Introduction

The eighteenth century could be described as a dark age for the flageolet in England. Although the instrument continued in occasional (and largely amateur) use, few flageolets survive and both the pedagogical material and repertoire could best be described as miniscule in comparison with the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The prime reason for this decline is, I believe, the ascendency of the recorder and its repertoire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Organology: The Eighteenth Century, The Windcap and The Bird Flageolet

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the flageolet continued in its original form with a 4+2 arrangement of tone-holes, but one of the distinctive (although not constantly present) features of the flageolet emerged in the early eighteenth century – the so-called sponge chamber, a windcap placed between the mouthpiece and the block and labium assembly. The cap contained a piece of sponge to absorb moisture from the player’s breath. The Bird Fancyer’s Delight of c1717 makes the first mention of the sponge chamber which was to become a common feature of later flageolets, particularly in the nineteenth century: the title-page reads ‘with a Method of fixing ye wett Air, in a Spung [sic] or Cotton’. Bird flageolets were tiny flageolets designed for teaching caged birds to sing, and their particularly small dimensions contributed to condensation in the windway and hence the development of the sponge chamber. In Figure 5, showing the head of a late nineteenth-century flageolet, the slender mouthpiece and windcap may be seen above the recorder-like window and labium.

Meierott classifies the flageolets into four varieties, only two of which are relevant to the eighteenth century, namely the small one-piece flageolets without a windcap and the bird flageolets with windcap. He describes the bird flageolet as an instrument used to teach caged birds to sing and which was furnished with a windcap, and had a very narrow bore and tiny tone-holes. Some collection checklists apply the term ‘bird flageolet’ to small French flageolets à bec (as opposed to à pompe, that is, with windcap) but this fails to separate the bird flageolets from the standard French flageolet with a beaked mouthpiece.