Although I had encountered flageolets in museums, organological books and literature, my first ‘live’ experience of the instrument came in 1984, when I was asked to review a concert at Susi Jeans’s Boxhill Music Festival. A short piece by John Parry was played on a flageolet, and my (still extant!) notes of this seminal event in my organological career read ‘Grossly inferior to the recorder in tone’ and my published review commented that ‘It was particularly interesting to hear the flageolet played – and hard to see how it almost displaced the recorder at the end of the eighteenth century’.

I thought little more about the flageolet until I began my research into the nineteenth-century recorder when it became apparent that the flageolet – in England at least – was one of the significant duct flutes of the era. In 2008 my wife presented me with an unusual left-handed nineteenth-century English flageolet and concurrently it was becoming apparent that little had been written about the instrument: I determined to study more and fill this not inconsiderable lacuna in the organological literature.

Looking briefly at the history of the flageolet, I noted that it had been played by the English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and, as a recorder player, I had become acquainted with its use described in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (c1730) for teaching caged birds to sing. During the nineteenth century complex double and triple flageolets appeared, and even in the twenty-first century music shops continue to sell ‘flageolets’ (of metal, rather than the traditional wood) for use in popular and folk music traditions.

Over the past ten years I have made an extensive study of the flageolet as made and played in England from the time of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the First World War, after which the instrument lapsed substantially into obscurity. The heyday of the flageolet in England was undoubtedly the nineteenth century, the time when it evolved from the declining alto recorder, retaining its fingering but acquiring a windcap and being known as the English flageolet. In 1803 William Bainbridge (fl1802–30) patented his ‘improved octave flageolet’, a soprano recorder-sized instrument with two keys and a simplified fingering.