"It's an intensely vocal instrument," says the flautist Susan Milan, "which can be like a coloratura opera singer one minute and a simple melodic instrument the next. It has a great palette of tone-colours and an enormous range. It appears to be an easy instrument to play at first, and many children pick it up very quickly - but at the high end it has the greatest technical demands of any wind instrument."

The flute has had three main incarnations, each associated with a "golden age". In the Renaissance period various flute-like instruments were around. Those blown from the end became the modern recorder; those from the side 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.

 It 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. In the early years of the eighteenth century Hotteterre wrote the first flute tutor and the first solo flute music had appeared, written by Michel de LaBarre.

It was the beginning the first golden age: 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 (1712-1786) was a keen flute player, and one of the select band of composing royalty, writing countless flute sonatas and concertos (though some 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 (1697-1773) composed something like 300 flute concertos and 200 flute sonatas and wrote a treatise on flute playing that was still in print over 170 years later. (His pronouncements are so often taken as gospel that a sentence beginning "Quantz says...." is bound to bring groans from many flute players). Fredericks appetite for music is said to have ceased in his sixties - possibly due to his losing his flute teacher, but more probably 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. Handel and Haydn all wrote several chamber pieces for the flute, and Bach's Suite in B minor - effectively a flute concerto - is a very familiar piece today.

 However, as musical writing became more and more adventurous through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the flute's lopsided sound began to show up. The problem was that different keys had a different sound. Sharp keys sounded brighter and brighter the further away the composer strayed away from C major; flat keys became more veiled and muted. Thus a phrase that modulated halfway through from a sharp key to a flat key when played on the flute would have a sudden change of feeling that the composer might not have wanted. Mozart has a reputation for not liking the flute, though it didn't stop him writing two concertos, a double concerto for flute and harp, and three quartets for flute and strings to commissions. But his misgivings were shared by other major composers, who generally ignored the instrument, or - like Beethoven or Schubert - wrote a few chamber pieces.

As the nineteenth century got under way, 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 parlour-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.

 The increasing mechanical skills being developed in the early nineteenth century came to the rescue. The simple amateur's flute, still basically a wooden tube with holes, needed some engineering to bring it up to date. Theobald Boehm was a German flute player, silversmith and engineer - just the right combination of skills to redesign the instrument. Discarding the trial-and-error approach used by his predecessors, he used his technical skills to work out on paper the ideal positions of all the holes so that the flute would have an even sound across all of its range. Then he devised a system of keys that would sit comfortably under the player's fingers and work a mechanism to close up specific holes, often nowhere near the position of the finger. Only then, in the early 1830s, did he attempt to build the instrument.

Boehm refined his new flute 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 retained the three-part design, but made the central part, with most of the keywork, cylindrically bored instead of conically, evening out the sound of a scale. He had the head joint cylindrically bored too, but made the end parabolic, to focus the sound down the tube like a headlamp reflector.

 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. Yet it didn't take off immediately. After all, Boehm was not alone; there were dozens of other makers trying to do what he was doing. All in different ways, and many of their creations were so laughably impractical that yet another new flute was bound to be treated with suspicion. Also the post-Mozart scepticism of the instrument by composers had still to be overcome. Neither the Germans nor the English took to his flute, preferring the old wooden models; it was in France that the second golden age started.

 French flute makers began switching to the new design, and Louis Lot, the flute-making equivalent of Stradivarius, made instruments of such high quality many of his 1850s models are still being used today. Paul Taffanel (1844-1908) was the first serious flute soloist to use the Boehm flute, and was part of the big revival that brought the new improved instrument to the attention of major composers again, in France at least.

Debussy showed what could be done with the flute, not only as an unaccompanied solo instrument (with his short solo piece Syrinx) but also as part of the orchestral palette of sounds; his famous Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune starts with the liquid tones of the lower register of the Boehm flute, setting the perfect atmosphere for the piece. He also wrote for the flute as a chamber piece with his Sonata for flute, viola and harp, as did Ravel. French players toured and emigrated to America, taking the new instrument and music with them, and the instrument was established again. It was a French player, Marcel Moyse (1889-1984) who pioneered the recording of flute pieces. The instrument's clear and simple sound quality, made the flute an ideal candidate for recording on early machinery, and Moyse recorded prolifically.

 The French players were developing flute technique all the time in the early part of this century. For example, vibrato had never been a strong feature of flute playing, and the baroque flute is usually played with straight, vibratoless tones. Moyse, however, influenced by the technique of singers he'd worked with, incorporated vibrato into his playing. The string mouthpiece of the Boehm-style flute made it easier for the player to make an embrouchure, and the more relaxed lip position made for a smoother swirlier, more flexible sound. Some players describe it as an "art nouveau" sound, in contrast to the strong but stiff character of the traditional style. Britain, as usual, lagged behind these developments, with the wooden flute still being popular until the 1940s.

The third golden age of the flute - not that the second has ever really finished - came with the advent of mass-produced flutes in the 1960s and 1970s. An inexpensive Japanese model can be bought today for the same price as a hi-fi system. 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; the British Flute Society is thriving with thousands of members, regular newsletters and dozens of events through the year from masterclasses to concerts. The flute even has its obligatory media star in the shape of Irish player James Galway, who had a hit in the pop singles charts with Annie's Song, though his fame is due as much to shrewd management as to his undoubted ability.

 Yet though the flute has established itself as a vital part of the orchestra, the solo repertoire is still surprisingly thin. Virtually every orchestral composer this century has highlighted the flute in their work somewhere: Stravinsky's Petrushka; Shostakovich's Fifth and Fifteenth Symphonies; Prokofiev's bird in Peter and the Wolf; Ravel's "La Flute enchantee" from Sheherazade.... the list goes on and on. But concertos, r even substantial chamber pieces, are another matter. Nielsen is one of the few symphonists to have written a flute concerto; Jolivet also did one, and Ibert's sums up the French school of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Messiaen has written a short piece, Boulez a Sonatine, and Martinu a good Sonata, but that's about it; no solo works by Britten, Shostakovich, Tippett, Sibelius or the rest.

It's strange that modern composers have shunned the flute, because composer John McCabe, whose Flute Concerto was premiered by James Galway in 1990, says that it's a relatively easy instrument to write for. When Galway asked him to write a flute concerto, McCabe had the idea of expressing the charater of spume crashing out from waves breaking on the sea shore, and found that the fast patterns of notes he heard in his head were quite playable on the flute.

 "Of course there are secrets with any instrument that only a player knows about," he says, "and you have a slight problem with balance, because the flute can easily get drowned out by the woodwind. But otherwise it's fairly straightforward. I had the notes firmly in my mind before I wrote them down. Jimmy checked that the patterns were playable and suggested a few things, but didn't change much." One of the changes Galway did persuade McCabe to make was to have the final few bars, originally written for the very lowest register of the flute, to be played on the alto flute, which is pitched five notes lower than the normal instrument - thus giving the concerto the unusual property of ending on a different instrument from the one on which it began.

 Galway's solid gold instrument is almost as well-known as he is. Flutes have been made out of various metals - everything from steel to silver, gold and platumin, on the basis that denser metals give a brighter tone - but flute maker Albert Cooper is sceptical. "I don't think it makes any difference," he says. "If there was a single best metal for the flute, it would have shown up by now, which simply isn't the case. It's all down to the shape of the head joint and cut of the mouthpiece which determines the sound, and you can get good and bad whatever metal you use."

So crucial is the shape of the head joint - the keyless top third of the instrument that has the mouthpiece - that Cooper, who started working for famous makers Rudall Carte in 1938, now specialises exclusively in making head joints. "The Americans and Japanese do good mass-produced bodies with good keywork, but they can't mass-produce good head joints," he says. "That's all down to trial and error, and skill. You can't read it in a book." He stresses the importance of the head joint in determining the sound quality of the whole instrument: "You can put the same body with four different head joints, " he says, "and it'll sound like four different instruments." Players who have come to buy a head joint for their flute, he says, always choose the loudest one, rather than the one with the best tone. "They say they just want the best quality of sound," he laughs, "and if I ask them to pick the best, they will do. But if they're buying, they always buy the loudest one!"

 The modern flute doesn't have it all its own way. The revival of interest in authentic instruments in the 1980s has seen many flute players taking up the old wooden one-keyed baroque flute again for music of that period, with its totally different technique and tighter, recorder-like sound. Many compositions of the baroque period are available in modern or baroque versions,, and the flute has been well represented on the CD catalogue since the medium's inception. On vinyl only the efforts of Jean-Pierre Rampal, who kept up the recording of flute music in the 1950s and 1960s, saved the repertoire from sliding away from the listening public.

 With hundreds of thousands of players worldwide, a healthy CD catalogue and a high musical profile, the flute - in both baroque and modern forms - is well established. Players and listeners must now hope that composers of the twenty-first century can make the solo repertoire match the orchestral and chamber repertoire in depth and breadth.

(this was NOT written by my Mom, but she can't find the original author to give credit to)
 

I learned something, did you?  I thought it was especially interesting that today we are playing the same kind of flute that was originally made in 1847 by that Boehm guy.  Why do you suppose that the English were so slow to adopt that style?  I wonder what it is like to play one of those wooden baroque flutes?  Questions, Questions, Questions.