Voice flute
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The voice flute (also the Italian ''flauto di voce'' and the French ''flûte de voix'' are found in English-language sources) is a
recorder Recorder or The Recorder may refer to: Newspapers * ''Indianapolis Recorder'', a weekly newspaper * ''The Recorder'' (Massachusetts newspaper), a daily newspaper published in Greenfield, Massachusetts, US * ''The Recorder'' (Port Pirie), a news ...
with the lowest note of D4, and is therefore intermediate in size between the
alto The musical term alto, meaning "high" in Italian (Latin: ''altus''), historically refers to the contrapuntal part higher than the tenor and its associated vocal range. In 4-part voice leading alto is the second-highest part, sung in choruses by ...
and
tenor recorder The tenor recorder is a member of the recorder family. It has the same form as a soprano (or descant) recorder and an alto (or treble) recorder, but it produces a lower sound than either; a still lower sound is produced by the bass recorder and ...
s. Although sometimes regarded as a small tenor, a tone higher than the usual one in C4,) it was treated historically and is most often in modern times described as a large alto.( Though it has been speculated that the name might refer to the instrument's range, which is roughly equivalent to that of the soprano voice, the origin of the term "voice flute" is obscure.) Revived in the early twentieth century along with other sizes of recorder, it is used today as it was in the eighteenth century—as a substitute for the transverse flute—though it also has a small repertory of music composed specially for it, from both the
Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...
and modern periods.


History

The voice flute was a popular size of recorder in the eighteenth century, especially in England. It offered an alternative instrument for amateurs to play music written for the transverse flute, since both instruments are at the same pitch. The usual
clef A clef (from French: 'key') is a Musical notation, musical symbol used to indicate which Musical note, notes are represented by the lines and spaces on a musical staff (music), stave. Placing a clef on a stave assigns a particular pitch to ...
used for recorder parts was the French violin clef, with G on the bottom line of the staff. Imagining this clef in place of the treble clef and using the normal F-alto fingerings on a voice flute renders music composed for flute or violin in the original key. Although the rather large number of surviving eighteenth-century voice flutes suggests this may have been a common practice at that time, there is little documentary evidence to support the idea. Parts intended for this instrument were also often written in transposed notation, so the player could imagine he was playing an ordinary alto in F.


Baroque repertoire

Important Baroque works composed specifically for the voice flute include the first four suites (in A major, D major, E minor, and B minor) from a set of six with accompaniment of
archlute The archlute ( es, archilaúd, it, arciliuto, german: Erzlaute) is a European plucked string instrument developed around 1600 as a compromise between the very large theorbo, the size and re-entrant tuning of which made for difficulties in the p ...
and
viola da gamba The viol (), viola da gamba (), or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted, and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitc ...
, published in 1701 by Francis (Charles) Dieupart, a Quintet in B minor for the unusual combination of two voice flutes and two transverse flutes with continuo, attributed to one of the Loeillets in a Rostock manuscript,, though the precise authorship is disputed, see and the two
obbligato In Western classical music, ''obbligato'' (, also spelled ''obligato'') usually describes a musical line that is in some way indispensable in performance. Its opposite is the marking ''ad libitum''. It can also be used, more specifically, to indica ...
recorder parts in Bach's cantata ''Komm, du süße Todesstunde'', BWV 161. It is also probable that the voice flute is the type of recorder Bach intended for the obbligato part in Cantata 152, '' Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn'', where the pitch of Bach's organ (the '' Chorton'' or choir pitch) was a minor third higher than the ''Cammerton'' (chamber pitch) of the other instruments.


Eighteenth-century instruments and makers

A significant number of historical voice flutes survive in museums and private collections. The largest number by a single maker are the 15 (or 16) voice flutes (at a conservative count) by the London maker P. I. (Peter) Bressan, accounting for a fifth of the total of 76 (to 78) surviving recorders from his workshop. A more liberal count, including instruments possibly but not certainly by Bressan puts the number of voice flutes at sixteen, out of a total of 77 surviving recorders. At least two of these instruments appear to be "left handed"—that is, they are meant to be played with the right hand uppermost. There are other surviving English voice flutes from Thomas Stanesby, Sr., Joseph Bradbury, Thomas Cahusac, and a very late example by (probably) Valentine Metzler, as well as one by the Dublin maker John Neale. Continental examples also exist, from the Nuremberg families of Denner (one each by
Jacob Jacob (; ; ar, يَعْقُوب, Yaʿqūb; gr, Ἰακώβ, Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. J ...
and
Johann Christoph Denner Johann Christoph Denner (13 August 1655 – 26 April 1707)Martin Kirnbauer. "Denner", ''Grove Music Online'', ed. L. Macy (accessed 13 October 2006)grovemusic.com(subscription access). was a German woodwind instrument maker of the Baroque era, to ...
) and Oberlender, and three instruments by one or the other of the father-and-son Amsterdam makers Willem Beukers, Sr. and Jr. French instruments are scarcer, but one voice flute survives from the Paris workshop of Pierre Naust, and an instrument in the Bate collection in Oxford, which formerly belonged to
Edgar Hunt Edgar Hubert Hunt (28 June 1909 – 16 March 2006) was a British musician and musicologist. He was a key figure in the early music revival in Britain in general, and in the revival of the recorder in particular. He was a founding member of the ...
, bears the maker's name Hail, who may have been French. Italian instruments are also infrequent, but three surviving voice flutes from Venice bear the maker's name "Castel", all with the initial "N".


Modern use

The revival of interest in the recorder in the twentieth century was stimulated by
Arnold Dolmetsch Eugène Arnold Dolmetsch (24 February 1858 – 28 February 1940), was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey. He was a leading f ...
, who began making copies of surviving early recorders in 1919. Shortly after founding the Haslemere Festival in 1925, he put his son Carl (then aged 15) in charge of recorder development. In addition to the descant (soprano), treble (alto), tenor, and bass sizes of recorders (usually tuned at A = 415 Hz) he produced for the needs of the Festival low alto recorders in E for Bach's cantata ''Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit'', BWV 106, sixth flutes for concertos by Woodcock and other eighteenth-century English composers, and voice flutes. The latter were used to play parts written for transverse flutes since, before 1930, there was no one in the Haslemere circle who had mastered the embouchure of the Baroque one-keyed flute. In Germany between the two world wars both soprano and alto recorders were made in different sizes, in part because of the difficulty of playing the cross-fingered flats and sharps on instruments using so-called German fingering, but also to exploit differences in timbre and response. In addition to the soprano in C5, there were instruments made in D5, B4, B4, and A4; in addition to the usual alto in F4, there were also instruments in G4, E4, E4 and D4, the last corresponding to the 18th-century voice flute. A conference to discuss these differences in size, held in 1931, concluded that the larger instruments in A and D were to be preferred, though this position was later partially countermanded by the
Hitler Youth The Hitler Youth (german: Hitlerjugend , often abbreviated as HJ, ) was the youth organisation of the Nazi Party in Germany. Its origins date back to 1922 and it received the name ("Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth") in July 1926. ...
leadership, who permitted the D and A instruments "only for the purposes of chamber music; for folk music, for the sake of uniformity throughout the German Reich, it considers only the pitches C and F". Music was composed specifically for the alto in D, such as
Johann Nepomuk David Johann Nepomuk David (30 November 1895 – 22 December 1977) was an Austrian composer. Life and career David was born in Eferding. He was a choirboy in the monastery of Sankt Florian and studied at an episcopal teacher training college in Linz, ...
's ''Variations on an Original Theme'' for recorder and lute, Op. 32, No. 2 (1943), which is also cited as a rare pre-1960 example of the use of flutter-tongue on the recorder. A much better-known piece is the Trio from
Paul Hindemith Paul Hindemith (; 16 November 189528 December 1963) was a German composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the ''Ne ...
's ''Plöner Musiktag'' (1932), which originally was for one soprano in A and two altos in D, though when eventually published it was transposed (with the composer's blessing) by the editor, Walter Bergmann, for soprano in C and two altos in F. The first notable avant-garde work for the tenor recorder,
Makoto Shinohara is a Japanese composer. Biography Born in Osaka, Japan, Shinohara studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts from 1952 to 1954, studying composition with Tomojirō Ikenouchi, piano with , and conducting with Akeo Watanabe and Kurt Wöss. Fro ...
's ''Fragmente'' (1968), has come to be performed by many players on the voice flute by preference. More recently, Australian composer Zana Clarke has written two works for the instrument: ''Cold Honey'' (1997) for either voice flute or tenor recorder, and ''Gentle Walker'' (1998) for both voice flute and tenor recorder, composed for and dedicated to Ben Ayre. In 2022 Israeli composer
Gilad Hochman Gilad Hochman ( he, גילעד הוכמן; born 26 July 1982 in Herzliya) is an Israeli classical music composer. Education Hochman was born to an Odessa native father and a Paris native mother and currently resides in Berlin, Germany. He began ...
added "By These Rivers" to the Voice flute's repertoire, exploring new modal expressions of the instrument in connection to the textual source of
Psalm 137 Psalm 137 is the 137th psalm of the Book of Psalms in the Tanakh. In English it is generally known as "By the rivers of Babylon", which is how its first words are translated in the King James Version of the Bible. Its Latin title is "Super flum ...
("By the rivers of Babylon").


References

Sources * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Further reading

* Benedikt, Erich. 1972. "Ungewohnte Stimmlagen der Blockflote und ihre Bedeutung". ''Musikerziehung: Zeitschrift der Musikerzieher Österreichs'' 25, nos. 4–5 (March–May): 156–159, 210–12. * alfpenny, Eric!--NB: The name appears in square brackets because the article is unsigned, but can reasonably be attributed to the editor of the journal.-->. 1967. "Current Register of Historic Instruments". ''
The Galpin Society Journal The Galpin Society was formed in October 1946 to further research into the branch of musicology known as organology, i.e. the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments. Based in the United Kingdom, it is named after the emin ...
'' 20 (March): 99. * Higbee, Dale. 1985b. "On Playing Recorders in D: Being a Short History of the Odd-Sized Recorders and Concerning the Revival of the Voice Flute & Sixth Flute". ''The American Recorder'' 26, no. 1 (February): 16–21. * Higbee, Dale. 1991. "Recorders in Bach Cantata 161, ''Komm, du süsse Todesstunde''". ''Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society'' 17:83–84. * Higbee, Dale. 1999. On Playing the Baroque Treble Recorder in G Today. ''
The Galpin Society Journal The Galpin Society was formed in October 1946 to further research into the branch of musicology known as organology, i.e. the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments. Based in the United Kingdom, it is named after the emin ...
'' 52 (April): 387–88. * Lander, Nicholas S. 1996–2014d.
Recorders by Castel
. Recorder Home Page: Historic makers, instruments & collections (accessed 4 December 2014). * Lander, Nicholas S. 1996–2014h.
Recorders by Rottenburgh
. Recorder Home Page: Historic makers, instruments & collections (accessed 4 December 2014). * MacMillan, Douglas. 1991. "The Voice Flute: An Historical Survey". ''The Consort'' 47:5–7. * MacMillan, Douglas. 2007. "An Organological Overview of the Recorder 1800–1905". ''
The Galpin Society Journal The Galpin Society was formed in October 1946 to further research into the branch of musicology known as organology, i.e. the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments. Based in the United Kingdom, it is named after the emin ...
'' 60 (April): 191–202. * Rowland-Jones, Anthony. 1995a. "The Recorder's Medieval and Renaissance Repertoire: A Commentary". In ''The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder'', edited by John Mansfield Thomson and Antony Rowland-Jones, 26–50. Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. . * Rowland-Jones, Anthony. 1995c. "The Baroque Chamber-Music Repertoire". In ''The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder'', edited by John Mansfield Thomson and Antony Rowland-Jones, 74–90. Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. . {{Flutes, state=autocollapse Baroque instruments Early musical instruments Internal fipple flutes Recorders (musical instruments)