Instrument
Flute
A reedless woodwind, played by splitting a stream of air across an edge.
The flute is the woodwind family's odd one out: unlike every other instrument in the section, it uses no reed at all. Sound is produced the same way it is when blowing across the top of a bottle - a stream of air splits across a sharp edge, setting the air column inside the tube vibrating. Despite its name and wooden ancestry, the modern orchestral flute is almost always made of metal today, not wood.
How it's played
The player holds the flute sideways, to the right, and blows across the embouchure hole near one end, shaping the airstream with the lips. Fingers open and close holes along the tube through a system of keys, and blowing harder or more narrowly makes the instrument jump up to higher registers. Its range spans about three octaves, from middle C upward.
That reedless mechanism gives the flute an especially bright, clear, agile tone, and it sits at the top of the woodwind section's range, often carrying quick, light melodic passagework that would be more difficult for the reed instruments around it. Flutists can also produce special effects, such as rapid fluttering of the tongue ("flutter-tonguing").
The flute family
Its close cousin, the piccolo, is built the same way but sounds an octave higher, and is reserved for moments needing extra brilliance or piercing volume. Larger alto and bass flutes reach down into a soft, breathy low register. Most orchestras have two or three flutists, one of whom also plays piccolo.
A long history
Flutes are among the oldest instruments of all: flutes carved from bird bone and mammoth ivory, found in caves in southern Germany, are around 40,000 years old. The sideways (transverse) flute of the Baroque era, the traverso, was made of wood with just one key. It was hugely fashionable - King Frederick the Great of Prussia was a keen flutist who played nightly concerts at his court.
The modern flute's key layout owes almost everything to Theobald Boehm, a 19th-century flutist and instrument maker who redesigned its fingering system and tone-hole placement for better tuning and tone; his "Boehm system" proved so effective that clarinets and other woodwinds later adopted versions of it too.
Mozart, despite writing two well-loved flute concertos and a concerto for flute and harp, reportedly disliked composing for the instrument, which makes those works something of a reluctant contribution to the repertoire.
Essential flute music
- Bach - Orchestral Suite No. 2, ending with the sparkling "Badinerie."
- Mozart - Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major and the Concerto for Flute and Harp.
- Debussy - Syrinx (1913), for solo flute.
- Ravel - Daphnis et Chloé, with its long, sensual flute solo.
- Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf, where the flute plays the bird.
Where to start listening: the opening flute solo of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is one of the most famous flute melodies in the entire orchestral repertoire. Mozart's Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major is a lighter, more Classical-era alternative.