Books › A descriptive catalogue of the musical instruments recently exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890 …, 1891 › scan 46
Scan 46
A descriptive catalogue of the musical instruments recently exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890 …, 1891
6 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 26. See the scan on archive.org.
1history of the c'' key (which was at first an open one, similar to that on most of the modern flutes) is extremely interesting, but too long to be inserted here. The ordinary c'' key of the "eight-keyed flute" was invented prior to 1806.
3The first systematic attempt to battle with the imperfections and difficulties caused by the union of open holes with closed keys, and the adaptation of the positions of the former to suit the convenience of the fingers instead of in accordance with the requirements of the musical scale, was made by Tromlitz, and described by him in 1800. A more important and ingenious effort was made by a German doctor of medicine, named H. W. Pottgiesser, in 1803, but little notice seems to have been taken of either of these attempts to improve the flute, and even a letter from the illustrious C. M. von Weber, in the Leipsic Musical Gazette, concerning a new flute by Capeller of Munich, received scant attention, although on this flute was placed, for the first time, the now almost universally adopted key for d''. A further experiment by Pottgiesser, in 1824, met with no better reception, and, notwithstanding numerous minor improvements, the flute remained in its old anomalous condition until 1826, when the unfortunate Captain Gordon of Charles the Tenth's Swiss Guards, an amateur passionately devoted to the flute, began to apply himself to the task of devising a rational system of open holes and open keys, founded on the schemes of Tromlitz and Pottgiesser. How Theobald Boehm modified the machinery, while retaining the principal features of the system of Gordon; how he asserted that the invention was, ab initio, his own, and that Gordon was utterly ignorant of the principles of flute-construction, are matters which have been amply discussed, and which need no more than a passing allusion here. The "ring-key" (see No. 97) for closing an open key and an uncovered hole by the same finger, an invention often attributed to Boehm, was first applied to a flute by the Reverend Frederick Nolan in 1808. Pottgiesser, in 1824, and Gordon after him, employed a crescent, partly surrounding the hole, for the same purpose. Many of the subsequent improvements and modifications are illustrated by the specimens hereafter described.
5It has been the immemorial and almost universal custom to consider the fundamental note of the simple transverse flute as d', whatever its actual sound may have been. The flutes on which the note d'
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