its baroque ancestors. Those baroque flutes, usually starting from d1, were wooden and one-keyed, played mainly from the early 18th to the early 19th century before the concert flute pushed them aside. They returned in the late 20th century through historically informed performance. Nearly all modern concert flutes follow Boehm's design, the rare exceptions being the Kingma system and other custom fingering systems. Beginners play nickel, silver, or silver-plated brass, while professionals use solid silver, gold, and even platinum, with some wooden-bodied flutes made of African Blackwood. Pitched in C, the standard flute has a range of three octaves from middle C, or a half step lower with a B foot attached. The piccolo plays an octave higher, while the G alto and C bass flutes sit a perfect fourth and an octave below. Rarer still are the contra-alto, contrabass, subcontrabass, double contrabass, and hyperbass flutes, pitched up to four octaves below middle C.

• 8. Voices Around The World

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  The best bamboo for an Indian flute, by general agreement, grows in the Nagercoil area of South India. India keeps two main varieties in use. The Bansuri carries six finger holes and one embouchure hole and dominates the Hindustani music of the North. The Venu, also called Pullanguzhal, has eight finger holes and belongs to the Carnatic music of the South. Before the eight-holed cross-fingering technique spread, the South Indian flute had only seven finger holes, with the standard set by Sharaba Shastri of the Palladam school at the start of the 20th century. China's dizi comes in many forms, from six to eleven holes, made of bamboo, wood, jade, bone, or iron, often carrying a resonance membrane called a di mo, a thin tissue paper that brightens the sound. Korea's daegeum is a large bamboo transverse flute with a buzzing membrane all its own, while Japan's fue covers many instruments, from the end-blown shakuhachi to the transverse ryuteki and nokan. On Madagascar, the end-blown sodina resembles the Indonesian suling so closely that its predecessor was likely carried there by settlers from Borneo in outrigger canoes. The celebrated sodina flutist Rakoto Frah, who died in 2001, appeared on the local currency. In Eastern Armenia, the small, nasal-toned sring is made of wood or cane with seven finger holes and a thumb hole. Among the Igbo of Nigeria, the oja is carved from wood, bamboo, or metal and played during cultural events. To carry any of these voices unbroken, a player can turn to circular breathing, drawing air in through the nose and pushing it out through the mouth to sustain a continuous sound.