The flageolet is a woodwind instrument and a member of the family of fipple that includes recorders and . There are two basic forms of the instrument: the French, having four finger holes on the front and two thumb holes on the back; and the English, having six finger holes on the front and sometimes a single thumb hole on the back. The latter was developed by English instrument maker William Bainbridge, resulting in the "improved English flageolet" in 1803.
Etymology
Flageolet means "little flute". The name is the
diminutive form of the
Old French word
flajol (flute). In Provençal dialect, flute is
flaujol or
flautol.
[Littré, Emile, and Devic, I. Marcel. Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, II D-H. Paris: Hachette Livre, 1874. 1688.]
History
Flageolets have varied greatly during the last 400 years. The first flageolets were called "French flageolets", and have four tone-holes on the front and two on the back. An early collection of manuscript
Lessons for the Flajolet, dating from about 1676, is preserved in the British Library.
[British Library Sloane MS 1145, ff. 35–39.] Small versions of this instrument, called bird flageolets, were also made and were used for teaching
to sing. These tiny flageolets have, like the French flageolet, four finger holes on the front and two thumb holes on the back. Its invention is often ascribed to the 16th-century
French nobility Juvigny in 1581.
[Pascual, Beryl Kenyon de, and William Waterhouse. "Flageolet." Grove Music Online. 2001. Oxford University Press.] It is possible Juvigny refined an earlier design,
or was simply a flageolet player.
The number of keys on French flageolets ranges from none to seven, the exception being the
Boehm system French flageolet made by
Buffet Crampon which had eight keys and five rings.
[MacMillan, Douglas. “The Flageolet: A Woodwind Instrument That Transcended Social Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 18.3 (2021): 475–498.] The arrangement of the tone holes on the flageolet yields a scale different from that on the whistle or recorder. The flageolet's basic scale is D-E-F-G-A-B-C-d. Cross-fingerings and keys are required to play a major scale.
[MacMillan, Douglas. The Flageolet in England, 1660-1914. Boydell & Brewer, 2020.]
English
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, certain
England instrument makers, most notably William Bainbridge, started to make flageolets with six finger-holes on the front. These instruments are called "English flageolets" and were eventually produced in metal as
tin whistles. The keys number between none and six. Some were produced with changeable top joints which allowed the flageolet to be played as a
flute or fife.
[ The Pleasant Companion: The Flageolets Site "The Flageolet Family" ]
Double
In 1805 William Bainbridge made a double flageolet out of one piece of wood.
[Waterhouse, William. “The Double Flageolet - Made in England.” The Galpin Society Journal, vol. 52, 1999.] In December 1805 his rival Thomas Scott was granted a patent for "an instrument on the flageolette principle, so constructed as a single instrument that two parts of a musical composition can be played thereon at the same time by one person".
[British patent No. 2995 (1806)] With the blind organist
John Purkis, the Scott & Purkis partnership was formed to manufacture the new instruments, and a tutorial book was published.
[John Purkis. Scott & Purkis's Delecta Harmonia or Patent Double-Flageolet, a complete Tutor for the above Instrument (London, c. 1806)] Bainbridge patented a traverse flageolet in 1807 and a double flute-flageolet in 1819. In the 1820s, he created a triple flageolet. The third pipe relies on the thumb to finger in an
ocarina pattern.
[
]
Design
The mouthpiece of the initial French design resembled that of a recorder. A later design placed an elongated windcap around the entrance to the duct and became the standard for the English instrument. The mouthpiece was a flat bit of ivory or bone. The chamber inside the windcap was intended to collect moisture and prevent it from entering the duct, employing differing devices for that purpose.
The stream of air passing through the duct crosses the window and is split by the labium (also lip or edge) giving rise to a musical sound. The body (or bodies, in a double or triple flageolet) contains the finger holes and keys. The windcap is not essential to the sound production and the instrument can be played by blowing directly into the duct as in the initial recorder-type design.
The flageolet was eventually entirely replaced by the tin whistle and is rarely played today.
Usage
Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chalon, Samuel Pepys, and Robert Louis Stevenson all played flageolets. Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel composed for it. Some of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's piccolo parts were originally played on flageolet.[Montagu, Jeremy. Origins and Development of Musical Instruments. Scarecrow Press, 2007. 56.]
Other Uses
The instrument's soft, high tone gave rise to the usage of "flageolet" as a term for in other instruments, particularly strings and the flute. The German term for is Flageolet/Flageolettöne.[Adler, Samuel. The Study of Orchestration. Norton, 1989. 46.] Soft flute harmonics are sometimes referred to as "flageolet tone". In the second part of The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky marks an extended flute passage "Flag." which requires the three players to use harmonics.[Anthony Baines. Woodwind instruments and their history. Faber and Faber, 1977.]
In the 16th century, French organs began to use a 1' Organ pipe labeled "flageolet". It became a less common organ stop in the late 17th century.[Douglass, Fenner. The Language of the Classical French Organ. Yale University Press, 1991. 82.] In American organs, flageolet stops are often 2'.[" Flageolet", The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Edited by Don Randel. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986. 430–1.]
See also
External links
