It was Vincent Megaw who coined the term “penny whistle” for all the duct flutes of antiquity, irrespective of size or the number of fingerholes. There have been attempts to make surmises about the pitches produced by and the music played on some prehistoric flutes, based on the sounds obtained by playing reconstructions of some instruments, but Dale Olsen’s recent book on the flutes of South America delivers a salutary warning against such attempts. He describes fingering techniques used by some players in his area that are very different from those to which we are accustomed and that, as a result, produce scales and tunings wholly unlike any that we would expect from the instruments. The lesson to learn from this is that nobody can have any idea of the musical capabilities of any instrument, especially one dependent on fingerings of any sort, be it wind or string, unless there is a player attached or available or unless one is within the culture concerned—both obviously impossible with antiquity.
An example of such an endeavor some years ago in China was reported prominently in the scientific journal Nature. The six presumably end-blown flutes were dated to between 6300 and 5100 BC.30 Intervals of between a wide whole tone and a minor third between some of the fingerholes of one of them are given in the article, but these intervals were produced by opening single holes in succession, and as Olsen showed, this is not necessarily a valid assumption. That is how we, and the Chinese, might play such an instrument today, but there is no way of knowing whether that technique was used in China eight thousand years ago.
Even within one’s own culture and within historical times, time and changes of taste and practice can lead to misconceptions. We do not really know how our own medieval music sounded nor how any of the instruments played it, still less for any earlier periods. Even the performance techniques and exact tunings used in our baroque and classical periods, little more than two hundred years ago, are debated and disputed today. Thus counting or measuring fingerholes will never tell us anything about the music, only that the culture concerned had an advanced musical system and the necessary skills to create and perform it. Beyond that, the ways that the instruments were made can tell us much about the skills involved and the quality of life in that time and place.
Instruments from antiquity are widely reported in the archaeological literature, with occasional collected summaries as in Megaw’s article cited above and the special issue of World Archaeology that he edited. Numerous instruments have been described in other journals also, especially that of the Galpin Society. With duct flutes, as those that are often called “whistle flutes” today are properly termed, the geometry of the head, the angle of the duct through the head, the width and length of the mouth, the angle of the ramp or bevel of the lip, and the shape of its sides or ears, all affect the tone quality. There is no universal ideal, for each culture has its own preferences in this respect.
Most ducts are internal, but some, especially in East and Southeast Asia, are external. In Indonesia with the suling, the head of the instrument is closed, but one segment of the circumference is cut away for a short distance in a narrow geometric chord, and the mouth is cut in the side of the tube immediately below this. A leaf or strip of bamboo is tied around the head, fitting closely all the way around save at this cutaway point, where a narrow channel is left for the air to pass to the mouth. A similar effect is achieved in Myanmar with the palwe by tying a curved segment of bamboo against the head, which again forms a channel for the air.
Vessel Flutes
