Recorder

The recorder is a family of woodwind musical instruments and a member of the family of duct flutes that includes tin whistles and flageolets. It is the most prominent duct flute in the western classical tradition. A recorder can be distinguished from other duct flutes by the presence of a thumb-hole for the upper hand and holes for seven fingers: three for the upper hand and four for the lower.

Recorders are made in various sizes and ranges. The sizes most commonly in use today are the soprano (also known as descant, lowest note C₅), alto (also known as treble, lowest note F₄), tenor (lowest note C₄), and bass (lowest note F₃). Recorders were traditionally constructed from wood or ivory. Modern professional instruments are wooden, often boxwood; student and scholastic recorders are commonly made of moulded plastic. The recorders' internal and external proportions vary, but the bore is generally reverse conical (i.e. tapering towards the foot) to cylindrical, and all recorder fingering systems make extensive use of forked fingerings.

Name

The instrument has been known by its modern English name since the fourteenth century. David Lasocki reports the earliest use of "recorder" in the household accounts of the Earl of Derby (later King Henry IV) in 1388, which register i. fistula nomine Recordour (1. a pipe called a 'Recorder').

By the fifteenth century, the name had appeared in English literature. The earliest references are in John Lydgate's Temple of Glas (c. 1430): These lytylle herdegromys Floutyn al the longe day.In here smale recorderys, In floutys. ('These little shepherds fluting all day long ... on their small recorders, on flutes.') and in Lydgate's Fall of Princes (c. 1431–1438): Pan, god off Kynde, with his pipes seuene, / Off recorderis fond first the melodies. ('Pan, god of Nature, with his pipes seven, / of recorders found first the melodies.')

Etymology

Appending the name recorder to the instrument itself is uniquely English: In Middle-French there is no equivalent noun sense of recorder referring to a musical instrument. The English verb record (from Middle-French recorder, early thirteenth century) meant "to learn by heart, to commit to memory, to go over in one's mind, to recite"; but the term did not refer to playing music until the sixteenth century. It was long after the English recorder was so-named that it gained two additional meanings: "silently practicing a tune", or "sing or render in song"—both referring almost-exclusively to songbirds.

Partridge indicates that the use of the instrument by jongleurs led to its association with the verb: Recorder the minstrel's action, a recorder the minstrel's tool. The reason is uncertain why this flute instrument—rather than some other instrument played by the jongleurs—is known as the recorder.

Materials

Recorders have historically been constructed from hardwoods and ivory, sometimes with metal tone keys. Since the modern revival of the recorder, plastics have been used in the mass manufacture of recorders, as well as by a few individual makers.

Today, a wide variety of hardwoods are used to make recorder bodies. Relatively fewer varieties of wood are used to make recorder blocks, which are often made of red cedar, chosen because of its rot resistance, ability to absorb water, and low expansion when wet. A recent innovation is the use of synthetic ceramics in the manufacture of recorder blocks. Instruments fitted with this device were marketed by Moeck in the 1970s.

Modern developments

Some newer designs of recorder are now being produced. Recorders with a square cross-section may be produced more cheaply and in larger sizes than comparable recorders manufactured by turning. Another area is the development of instruments with a greater dynamic range and more powerful bottom notes. These modern designs make it easier to be heard in concertos. Finally, recorders with a downward extension of a semitone are becoming available; such instruments can play a full three octaves in tune.

German fingering

In the early twentieth century, Peter Harlan developed a recorder with apparently simpler fingering, called German fingering. A recorder designed for German fingering has a hole five that is smaller than hole four, whereas baroque and neo-baroque recorders have a hole four that is smaller than hole five. The immediate difference in fingering is for F (soprano) or B♭ (alto), which on a neo-baroque instrument must be fingered 0 123 4–67. With German fingering, this becomes a simpler 0 123 4 – – –. Unfortunately, however, this makes many other chromatic notes too out of tune to be usable. German fingering became popular in Europe, especially Germany, in the 1930s, but rapidly became obsolete in the 1950s as people began to treat the recorder more seriously, and the limitations of German fingering became more widely appreciated. Recorders with German fingering are today manufactured exclusively for educational purposes.

Basic sound production

The recorder produces sound in the manner of a whistle or an organ flue pipe. In normal play, the player blows into the windway (B), a narrow channel in the head joint, which directs a stream of air across a gap called the window, at a sharp edge called the labium (C). The air stream alternately travels above and below the labium, exciting standing waves in the bore of the recorder, and producing sound waves that emanate away from the window. Feedback from the resonance of the tube regulates the pitch of the sound.

In recorders, as in all woodwind instruments, the air column inside the instrument behaves like a vibrating string, to use a musical analogy, and has multiple modes of vibration. These waves produced inside the instrument are not travelling waves, like those the ear perceives as sound, but rather stationary standing waves consisting of areas of high pressure and low pressure inside the tube, called nodes. The perceived pitch is the lowest, and typically loudest, mode of vibration in the air column. The other pitches are harmonics, or overtones. Players typically describe recorder pitches by the number of nodes in the air column. Notes with a single node are in the first register, notes with two nodes in the second register, etc. As the number of nodes in the tube increases, the number of notes a player can produce in a given register decreases because of the physical constraint of the spacing of the nodes in the bore. On a Baroque recorder, the first, second, and third registers span about a major ninth, a major sixth, and a minor third respectively.

Technique

Although the design of the recorder has changed over its 700-year history, notably in fingering and bore profile, the technique of playing recorders of different sizes and periods is much the same. Indeed, much of what is known about the technique of playing the recorder is derived from historical treatises and manuals dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The following describes the commonalities of recorder technique across all time periods.

Renaissance

In the sixteenth century, the structure, repertoire, and performing practice of the recorder is better documented than in prior epochs. The recorder was one of the most important wind instruments of the Renaissance, and many instruments dating to the sixteenth century survive, including some matched consorts. This period also produced the first extant books describing the recorder, including the treatises of Virdung (1511), Agricola (1529), Ganassi (1535), Cardano (c.1546), Jambe de Fer (1556), and Praetorius (1619). Nonetheless, understanding of the instrument and its practice in this period is still developing.

Structure

In the sixteenth century, the recorder saw important developments in its structure. As in the recorders of the Middle Ages, the etiology of these changes remains uncertain, development was regional and multiple types of recorder existed simultaneously. Our knowledge is based on documentary sources and surviving instruments.

Structure

Several changes in the construction of recorders took place in the seventeenth century, resulting in the type of instrument generally referred to as Baroque recorders, as opposed to the earlier Renaissance recorders. These innovations allowed baroque recorders to possess a tone regarded as "sweeter" than that of the earlier instruments, at the expense of a reduction in volume, particularly in the lowest notes.

The evolution of the Renaissance recorder into the Baroque instrument is generally attributed to the Hotteterre family, in France. They developed the ideas of a more tapered bore, bringing the finger-holes of the lowermost hand closer together, allowing greater range, and enabling the construction of instruments in several jointed sections. The last innovation allowed more accurate shaping of each section and also offered the player minor tuning adjustments, by slightly pulling out one of the sections to lengthen the instrument.

The French innovations were taken to London by Pierre Bressan, a set of whose instruments survive in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, as do other examples in various American, European and Japanese museums and private collections. Bressan's contemporary, Thomas Stanesby, was born in Derbyshire but became an instrument maker in London. He and his son (Thomas Stanesby junior) were the other important British-based recorder-makers of the early eighteenth century.

In continental Europe, the Denner family of Nuremberg, including Johann Christoph and his son Jacob, were the most celebrated makers of this period.

The baroque recorder produces a most brilliant and projecting sound in the second octave, which is more facile and extended than that of earlier recorders, while the lowest notes in its range are relatively weak. Composers such as Bach, Telemann and Vivaldi exploit this property in their concertos for the instrument.

Measured from its lowest to its highest playable note, the baroque alto recorder has a range of at most two octaves and a fifth with many instruments having a smaller range. Even the most developed instruments of the period, however, cannot produce the augmented tonic, third and fourth of the third octave. Notably, Georg Philipp Telemann's concerto TWV 51:F1 makes use some of these notes in the third octave, posing significant technical challenges to the player, perhaps requiring the covering of the bell or other unusual techniques.

Structure

The first recorders to be played in the modern period were antique instruments from previous periods. Anecdotally, Arnold Dolmetsch was motivated to make his own recorders after losing a bag containing his antique instruments. Recorders made in the early twentieth century were imitative of baroque models in their exterior form, but differed significantly in their structure. Dolmetsch introduced English fingering, the now standard fingering for "baroque" model instruments, and standardised the doubled 6th and 7th holes found on a handful of antique instruments by the English makers Stanesby and Bressan. Dolmetsch instruments generally had a large rectangular windway, unlike the curved windways of all historical instruments, and played at modern pitch.