The word 'flute' comes from the Latin word 'flare' which means to flow. Most student flutes are made of silver-plated metal such as yellow brass, which is 70% copper and 30% zinc. Silver-plating gives the flute a more mellow sound. Most professionals play on solid silver flutes (silver content 92.5%) although some, like James Galway, play on flutes made of other metals.
Flute-makers have to do a five year apprenticeship. The hardest part to get right is the head-joint. If this is wrong the flute will never sound good. The head-joint is conical. The lip plate is shaped and the embouchure hole cut by hand to the right size with the blowing edge at the correct angle for the breath to vibrate the column of air in the body of the flute. The top end is stopped by a crown. This holds the cork inside the tube by means of a screw. Moving this cork minutely changes the length of the column of air and therefore the relative pitch of every note played.
A Flute is 67cm long (C Foot joint) and weighs 400-600g. The constant bore of the body and foot joint is 19mm.
The rest of the flute is made from two pieces of tube with a constant bore. It takes more than 150 pillars, rods, keys, rollers and springs to make a flute.
Three pieces are taken from a length of metal tube. The holes are cut and the metal around each hole is pulled up to form a chimney. A strap of metal is soldered onto the body, and another is added to the footjoint. Next, metal pillars are welded onto these.
Meanwhile, all the keys are being cut and shaped. Once this is done, they can be sorted into groups and soldered by hand. Next a piece of metal called the riser is fitted to the headjoint. The Lip Plate is placed on top of this and all three are soldered together. Then the embouchure hole is cut.
All the different parts are now ready to be polished. Now it's plated. The flutes are placed in racks in special baths and coated with silver. Pads are fitted and felts and corks are added in places to stop keys from rubbing against each other.
Finally the tuning cork and the crown are added. The flute is then tuned and electronically checked before being dispatched to the retailers.
Design and Invention
Until the 19th Century, flutes weren't very popular. They tended to play out of tune and this was because the holes were placed where they were easy to reach and not where they gave the best intonation. There were also fewer holes which led to some very complicated fingering. For many years people tried to do something about this, but the first person to come up with a successful design was Jacques Hotteterre (1680 - 1761). His design, which added the D# key, made the flute more popular and many people then lost interest in other instruments - especially the recorder. Hotteterre did a great deal to improve the flute. He added a key and changed the shape of the tube to give the flute a better sound. He also wrote the first ever book about the flute in 1707 - 'Les Principles de la Flute Traversiere'.
Over the next few decades, more keys were added. To begin with they caused more problems than they solved. There isn't a lot of music for the flute from this time because composers began to dislike the flute again. It was unreliable and difficult to play. It wasn't till the early 1800s when Theobald Boehm came on the scene, that the modern flute evolved. He worked out the best size and position for all the holes and designed keys which made it possible to play the flute without tricky fingerings. Most flutes today are based on his design.
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The Boehm Story Theobald Boehm (1794 - 1881) was a German flute player and instrument maker. He had taken flute lessons as a young man and later became a virtuoso flute player, but it's usually as the inventor of the modern flute that he is remembered. In 1831, Boehm visited London and heard a man (Charles Nicholson) playing a flute with unusually large holes. He was so taken by the sound that he decided to redesign the instrument. In 1847, he finished work on his new patent flute and won many prizes for it and the new flute was soon used all over the world. |
When people discovered how to make flutes 100s of years ago, they believed them to have magical powers. As a result flutes were often used in religious ceremonies and rituals, but they were played for entertainment as well. Like we said already, for a long time the flute wasn't popular. However in 1678, Lully included a part for flute in a piece of ballet music he was writing. From then on composers started to use the flute and by the 1780s it was fairly standard for an orchestra to include a flute. These days orchestral music includes parts for 2 or 3 flutes with one player doubling on piccolo.
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