Introduction

Double wind instruments, both in the form of reed pipes and of duct flutes, have existed since antiquity, the classical example of the double reed pipe being the Greek aulos (plural auloi) which may be found as early as 700 BC. However, of greater relevance to the student of the double flageolet is the existence of double duct flutes and double recorders. Sybil Marcuse relates that double duct flutes have existed in Europe since the fourteenth century and describes duct flutes (recorders) in the sixteenth century with pipes of different lengths bored in a single block of wood and thus sounding at different pitches. The Amsterdam maker Michiel Parent (1692) advertised ‘a combination of two recorders … with which two different parts can be played at once’, and such practice continued into the eighteenth century.

Although the double flageolet came to prominence in England in the first decade of the nineteenth century, there is some evidence to suggest that Samuel Pepys played two flageolets together. In 1667–8 Pepys had two flageolets made, one loud and one soft, so that they could be fastened together:

The pair of flageolets was designed to produce an echo effect rather than harmony as produced by the double recorders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or the double flageolets of the nineteenth.

The earliest account of the use of a double flageolet in the nineteenth century appears in 1804, when the virtuoso player John Parry performed on two of Bainbridge’s flageolets fixed together on a frame. Many years later Parry described his performance in a letter to The Harmonicon in 1830: