Please read this policy before using the site or submitting any personal information. I have slightly lengthened the instrument so that it can be played at a common modern French standard pitch of A=392 Hz.This privacy policy tells you how we use personal information collected on our site. The original instrument plays at A=395 Hz. For my version of this instrument I have altered a few minor visual and non-acoustic features such as the length of the cap at the top of the instrument. They include a three-piece flute that is now in the Landesmuseum Graz, Austria. Only a small number of the many woodwinds made by the Hotteterre family survive. It plays at pitch A=430 Hz and I supply an extra A=440 Hz middle joint. I base my flute on an original in the collection of the Musée des Instruments de Musiques de Bruxelles. Although most of flutes made around 1800 were made with four, six or more keys, Tuerlinckx’s flutes had just one key. When his son sold the workshop in 1856, it contained no less than 300 flutes, of which only 15 instruments have survived.
Jean-Arnold Antoine Tuerlinckx established his workshop in Mechelen/Malines at the beginning of the 1780s, and flourished as both a woodwind and brass instrument maker until his death in 1827. So my model comes with middle joints playing at pitches A=415, A=405 or A=392 Hz. The tuning of the original flute, with its long middle joint, is questionable. In addition, it has an extra left-hand joint that is played in B, about a minor third lower than 415 Hz. It has four middle joints, the upper three playing at about pitch A=395, 405 or 415 Hz. The instrument I make is based on an original Denner flute now in a private collection. Or rather six and a half: parts of a Denner flute are preserved in the instrument museum in Poznan. (His father Johann Christoph Denner is said to have invented the clarinet.) Among the oboes, recorders, bassoons, chalumeaus and clarinets made by the Denners, five or six original traversos made by Jakob Denner remain. Jakob Denner (1681‒1735) was particularly skilled and enjoyed considerable success. One of the most reputed workshops of woodwind making in the 17th and 18th centuries was in Nürnberg, and bore the family name of Denner. Since wooden flutes always play at a slightly lower pitch than an ivory equivalent, the traverso I offer here plays perfectly well at pitch A=415 Hz. The two ivory flutes in Paris play at about pitch A=418 Hz.
Unlike Renaissance traversos, making a Baroque flute that plays at a higher or lower pitch than the original by extension or reduction is difficult, due mainly to its conical bore (unless only a minor few hertz are involved). The flute I present is loosely based on two similar ivory flutes in the Musée de la Musique in Paris. Therefore my model has three ‘corps de réchange’:, upper middle joints pitched at A=392, A=400 and A=415 Hz.Īlmost fifty traversos made by the English woodwind maker Thomas Stanesby (the younger) have survived. The instrument in Brussels, however, has a single middle joint and plays at pitch A=400 Hz whereas the traverso in Pistoia has two upper middle joints and is pitched at A=393 and A=417 Hz. Surprisingly, all are quite different with respect to both their acoustic and visual characteristics, with the exception of two specific flutes, one now in Brussels and the other in Pistoia, which are very similar. Joannes Hyacinthus Rottenburgh (the elder) lived and worked in Brussels and 16 or 17 of his transverse flutes still exist. My one-keyed baroque flutes are inspired by a number of historical instruments.