Conference Report

Renaissance Flute Days, Basel, Switzerland,

September 6-8, 2002

Jane M. Bowers

            In early September 2002, a Renaissance flute weekend, the first event of its kind, took place at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland.  Formally entitled Renaissance Flute Days, the weekend was organized by two early music scholars and performers in Basel--Anne Smith, on the faculty of the Schola Cantorum, and Liane Ehlich, on the faculty of the Musikhochschule in Lucerne–and it brought together instrument makers, researchers, and performers for a jam-packed forty-eight hours.  From Friday evening through late Sunday afternoon, eight papers, nine concerts, a visit to the Basel Musikmuseum, and a Renaissance ball directed by Véronique Daniels, took place.  In addition, a wide-ranging iconographic exhibition featuring the Renaissance flute, which had been put together by Albert Jan Becking with Liane Ehlich and Kathrin Bopp, was on display in the principal lecture hall, and various flute makers, including Boaz Berney, Folkers & Powell, Thijs van Baarsel, Dario Lo Cicero, and Giovanni Tardino, were on hand with instruments that one could try.

            An invitation to the Renaissance Flute Days that was circulated in advance suggested that the main purpose of the weekend was to give people the opportunity to exchange ideas about the instrument.  Representative of the approach taken by the organizers of the conference was the opening paragraph of the flyer they distributed: “We are sure you all know what it is like.  You have ideas about what the renaissance flute could sound like in flute consort, in broken consort, you have tried all sorts of things out, but you have never really heard what other people have done, what other people have tried out.  You don’t know how other flute makers have solved those insoluble intonation problems. Etc.”  And so a remarkable group of scholars, instrument makers, and players from some dozen or so countries gathered on September 6-8, 2002, in Basel to talk about research they had conducted in connection with the Renaissance flute, explore questions they had about it with others, play and listen to performances of the flute, and enjoy the company of like-minded Renaissance flute devotees.  The lively spirit of the conference has been well captured by Ardal Powell in his commentary entitled “Renaissance Flute Renaissance” that appeared, complete with color photographs, in volume 14,  no. 1 (October 2002) of Traverso: Historical Flute Newsletter <http:/traverso.baroqueflute.com>, and interested readers may wish to consult his commentary as well as my own.

            Before describing the Renaissance Flute Days in any detail, let me explain that the instrument referred to as the “Renaissance flute” was for the most part the cylindrical keyless transverse flute, made in various sizes, that emerged and became rather widely used during the Renaissance period of music, especially the sixteenth century.  But it continued to be used well into the seventeenth century as well.  It was only towards the end of that century that the earliest kind of flute we know today as the “Baroque flute” emerged.  Hence, discussions of the instrument and the repertoire played at the Flute Days included a fair amount of seventeenth-century material.

            Papers.  Let me turn first to the papers presented at the conference, for I would especially like to call attention to research on the Renaissance flute that has recently been taking place but which for the most part is little known, due to its not yet having reached print.  Papers ranged widely in subject matter.  London-based Renaissance flute specialist and recording artist Nancy Hadden, on the faculty of the Guildhall School of Music, delivered the opening address, a broad survey of seventeenth-century flute music that deserves immediate publication.  Hadden also touched on performance practice questions, such an when the flute must play an octave higher than its notated pitch, and speculated that the tender style of vocal airs published in Bénigne de Bacilly’s Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter (1668) was an important influence on the new style of French Baroque flute playing first introduced in print by Michel de la Barre in his Pièces pour la flûte traversière of 1702.  That this new style was possible was linked to changes in the instrument, according to Hadden, for the Renaissance system of flute fingering that favored the higher octave meant that the Renaissance flute could not play in as expressive a style.  Janice Beauford, a doctoral student at North Texas State University and a former student of Nancy Hadden’s, also turned to France in her presentation, especially the city of Lyons, which she described as the highway of all humanistic exchange between Italy and France in the sixteenth century.   Beauford speculated that the flute initially may have been introduced to Lyons by German visitors and immigrants, called attention to the printed music and instruments that traveled to and from Lyons all over Europe via the fairs held there, and pointed to the city as the place where Philibert Jambe de Fer, whose treatise L’Epitome musical (1556) included important information on the ranges, tunings, fingerings and playing techniques of the flute, resided, as did the leading flute maker Claude Rafi.

            An especially informative paper that dealt with the use of the Renaissance flute in mixed ensembles, as well as surveyed extant instruments, their pitches, and transpositions, was given by The Hague-based flute maker and player Boaz Berney.  Calling attention to Michael Praetorius’s remark that in earlier times it was not usual to make different kinds of instruments at the same pitch to be played together, because some sounded better at lower pitches while some sounded better higher, Berney went on to compare the length of the flutes and recorders depicted in Praetorius’s Organographia.  Positing that Praetorius’s tenor flute seems to have been pitched about a minor third lower than his tenor recorder--the tenor flute in d’ at 612mm suggesting a pitch of a’=380, with the tenor recorder in c’ at 540mm suggesting a pitch of a’=460--Berney concluded that flutes must have been considered to sound less harsh at lower pitches.  Going on to present a chart showing the pitches at which surviving Renaissance flutes seem to have been intended to play, Berney placed forty percent (or nineteen) of the surviving instruments at about a’=408, eleven a half-tone higher at a’=430, four a whole tone higher at a’=460, and two one-and-one-half tones higher at a’=480.  Four flutes were placed at a’=380, a half-tone lower than the largest group of flutes at a’=408, two a whole tone lower at a’=362, and five at other pitches not divisible by the half-tone system.  While some of the different pitches at which flutes were tuned might be explained by the purpose for which the instruments were intended–for example, flutes might have been pitched in choir tone when designed for playing with voices in church, or at high pitch when designed for playing outside--other pitch differences might be explained by makers having designed their flutes to play with other instruments.  Nevertheless, in some compositions by Schütz, Schein, Praetorius, Michael, and Knüpfer, flute parts were notated a whole step or minor third higher than the parts of other instruments, such as in G-major instead of F-major or in G-minor instead of E-minor.  Thus, the flutes for which those pieces were intended would have been pitched a whole step or minor third below the other instruments.  Besides sounding more mellow, lower flutes might have enabled players to avoid certain awkward chromatic fingerings. 

            In another probing paper, French instrument maker, scholar, and performer Philippe Allain-Dupré addressed certain problems in Marin Mersenne’s discussion of the “Fluste d’Allemand” in his Harmonie Universelle of 1636.   One problem lay in Mersenne’s omission of important information with regard to the measurements of the flute, while another lay in his thoughtless claim that low flutes were made four times as long as the standard instrument in d’.  There are also puzzling aspects to the three fingering charts Mersenne provided for the flute and fife. In his fingering chart for the flute in g (the bass flute–or was Mersenne even mistaken in this, because the range of two octaves and a fifth is impossible on that instrument, according to Allain-Dupré, and was it instead a fingering chart for a small flute or fife in g’ notated an octave lower?), the twelfth and thirteenth intervals (d” and e”) over the fundamental were fingered in the same manner as the fifth and sixth intervals (d’ and e’), which is not possible on most cylindrically-bored instruments.  For Raymond Meylan, these fingerings suggested that Mersenne’s flute must have already had a conical bore, but that would contradict a passage in which Mersenne specified that the flute “had a bore of equal size throughout its length.”  If  we then assume that Mersenne’s flute was cylindrically bored, there may be two ways to understand the problematic fingerings.  One is that the fingering chart pertained to a cylindrical flute with large enough fingerholes for the upper-octave notes to be fingered in the same manner as those in the first octave.  But the other way of understanding these fingerings may be more likely, because there are other discrepancies between Mersenne’s three fingering charts which suggest that Mersenne, in editing his work, exchanged the fingering chart for the flute in g with his fingering chart for the fife.  Readers wishing a more detailed discussion of these matters may wish to access Allain-Dupré’s paper online at the Renaissance Flute Days website, <http://www.enterag.ch/anne/renaissanceflute>.

            A paper addressed to “Long Military Flutes of the Sixteenth Century” presented by flute maker, scholar (see his impressive book The Flute published by the Yale University Press in 2002) and player Ardal Powell was equally fascinating.   (An earlier version of Powell’s paper was presented at the American Musical Instrument Society’s annual meeting in June 1999.)  Powell’s basic question was what the historical military flute was like and what difference, if any, there was between a military flute or fife and a flute intended for playing what we think of as art music.  Showing slides depicting various kinds of military flutes, Powell compared scenes in which off-duty soldiers were shown playing different sizes of flutes with their right fourth fingers tucked under their instruments, with scenes illustrating fifers who did not tuck their fourth fingers under their instruments because they needed those fingers on each hand to cover additional fingerholes on their eight-holed instruments.  Other scenes illustrated flutes with seven holes.  None of the depictions of military flutes Powell found, however, including one showing a fifer and drummer surrounded by Swiss infantry squadrons playing in the heat of battle, illustrated the sort of short, shrill instrument we usually think of as a military fife.  While Thoinot Arbeau wrote in his Orchésographie of 1589 that the fife was a “little transverse flute with six holes, used by the Germans and the Swiss,” and that as its bore was “very narrow, only the thickness of a pistol bullet, it has a shrill note,” earlier illustrations of military flutes depicted them as about twice as long.  Moreover, in some pictures, players’ hands were widely spaced apart.  In an attempt understand the long military flute better, Powell constructed a flute out of a piece of plastic pipe, basing his design on a 1555 engraving by Fronsperger.  Pointing out that because of the instrument’s peculiar hole spacing in which the three right-hand holes were farther down on the tube than on typical flutes, the fingering of this instrument is not diatonic but rather harmonic, like a tabor pipe--overblowing at the twelfth and providing the first eleven pitches with only the lowest three holes, Powell demonstrated the flute during the course of his presentation, accompanied by a large drum.  While the sound of the flute seemed insufficiently loud and piercing for it to have been heard against the sounds of soldiers marching or in the heat of battle, Powell stated that he did not intend to suggest that all sixteenth-century military flutes worked in the way his reconstruction did, or even that any of them did.  Yet, his survey of military flutes in pictorial sources had led him to the conclusion that there was no standardization in such instruments or playing practice, and that “not all transversely held woodwind instruments of the sixteenth century were the same kind as the flutes we use for playing consort music.”   Along with Allain-Dupré’s paper, Powell’s may be accessed online at <http://www.enterag.ch/anne/renaissanceflute>.

            Another paper that focused on pictorial sources was Gianni Lazzari’s “Apollo, Marsia and a Restored ‘Traversa’,” which investigated the meaning of a flute depicted in a painting attributed to a collaborator of Isidoro Bianchi that hangs in the picture gallery at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.  Lazzari’s iconographical work is not well known in this country, for the periodical in which he often publishes is the Bollettino della Società Italiana del Flauto Traverso Storico (Bulletin of the Italian Society of the Historical Transverse Flute), which is little known here.  In fact, when I tried to obtain some articles from the Bollettino through interlibrary loan, none appeared to be available.

            The remaining two paper presentations during the course of the weekend were made by flute makers Giovanni Tardino from Rome, Italy, and Rudolf Tutz from Innsbruck, Austria, both of whom addressed the construction of present-day Renaissance flutes in relation to original instruments.  Tardino stated that as a maker who wanted to understand old instruments, he began by collecting data on them, measuring the size and placement of their holes, their bore, and so forth, but that didn’t answer all his questions.  His main problem was how to arrive at an understanding of how early flute makers came to the idea plan that lay behind the construction of their instruments.  While such an idea plan does not exist in written form, early fingering charts can provide us with some clues.  For Tardino, an important question then became why fingering charts for transverse flutes did not use the principle of the perfect octave, although builders knew the principle of the octave from making recorders based on the principle of conicity.  Why then did they use the principle of the cylinder for making flutes?   According to Tardino, in constructing flutes with fingerings based on the twelfth, or fifth, rather than the octave, flute makers must have had a clear idea of what they wanted the flute to sound like, and since the idea of using the fifth instead of the octave was known from organ building (that is, while open organ pipes produce an octave, closed pipes produce a fifth), they may have considered flutes as closed pipes, doing so in order to stress the characteristic sound they wanted to achieve.  Thus, their thinking about the kind of sound they wanted may have informed their design of the instrument more than any other factor.

            Finally, flute maker Rudolf Tutz stressed that the differences seen in extant instruments suggest that they may have been built for different purposes.  While some flutes were probably built for simple purposes, others were built for more artistic purposes, and thus they illustrate different qualities.  We are just now at the beginning of the journey, according to Tutz, which will lead us to an understanding of how the Renaissance flute sounded and how it should be played.  As an example of a question that we so far have not been able to answer, Tutz stated that whether the seventh tone on the flute should be a large or small seventh depended on the purpose of the instrument; yet, we may have a more rigid idea of the semitone than earlier builders did, and thus remain uncertain about whether a flute’s seventh tone was intended to be higher or lower.  Tutz also talked about the differences between flutes in various instrument collections he had studied, although he was sometimes not allowed to play them, and he stressed that the difference in measurements taken of the same flute in different seasons is enormous.

            Concerts.  Alongside these thought-provoking papers, which stirred up interesting discussions as well as pointed to areas of flute history and design that call for further research, the Renaissance Flute Days featured nine exhilarating concerts of Renaissance flute music.  Due to the high standard of performance displayed throughout, these concerts were also informative:  indeed, how better to understand an instrument than to hear it played by a variety of performers on instruments made by a variety of makers in a variety of repertoires, as well as in a variety of venues (the Kleiner Saal of the Musik-Akademie where the Schola Cantorum is housed, the Zinzendorfhaus, the Leonhardskirche, the Waisenhauskirche, and the Basel Musikmuseum)?  It was especially impressive that five flute consorts played during the weekend, so that if anyone had wondered just what well-proportioned, sensitive, and expertly played flute consorts would sound like, they got an abundance of answers.  The largest of the consorts that played at the weekend was the eight-member Italian Ensemble Rafi under the direction of Dario Lo Cicero, which opened the conference with madrigals, canzonas, and other pieces played on glass and low-pitched keyless flutes.  Then Anne Smith and her six-member ensemble, I Fifferi di Basilea, played a program of English music.  Credit for bringing the Fifferi together would also seem to be due to Sarah van Cornewal, whose interest in the Renaissance flute brought Smith out of a discouraging period during which she had witnessed very little interest in the instrument, Smith said in her opening remarks.

            Other flute ensembles that took part in the conference were the four-part Modena Consort directed by Boaz Berney, which played a program of music from the court of Maximilian I; Il Desiderio directed by Thomas Kügler, which performed French chansons, fantasies, and variations with lutenist André Henrich; and the Attaingnant Consort directed by Kate Clark, on the faculty of the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, who a decade or so ago studied and researched the Renaissance flute and its repertoire under the guidance of Anne Smith.  Clark’s program notes for the Attaingnant Consort’s concert stated that the greatest and arguably the best part of their repertoire as a flute consort is drawn from the vocal repertoire of the first half of the sixteenth century, and thus their performance of those pieces on instruments “must be made to echo as closely as possible the vivid imagery, the mood, the sentiment and even the ’speaking’ quality of the poem that inspired them.”  So that the ensemble might make instrumentally performed vocal music “a true echo of its original, and not just a faded reproduction, we must know and appreciate the texts they set,” according to Clark.  And so that the audience too could know and appreciate the texts, Clark provided the lyrics of the pieces the consort performed in their original language as well as in English translation.

            Among the remaining concerts, one featured unaccompanied flutists Nancy Hadden and Janice Beauford, who performed solo ricercate, ornamented chansons and madrigals, and dances.  Others featured flute with other instruments and voice.  Anne Smith appeared in a voice, flute, and lute trio performing works by Henry VIII, William Cornish, and Johann Hermann Schein.  Liane Ehlich presented a delightful program of French chansons and dances with flute, voice, lute, viola da gamba, and percussion in one of the galleries of the Musikmuseum.  Finally, Philippe Allain-Dupré appeared with harpsichord and viola da gamba in a program of early seventeenth-century solo music by Riccio, van Eyck, Cima, and other composers.  Featuring several different sizes of flutes, Allain-Dupré made an especially forceful case for playing music from Jacob van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lust-hof on a small transverse flute in g’, which is depicted in a four-page set of instructions for recorder and flute by “P.M.” (probably Paulus Matthysz) found in two of the five extant copies of Der Fluyten Lust-Hof along with a set of fingerings for the instrument, which is probably to be interpreted at 4-foot pitch[1].

             At the conclusion of the Renaissance Flute Days there was a warm round of applause for the conference organizers, accompanied by an enthusiastic presentation of bouquets, and I heard many people express the wish that another such meeting take place the following year.  Yet, like all conferences, it was very wearing for the organizers, and it seems likely that it will be several years before another Renaissance flute weekend takes place.  Meanwhile, the lively exchange of ideas, the excitement of the research, the high level of performance, and the friendly spirit that characterized the Renaissance Flute Days will carry its participants along, and energize, inspire, and buoy them up in-between.