1600

Ardal Powel, Folkers & Powell, Makers of Historical Flutes, Hudson NY, USA, hielt am 7. September 2002 an den „Renaissance Flute Days“ in Basel einen Vortrag mit dem Titel «Long Military Flutes of the Sixteenth Century».

An earlier version of this presentation was given at the American Musical Instrument Society’s annual meeting in Poughkeepsie NY on 18 June 1999. A handout for this presentation contains some dates of historic significance.

Let’s start with this familiar Pen and ink drawing of four flute-playing soldiers by Urs Graf–made in 1523 and still right here in Basel at the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung. These men are apparently playing an ordinary 4-part consort, and there seems to be nothing particularly military about the picture except for the men’s costumes, which indicate that two of them are Swiss and two German. Their instruments seem to be a bass in G, two tenors in D, and a discant in A or G. The hand spacing of the player on the right looks like an odd fit with any of the consort flutes we know of. And notice that all five of the hands in view have the little finger tucked under the flute body.

These guys were quite clearly off-duty when their picture was taken, and now here’s another group of players, in an unusual situation: they are playing on horseback, usually reserved for trumpets and kettledrums while fifes and drums slogged along the ground with the infantry. This in any case is an imaginary ceremonial setting conceived in about 1512 for Hans Burgkmair’s Triumph of Maximilian I. The man with the banner is the Emperor’s personal fifer, Anthony of Dornstätt, who accompanied him everywhere it seems.
You see that the nearest fifer has a case for at least three sizes of instrument, but all three men appear to be playing instruments of the same length. They don’t have their fingers tucked under because they need them to cover a fourth fingerhole for each hand, so there are eight in all on each of the flutes. Another woodcut by Burgkmair, in Der Weisskunig, the one with the emperor surrounded by his musicans and their instruments, shows a flute with seven holes. And there are other images of fifes with more than six fingerholes by artists such as Breughel the Elder (1528-1569) which there’s no time to go into now.

Once the Swiss infantry had use these effective and disciplined tactics to defeat the supposedly invincible Burgundian heavy cavalry in the 1470s they were soon hired out as mercenaries to teach first the German and French, then Spanish and Italian forces, and the fife and drum signals went with them. For example in 1494 the French military provisioning department was making payments to tambourins suisses, and shortly thereafter the French king established his own fife and drum corps, the phiffres et tabourins.

Now, although the men in the infantry formations stood and marched close together, the sounds of the military flute must have been extremely penetrating to be audible in a battle situation. We might immediately think of the fife we have heard in bands consisting of the Basel piccolo, or in the U.S. and Canada, of the shrill little colonial era instruments. The first mention of this instrument I’ve come across is by Thoinot Arbeau, who wrote in his dance manual Orchesographie of 1589 that the fife was ‘a little transverse flute with six holes, used by the Germans and the Swiss, and, as the bore is very narrow, only the thickness of a pistol bullet, it has a shrill note.’ He also noted that the fife was played with extremely large drums, two and a half feet in diameter.
The drums Praetorius illustrated in 1619 were 2 feet in diameter, which is still very large for a side drum, and in fact bigger than even the bass drums normally used in marching bands today. They had a heavy snare on the lower head and a black spot on the batter head,which may have been to help the drum produce a tunable ringing tone. Praetorius’s Schweitzer Pfeiffen (at number 3) have sounding lengths of 10 inches and 1 foot.

The position of the players’ hands

This woodcut by Jost Amman from the mid-16th century shows Landsknechte, German mercenaries who imitated the Swiss infantry. The flute is about two feet long and the drum is maybe a few inches larger. See that the fifer has a case slung over his left shoulder to hold several instruments. And his left little finger is tucked under the flute.

In this and the next four slides I want to draw your attention not only to the length of the flute but to the position of the players’ hands, which are widely spaced so that the left hand seems too high up the tube.  Specifically, it seems that the players have their right third finger at a point at or near the middle of the tube, near where the first finger goes on a normal flute. We can’t be sure of course that any one of these is an accurate representation of what the artist actually saw–and in fact this slide and the next one could well have been composed from a common model. But there is a certain consitency here and as I hope you’ll see, it isn’t completely implausible.

This woodcut by Jost Amman from the mid-16th century shows Landsknechte, German mercenaries who imitated the Swiss infantry. The flute is about two feet long and the drum is maybe a few inches larger. See that the fifer has a case slung over his left shoulder to hold several instruments. And his left little finger is tucked under the flute.

This anonymous woodcut from a German manual of military discipline published in 1555 shows a better view of a fifer with a case for four instruments slung over his shoulder. Again there’s the very large drum, and a long, narrow flute, and again his right little finger is tucked under. In this image you can clearly see the very wide hand spacing.

Here’s a painting by Breughel the Elder, The Three Soldiers, c1568 (New York: Frick Collection 65.1.163) Sorry for the terrible reproduction–you can’t even see that there’s a third figure raising a banner between the two musicians. I’m showing it so you can see that this artist too illustrated the wide hand spacing on a two-foot fife and the absolutely huge field drum with a snare on the lower head.

To add to Swiss, German and Flemish sources, here we have a French one that shows two flutes played together with four large drums. Perhaps these are the tambourins Suisses of the French court establishment.

A little about the flute. Because of its peculiar hole spacing, its fingering is not diatonic, like a shawm, but harmonic, like a tabor pipe or a trombone. It overblows at the 12th, and the first 11 notes can be played using only the lowest three holes.