They are blown in all the ways known for flutes—end, notch, duct, and transverse—and it is suspected that they exist over much wider areas than we yet have knowledge of, because since many consist simply of a tube, unless people are seen playing them, they may easily remain unrecognized as a musical instrument and unregarded. The longest are the spirit flutes of New Guinea. We have above traced the origins of most of the world’s transverse flutes to the Indian subcontinent, but this seems unlikely with these huge instruments, often well over six feet long, because they are so different from any other known flutes that local invention seems by far the most likely explanation. They have so wide an embouchure that the playing technique involves forming a duct with the forefinger of each hand, partly to direct the air and partly to occlude some of the hole. Both they and the shorter transverse flutes, three feet or so long and with a single fingerhole near the foot, are made from species of bamboo, and on both types the stoppers at the proximal end are so beautifully carved that they have often been collected as art objects in themselves and may be seen in many museums without the flutes of which they are an essential functional part.
While the New Guinea flutes use a simple series of harmonics with the two players alternating their notes, most—probably all—other harmonic flutes have a more complex technique, using the overtones of both the open and stopped tube, by closing the distal end with a finger. The overtones of an open tube, let us say approximately two feet long, will start on middle C and will include all the harmonic series based on that pitch. Stopping the end will sound the C an octave lower (see the afterword for the reasons for this) and sound only the odd-numbered harmonics of that note. In the musical example shown in figure 3.14, the white notes with stems pointing upward are the harmonics of the open flute; the black notes with the stems downward are those of the stopped flute. Looking at the white notes, it will be seen that there are wide gaps between the available pitches. By including the black notes, one can fill those gaps and produce a similar range to that of an open flute four feet long.
Two of the better known harmonic flutes are the Romanian tilinca and the Norwegian seljefløyte. The tilinca varies in length from two feet or less to double that and is end-blown. While it was originally of cane or reed stem, it is now quite often made of a spare piece of water pipe. A wide variety of such flutes is used in Slovakia, some of reed stem, some of turned wood, and again some of convenient pieces of metal tubing, some end-blown and some duct-blown.76 They are often used by shepherds, as in Romania. Hungarian examples are also known, and it is likely that they are or have been used over much of Europe in areas less well recorded.
The Norwegian seljefløyte was traditionally an ephemeral instrument, made only in springtime from willow bark, when the bark is easily removed from the wood, but a year-round version was created by Egil Storbekken, with a plastic tube covered, for cosmetic reasons, by imitation coiled bark. It differs from other flutes in being a transversely blown duct flute. A wooden block is inserted into the end of the tube, and the distal end of the block, where the player puts the lips, is carved down to form the duct, with a mouth cut in the tube itself. It is by no means the only folk instrument that has been modernized to suit those who wish to play it in a wider context, and there are many others noted within these pages. Where and when it originated is unknown, but it must have been at least seven hundred years ago, for recently a medieval exemplar appeared. On f. 188 of the recently discovered East Anglian Macclesfield Psalter, dated to 1325–1335, an identical instrument is illustrated, played in exactly the same way and, so far as one can judge from an illustration of this type, made in exactly the same way.78 Many other instruments in folk traditions will have as long a history (another example here is the trump), but it is not often that one is fortunate enough to find the evidence.
Transverse Flutes
