Introduction and Terminology

There is little doubt that the first half of the nineteenth century represented the heyday of the English flageolet: after c1850 the publication of assigned music and tutors fell dramatically, and the instrument itself underwent change, many of Bainbridge’s innovations being discarded. Double, triple and transverse flute-flageolets had been consigned to musical oblivion by the middle of the century and it seems appropriate to distinguish the flageolets of the latter half of the century from the English flageolets and improved octave flageolets of earlier days by designating instruments built after c1850 as ‘late English flageolets’. In the late nineteenth century the terms ‘flute-flageolet’ and ‘flageolet-flute’ may be encountered but these refer not to transverse instruments (as in Bainbridge’s flute-flageolets) but to vertically blown instruments. Many of these instruments are also stamped ‘improved’ and ‘patent’, and the marks ‘new’ and ‘improved’ are, as in the past, more often related to advertising style than to organological reality.

The short period between the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the beginning of the First World War marked the sub-terminal decline of the flageolet in England. It is important to recall that the use of the term ‘flageolet’ may refer not only to the traditional wooden flageolet as used in the nineteenth century but also to metal instruments which may have a cylindrical bore (metal, silver, cylinder flageolets or ‘Generation’ flageolets) or a conical bore (tin whistles). In addition to the English flageolets, French flageolets were still advertised for sale. The inappropriate application of the term ‘flageolet’ to various types of whistle (both in metal and in celluloid) has bedevilled accurate organological description of the flageolet for over a century.

Organology

Many of the features of earlier instruments were retained in flageolets made after 1850 (in particular, the sponge chamber), but cisterns and cutaway slanted blocks were no longer used and fewer instruments were furnished with spacing studs. The octave was necessarily sounded by over-blowing, for very few instruments had thumb-holes or partially plugged first holes: it is, however, possible to facilitate the sounding of the octave by fractionally opening the first tone-hole. In terms of keywork, two types of instrument emerged, the first being a simple instrument with only a D sharp key (Figure 17).