It is just a flute. But then, that is a bit like saying a bike is just a bike.
https://i.imgur.com/SCE8rOc.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/8UAkGT8.jpg
This flute was first made in 1904 by the English company Rudall Carte who were leaders in the manufacture and development of the flute from the early part of the 19th century to the 1950s.
They were a flute manufacturing company but not in the way Colt, for example, was a gun manufacturing company. Rudall Carte did not have a production line. They employed a number of individual workers. Each worker was given a workbench and, if it was a wooden flute, a wooden body turned by hand by the company woodturner, some sheet silver and some silver rod. One maker was entirely responsible for one flute and was expected to shape all the keywork by hand forging from the silver raw material. Even the silver tubes for the keys were made by bending a sheet of silver around a mandrel and silver soldering a seam. The soldering was done using a gas pipe connected to the domestic coal gas supply with a mouth blown tube to add a bit of extra air when necessary to increase the heat of the flame. This meant that, although the flutes were made to a pattern, there were variations between instruments depending on the skill and inclination of the individual maker. The flute shown here was made by Henri Schumacher, acknowledged to be one of the best of the makers, who was French born and headhunted by Rudall Carte when the company was expanding rapidly in the 1880s.
I said the flute was first made in 1904. In the nineteenth and early 20th century most orchestras in England played at the high pitch A=452. By the 1920s this had fallen out of use and the modern standard A=440 (or A=439) was adopted. This was little problem if you were a violinist or other string instrument player, you just re-tuned your instrument. Wind instrument players needed longer instruments to play at the lower pitch and that meant buying a new instrument.
Rudall Carte offered the option of re-building one of their high pitched instruments to a lower pitch. This meant re-fitting all the keywork to new longer, low pitch bodies. As the holes were spaced further apart in the low pitched instruments the keywork had to be completely taken apart and re-spaced on new longer straps and silver tubes and steel rods. This was very labour intensive but as their way of flute manufacture was anyway extremely labour intensive, it was cheaper to have a high pitched instrument re-built to low pitch than to buy a completely new instrument. This flute was re-built to modern (low) pitch in the late 1920s which preserved Henri Schumacher's keywork to live another day.
https://i.imgur.com/XjMhECv.jpg
A comparison between a high pitched and a low pitched flute showing the longer body of the low pitched instrument and different spacing of the keys.
https://i.imgur.com/cuqu4lR.jpg
I play this instrument almost daily and I can not do so without thinking of Henri Schumacher, about his life in France and London, and whether he knew that his work would give so much pleasure to someone nearly a hundred years after his death.
