I became
interested in the history of the flute in Scotland as a masters student and
beginning traverso player at the Peabody Conservatory. While looking for eighteenth-century flute
music that didn’t make me cry when I tried to play it as I got used to a very
different and very difficult instrument, I discovered a modern edition of
something called The Airs for the Seasons
by James Oswald, edited by Jeremy Barlow.
Not only was the music very satisfyingly playable, it helped keep me
from giving on baroque flute entirely. I
began using Oswald as a warm-up for practicing Hotteterre and Philidor in flat
keys in French violin clef, and he really was good for morale. I didn’t cry nearly as much.
Several years
later, during a break from academia while still deciding what to do with my
life, I rediscovered Oswald. I was
reminded of the effortless quality of the and how it manages to combine an
Italianate structure with characteristic Scottish sounds. At the time I was listening to a great deal
of Scottish and Irish music, as well as Appalachian old-time music, and Oswald
seemed to fit right in with that overall aesthetic.
While there seemed
to have been many collections of music for the flute from eighteenth-century
Scotland, all the literature on the flute in Scotland said the same thing: the
flute was unknown prior to 1725. This
struck me as improbable; the flute was one of the most popular, flashiest
instruments in eighteenth century Europe and Scotland, while geographically
remote, produced some of best-known writers and thinkers of the time. Why would the Scots lag behind in flute
playing? It also struck me as odd that
while most Irish bands have flute players and there are hundreds of books of
Irish tunes for flute, Scottish bands (usually) lack flutes and there are
practically no modern books of Scottish tunes for flute.
I decided to
pursue this mystery by contacting David McGuinness and John Butt at the
University of Glasgow. And in the spirit
of candor, I was a bit of a fangirl of both their recordings and I was afraid
to write them, but I’m glad I did. Both
agreed that it was a Ph.D.-worthy inquiry and made suggestions for my initial
application abstract. A few months later I moved to Scotland.
As I began my
research, I found much that I expected: most research on Scottish music was
centered on the fiddle, the bagpipes, Robert Burns, or Gaelic song, with the
flute more or less relegated to a footnote saying that it was unknown prior to
1725. I tracked the 1725 date to an
essay by the antiquarian William Tytler that was written in 1792 about a St
Cecilia’s Day concert in the late seventeenth century. There was no other basis for the claim, and
yet historians clung to it. I decided
one of my major tasks was to verify or disprove it.
As I worked, in
archives, attics, basements, libraries and country houses, I realized my task
was larger than disproving a date. As
much as Tytler’s claim annoyed me, it wasn’t just him and his date. It was the whole notion that the flute wasn’t/isn’t
a Scottish instrument that I was rapidly discovering was part of the cultural
ethos of Scottish music, as rapidly as I was discovering that historically the
flute was very much a part of music in Scotland.
I had already
recognized that the idea of Scottishness in music took very particular forms,
and that the flute just didn’t fit, perhaps because of the association with
Irish music, or an association with gentility.
Although I do not play in a traditional idiom, many Scottish flute
players I met told me that they have to play Irish music because there is no
flute music from Scotland because the flute “isn’t Scottish enough.” I wanted
to scream, but it is! It is
Scottish! Scotland has a rich and varied
history of flute playing. There are hundreds
of books from the early eighteenth-century onwards of Scottish tunes for violin
or flute with specific flute versions!
Sonatas! Difficult, challenging,
flute sonatas! Manuscripts! Lots of repertoire, and history, and
evidence, and no one aware of it but me and maybe six other people. I began to evangelize.
So, here is
everything, in no particular order, that you need to know about the flute in
eighteenth-century Scotland and why it might be important to your non-Scottish
music oriented lives: The flute was a major status symbol among amateur
musicians, mostly men, but also ladies.
At least three gentlewomen played flute, and one of them received a
flute with a rather racy love poem hidden inside it. Scotland was not a cultural backwater, even considering
the implications of the Act of Union (1707) and the last Jacobite rebellion
(1745). There is, however, evidence for
a sense of nostalgia post-1745 with an increase in publication of Scottish
tunes. The flute, called the German
flute, may have had political associations with the English (Hanoverian)
court. General John Reid was the
best-known Scottish flute player, and when he wasn’t fighting Jacobites or
defending Fort Duquesne from the French, he was composing sonatas and giving
recitals that sent the ladies for their smelling salts. James Oswald wrote flute sonatas too! William McGibbon wrote the first sonatas for
flute in Scotland. One of them, 1729
number 6, is a reworking of a violin concerto set for German flute and
violin. There is little evidence for the
flute in the Highlands, but then, I’m hampered by poor Gaelic. There is, however, a great deal of evidence
for overlap between flute playing and bagpipe playing in the Lowlands in terms
of instruments and repertoire. The
earliest eighteenth-century mention of a flute from a Scottish source is a
friend of the Marquis of Montrose in 1703.
The first English translation of Hotteterre was by a Scot, Mr. Urquhart,
in 1726. He was also a flute maker. The earliest manuscript evidence of the flute
in Scotland is Alexander Bruce’s manuscript, in the collection of Lord Balfour
of Burleigh, from 1717. It contains the
second part to flute duets by Valentine, and much more interestingly, a
fingering chart for German flute going to the B-flat five ledger lines above
the staff. The highest note on the
one-keyed flute is the A just below that.
Hotteterre said it was best not to play above the E three lines above
because it was in bad taste. Tytler’s
1725 date is, as they say here, utter bollocks…but he did play flute. Also, knowing the flute’s role in musical
life in eighteenth-century Scotland gives us a better understanding of the
history of the flute and the history of music in Scotland.

Musical instruments have a history as old as music itself. It is noteworthy that all instruments have a different melody, pitch, rhythm, duration, notes and chords. https://abitsaving.com
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