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NOTE: As always, this series of articles is designed to educate the average Elanthian on the real world history and nature of each instrument detailed, and to place the instruments in a better context for those who play and use them in the Lands.

The pattern of sound produced by the flute, as an oscilloscope trace shows, is just about the purest tone you can get: a smooth, undulating wave, unspiked by mixtures of higher notes. Its simple sound, easy on the ear - coupled with the instrument's extraordinary agility in handling fast runs - has fascinated listeners since the emergence of the flute in the sixteenth century.

The method of blowing across an opening to make a sound was most likely first discovered when some unknown ancient noticed the sound produced when the wind blew across a hollow reed. Primitive flutes were found in Egyptian tombs and depicted in drawings.

The most famous ancient flute (or flute-like) instrument is the Pipes of Pan, pan flute, or panpipes. Greek mythology has it that the ancient god Pan pursued a nymph named Syrinx. When he finally caught her, she turned into reeds, so he fashioned an instrument from them.

The oldest known discovered flute, however, is thought to be a Neanderthal flute. Slovenian Academy of Sciences paleontologist Ivan Turk, who was leading excavations of the Divje Babe I cave in northwestern Slovenia, discovered the "flute" in 1995. Found near an ancient hearth and Mousterian tools (those associated with Neanderthals of this period), the fragment of cave bear thigh bone preserves two complete holes and perhaps remnants of two others. The holes in this bone, between 43,000 and 82,000 years old, are "really well rounded and just about the right separation for humans to put their fingers on," according to team member Bonnie Blackwell, a Queens College geologist.

The first flute to make an appearance during "modern times" was the fipple flute, otherwise known as the recorder in English. The term "recorder" came from the phrase "to record," which meant to warble or sing like a lark. The recorder, however, was different from the fipple flute because it had eight holes, with the hole in the back for the thumb.

There were terms to differentiate between the recorder, which was held and played with a vertical posture, descending directly down from the mouth, and the horizontally-held flute, pictured to the left. The recorder was termed as the "common flute" or flauto, and the German-styled transverse, horizontal lip flute was known as transverso. The transverse flute is thought to be of German or Swiss origin. Early transverse flutes were usually made out of boxwood with a round mouthhole. There were no holes for accidentals; it was pitched only for whatever major diatonic scale it was made.

In the Renaissance period various flute-like instruments were available. Those played from the end became the modern recorder, while those played from the side became the modern flute, but they were all essentially simple pipes, with holes which the player would cover with the fingers to make the notes. In the 1650s Jacques Hotteterre made the significant advance of splitting the side-blown flute into three parts; the head, with the mouthpiece; the body, with most of the holes; and the foot, with a few of the lowest holes.

The change in construction technique had a far-reaching effect. Holes on a flute are not bored perpendicular to the axis of the instrument. The tops are in a place convenient for the fingers; the bottoms, inside the tube, are in a place to make the notes the right pitch. Reaching inside the single-piece flute to bore these holes to the right skew was difficult, but with the three-piece set-up, it was much easier.

This apparently simple device had the effect of turning the flute from a military and folk pipe into a genuine musical instrument. The sound quality improved drastically and, with the addition of a single key to add the one note (D sharp) that couldn't be achieved by combinations of fingering, the flute could tackle the sort of wide-ranging music being written by the baroque composers.

It was the beginning the golden age of the flute: that of the baroque flute. In the eighteenth century it was the instrument for a gentleman to be seen playing - or at least, holding, as any portrait of a fashionable aristocratic family of the period will show. Such was its popularity that whole operas were arranged for solo flute, and one band, the "Gentlemen's Concerts" was founded in Manchester in 1774 consisting solely of 26 flutes.

Frederick the Great of Prussia was a keen flute player, and one of the select band of composing royalty, writing countless flute sonatas and concertos. Some scholars say he wrote only the flute parts, the rest being filled in by his court organist, who was a pupil of J S Bach. Frederick's flute teacher, Quantz, composed over 300 flute concertos and 200 flute sonatas and wrote a treatise on flute playing that was still in print over 170 years later. Frederick’s appetite for music is said to have ceased in his sixties - possibly due to the death of his flute teacher. It was more probably due to the loss of his teeth; it is virtually impossible to achieve the right lip position to play the flute - the embouchure - without dental support.

The flute boom was particularly strong in the French courts; and if every man had a flute, every young lady had a harp. The two instruments have gone together ever since, with composers from Mozart to Ravel writing for compositions for flutes and harp. Bach, Handel, and Haydn all wrote several chamber pieces for the flute, some of which are still played and easily recognized today.

During the beginning of the nineteenth century, the flute was seen as an old-fashioned instrument, played by enthusiastic amateurs, possessing a repertoire enormously broad but lacking in depth; hundreds and hundreds of flashy parlor-pieces from composing flute-players that showed off the agility of the instrument but did little else. The solo flute, like most other wind instruments, was in decline, and the golden age was over.

Theobald Boehm, jeweler and flutist, is considered to have created the most important revolution of the flute. Boehm was a German flute player, silversmith and engineer - just the right combination of skills to redesign the instrument. After observing performer Charles Nicholson, who had a flute with large tone holes, which produced a fine, large tone.

Only after finishing his extensive planning, in the early 1830s, did he attempt to build the instrument. He refined his new instrument over a period of 15 years. He used metal, partly for the brighter sound, but mainly because it was much more reliable material than wood, less prone to cracking and warping. He devised a mechanism that acted as an extension of the fingers, using larger holes and key rings. This allowed them to sit comfortably under the player's fingers and work a mechanism to close up specific holes, often nowhere near the position of the finger.

During the following decade, he continued his work, designing a new instrument with a cylindrical body, a foot joint, and a parabolic, or bowl-shaped, head joint, that also used all the previous work he had done with the keys. The tone holes were large, so Boehm designed padded cups for each hole, to substitute for the pads of the player's fingers. The shape of the head joint allowed the sound to be focused down the length of the instrument.

The final model, the Boehm flute of 1847, is virtually identical to the flutes of today, and could cope convincingly with the increasingly complicated music of the romantic period. Neither the Germans nor the English took to his flute, preferring the old wooden models; it was in France that the transverse flute was embraced and played widely.

With the advent of mass-produced flutes in the 1960s and 1970s, the flute has experienced a modern Rennaissance of sorts. The explosion in the number of players in the last 25 years has made the flute one of the most familiar instruments at all levels from school up to recording orchestras.

Author's Note -- If you have a specific request for an intrument to be explored in this column, feel free to let me know. Send me a message at LordAlturiak@aol.com, and I'll try to sneak it in.