(Fr. flûte eunuque).
Vessel Mirliton of the 17th and 18th centuries. It consists of a cylindrical tube of wood or metal widening into a bell at one end; the other end is closed by a membrane of thin parchment or onion-skin protected by a hollow, perforated sphere. The tube may have false finger-holes. The instrument is held like a transverse flute and the performer sings into a hole in the side of the tube, causing the membrane to vibrate; the resulting sound has a nasal buzzing quality, which is reinforced by the body of the instrument acting as a resonator.
The eunuch-flute is first mentioned in 1633, when C. de Villiers, a doctor from Sens, gave Mersenne information about such instruments, made of metal and in various sizes, brought from Flanders by a Jesuit. In his Harmonie universelle, Mersenne called the instrument a ‘chalumeau ou fluste eunuques’, the latter referring either to its phallic form or to its timbre, reminiscent of the castrato voices then becoming fashionable. It is possible that Shakespeare had already alluded to the name in Coriolanus (1608).
According to Mersenne, four or five eunuch-flutes were superior to any flute ensemble, and the instrument could imitate a ‘concert of voices … for it lacks only the pronunciation, to which a near approach is made in these flutes’. Francis Bacon had previously suggested that a ‘Melioration of Sounds’ might be obtained by singing vocal music in several parts into drums: ‘And for handsomnesse and strangenesse sake, it would not be amisse to haue a Curtaine betweene the Place where The Drums are, and the Hearers’.
In 18th-century France the eunuch-flute was called a flûte d'oignon after the characteristic shape of its protective cap, as well as a jombarde and a flûte à trois trous. However, the flûte brehaigne in Machaut's Remede de Fortune, sometimes mentioned in this context, was probably a flute from Bohemia. The term Narrenflöte, frequently found in museum catalogues, arose in the 19th century from a misinterpretation of Jester's flute, a name circulated with some copies of original eunuch-flutes. The Bigophone and Cantophone, also made in a whole series of ranges, are merely late descendants of the eunuch-flute. The significance of the eunuch-flute in the aesthetics of music of the 17th and 18th centuries has yet to be discovered.
F. Bacon: Sylva sylvarum, or a Naturall Historie (London, 1627, 10/1676)
M. Mersenne: Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636–7/R; Eng. trans. of the bks on insts, 1957)
C. Welch: Six Lectures on the Recorder (Oxford, 1911)
M. Mersenne: Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, ed. C. de Waard and B. Rochot (Paris 1932–88)
F. Jakob: Die Instrumente der Zürcher Musikkollegien und der Allgemeinen Musikgesellschaft, Zurich (Zürich, 1973), 27
R. Weber: ‘Eunuchenflöte: ein noch vergessenes Instrument’, Tibia, vii (1982), 205–8
D.Z. Crookes: ‘“Small as a Eunuch”: a problem in “Coriolanus”, Act III Scene 2’, ML, lxvii (1986), 159–61
M. Kirnbauer: ‘Eunuchenflöten: quellenkundliche Notizen zu einem immer noch vergessenen Instrument’, Scripta Artium, i (1999), 73–8
MARTIN KIRNBAUER