A small Duct flute 8·5 cm long, named after the instrument used by the Italian musician Joseph Picco [Angelo Picchi] (b Robbio, 1830) called the ‘Sardinian Minstrel’, who in 1854–7 enjoyed massive acclaim in Italy, France and England. The son of a poor shepherd and born blind, he was inspired by the sounds of the village organ. Apparently self-taught, he was heard playing in the Apennine mountains by a huntsman and brought to Milan. After successful concerts in Italy he was awarded a diploma by the Academia di S Cecilia in Rome in 1855 for his performing and extemporizing skills. His debut in London on 21 February 1856 was at Covent Garden. According to press reports, the ‘tibia pastorale’ he played was nothing more than a three-holed whistle, 2·5 to 3 inches (6·35 to 7·62 cm) in length and made of common white wood which was dyed yellow, a type of child's toy then commonly found at the smallest country fair (see Zuffolo). With a range of three octaves, he was praised for ‘difficult variations, those double notes, those flying octaves, those chromatic runs performed with so much precision and an accent so marked … he makes use of all his fingers, using particularly the forefinger of the left hand to close more or less the end of the whistle, in the way that a performer on the horn employs his hand’.
Such were his successes that London flute makers sold an instrument similar to his, made in boxwood or other hardwood, for some years. Like many earlier pipes from the Bronze Age onwards, it is a flute with two finger-holes and a thumb-hole above them, played with one hand. The bore is cylindrical but widely flared at the lower end. When this end is closed with the palm of the other hand the pipe behaves like an ocarina, sounding c''; opening the holes gives the notes g'' to b'', and partially uncovering the end produces all the semitones of this octave. The scale is continued upwards in open harmonics with the end uncovered, and further in stopped harmonics. The English maker A.W. Simpson has recently marketed a modified version in plastic to serve as an introduction to the recorder. However, none of these models appear ever to have equalled Picco's original pipe in range and response.
Gay, ed.: Picco, the Blind-Born Sardinian Minstrel (London, 1856)
C. Welch: Six Lectures on the Recorder and other Flutes in Relation to Literature (London, 1911)
A.W. Simpson: The Picco Pipe Tutor (Lewes, n.d.)
WILLIAM H. STONE, ANTHONY C. BAINES/WILLIAM WATERHOUSE