Both were given three joints: a cylindrical head, a tapering body, and a foot (tapering on the recorder, generally cylindrical on the flute). The flute was given a closedstanding key for D♯/E♭ (a difficult half-hole fingering on the keyless Renaissance flute), and both instruments were graced with ornate exterior turnery. Along with these changes in morphology came changes in pitch, nomenclature, and intervals between sizes—changes that represented especially radical departures for the family of recorders. (It is meaningless, in fact, to speak of a “family” of flutes in this period, since most of the evidence—sparse at best—concerns one size, the one we would now call the “concert flute,” or simply “flute.”) As mentioned above, the Renaissance habit of separating family members by fifths was given up in favor of alternating fourths and fifths (as with most modern orchestral woodwind families); the result is the “C and F” alignment of recorders with which we are still familiar. In France itself—still thought to be the origin of the new designs—the pitch standard to which recorders and flutes were now made was very low (a' = 392 to 405 or so, judging by extant examples). Such a low pitch was already quite normal for Renaissance flutes, as we have seen, but it was unusual for recorders. The change in both nominal pitch and pitch standard had a particularly drastic effect on the alto recorder, now the dominant solo member of the family. The real pitch difference between an old alt in g' at high Venetian pitch (a' = 460 or so) and an alto in f' at a' = 392 is a fourth; the new instrument is actually closer in pitch to the old tenor.
The reasons for these changes (and for the parallel changes to reed instruments, to be discussed below) can probably be boiled down to one word: the violin. In France the violin family had achieved dominance over other instruments, particularly in the theater. Quite obviously, it was necessary for wind instruments to match violins in range, pitch, and volume in order to play with them (or act as substitutes for them). Expressiveness as such seems not to have been as important an issue at first as it later became, since the recorder clearly had the advantage over the more dynamically flexible flute through the end of the century; the flute can be said to have come into its own only in the eighteenth. The new forms of woodwind were quickly adopted in other countries and proved to be remarkably adaptable, remaining fundamentally unaltered for more than a century—a real tribute to their designers.
It appears that in France the word flûte, unqualified, generally refers to the recorder in this period; the specific terms for the recorder are flûte douce, flûte à bec, and flûte d’Angleterre, while that for the transverse flute is flûte d’Allemagne (or flûte allemande). The new French nomenclature for the members of the recorder family seems to have been derived from the part names of Lully’s string band: dessus, haute-contre, taille, quinte, and basse, signifying what we would now call sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass recorders, respectively. This terminology obviously represents a real break from that of the Renaissance, in which haute-contre and taille were the same physical size in most families; it reflects the differentiation in size of the French orchestral strings. (In Lully’s orchestra, the three “parts of the middle” were played on violas of three different sizes—albeit with one tuning—specializing in three different registers.) While it is only in eighteenth-century sources that we find this recorder terminology used in its entirety, its seventeenth-century origin is confirmed by Lully’s own use of the labels taille and quinte de flûtes for alto and tenor recorders, respectively. As rational as this new terminology may be, it still leaves room for misunderstanding, since the taille recorder generally has the function of a dessus. Thus one cannot be certain, when dessus de flûte is called for (as, for instance, in Charpentier’s Médée of 1694, or in the 1677 livret of Lully’s Isis), whether sopranino or alto is actually meant. In any case, the use of a sopranino would be exceptional for the seventeenth century; the craze for the petites flûtes began in the eighteenth.
Concerning the basse, Lully himself makes a distinction between petite basse and grande basse. The former would seem to be the normal f-bass, which Lully assigns to an inner part, notated at sounding pitch. The grande basse is, however, a mystery, since no Baroque-style recorders larger than f-basses seem to have survived. The only documented type of recorder capable of playing Lully’s grande basse recorder part at eight-foot pitch is an extended grossbass—Mersenne’s largest; indeed, one writer has pointed to his example as the obvious candidate. However, this solution ignores the difference in pitch standard between Mersenne’s recorders and Lully’s orchestra; a remodeled, “Baroque” version of the instrument would be required. Such a contraption would seem both clumsy and ineffectual in a theater orchestra. Perhaps the most likely solution is a c-bass (a type known to exist in the late seventeenth century, even if none survives51), adapting the part, which it shares with the continuo, to its own range. Such a c-bass, sounding at pitch, would also seem to be called for in certain works of Charpentier (who in other instances requires an f-bass, sounding an octave higher than notated).
These appearances of bass recorders are, in any event, exceptional; by far the most usual use of flûtes in French theater of the period is to play the paired dessus parts of a trio texture.53 Whole consorts of recorders belong in the category of theatrical “special effects.” Recorders had long had this role in English drama, having been associated with scenes of love, death, and supernatural visitations, as well as with pastoral subjects. This role seems to have survived the Interregnum; it was apparently a recorder consort in a performance of Philip Massinger’s play The Virgin Martyr that so affected Samuel Pepys in 1667/68 that he was moved to purchase a recorder, “the sound of it being, of all sounds in the world, most pleasing to me.”
Previously Pepys and his wife had been devotees of the flageolet—the first of the French woodwind to have been adopted by the English. The flageolet is in many ways the perfect amateur wind: small and easily carried, it has but six fingerholes, which are regulated by the most easily controlled digits (thumb and first two fingers) of each hand. Though it came in more than one size, its principal seventeenth-century employment seems to have been as a solo instrument. To be sure, it is with a repertory intended for amateurs (the “lessons”—i.e., tunes—contained in Thomas Greeting’s The Pleasant Companion58) that the instrument is now associated. However, in the seventeenth century it led a professional life, as well. John Banister (along with Greeting, a member of the royal violin band) was a noted exponent, his specialties having been the playing of the flageolet to the accompaniment of a thoroughbass and “in consort” (that is, mixed with other instruments). In France, too, the flageolet was not thought unworthy of a professional player; for instance, the ravishing flageolet playing of “Osteterre” (presumably Jean Hotteterre, grandfather of Jacques Hotteterre le Romain) is included in a short list of the musical marvels of the era in the Mémoires of the Abbé Michel de Marolles, 1656.
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