The History of The Flute

When I was in primary 6, a music teacher came into our school and offered us lessons in the saxophone, clarinet and the flute. Naturally at first, I was desperate to learn the sax, but after an pathetic attempt of making a noise out of the mouth piece I quickly realised flute was the only option for me.

I continued to play the flute until after I finished secondary. Having played for over 8 years I know shockingly little about the origins of the woodwind instrument, so I've done some research into the history of the flute and how we have ended up with the flute we have today.

The first ever flute, also the oldest recognizable instrument, dates back to 40,000 years ago to the Palaeolithic era.

The palaeolithic flute was found in 2008 in a cave in Germany and was discovered to be made with the wing bones of griffin vultures. This flute was also found beside fragments of mammoth-ivory flute and these findings have added to evidence that music may have given the first advantage to the Homo Sapiens over the Neanderthals. However, It wasn't until the Renaissance period, that the first prototype of the flutes found in modern orchestras emerged.

During the Renaissance era the term flute referred to both the instruments we know as the flute and the recorder. It wasn't until the baroque period that the flute and the recorder were determined to be different instruments. The flute today was then referred to as the transverse flute.

In the Renaissance and the Palaeolithic eras we can see that the flutes consist of a mouth piece and finger holes, meaning they could only produce certain semitones. During the Baroque period they introduced a single key and with this mechanism added they were able to play all of the semitones in an octave for the first time on the flute.

Since the baroque period the flute has changed in several ways, the main change being the number of keys the modern flutes have. This change was introduced because the holes in the baroque flute meant that producing chromatic trills or scales required very complex fingering. So, as the flute evolved, more holes were added in order to have one per chromatic note in the octave and some spare holes were added to make certain fingering easier. These holes became larger and further apart making it almost impossible for the player to cover the holes completely. At this point the keys were added to the flute to cover all the holes and ensure that the player could reach every note, resulting in the modern flute.