An Aerophone whose essential feature is a head, partially blocked, leaving a windway or duct to lead the player’s breath to a rigid sharp edge or lip (voicing edge) at the base of the mouth (‘window’ or ‘labium’). There are normally a number of finger-holes (a duct flute without finger-holes is usually regarded as a Whistle), varying from three (e.g. the tabor pipe (see Pipe and tabor), to six (e.g. Penny whistle and Flageolet), eight or nine (the Recorder in the Baroque and Renaissance periods respectively). Because of its ease of sound production, the duct flute is by far the most common type of flute throughout the world, but in some areas (e.g. South America, the Middle East and North Africa, much of the Balkans, and in European art music since the mid-18th century) it has tended to be regarded as an amateur’s instrument, the professional player preferring more difficult but more expressive instruments such as the Notched flute, end-blown flutes such as the nay and kaval, or the transverse instrument.
Terminology for the various parts of the sound-producing apparatus of the duct flute has been vague and uncertain (e.g. the word Fipple has been applied by different writers to several different parts of the instrument), but a standard vocabulary has been established by Picken, combining organ builders’ (an organ flue-pipe is also a duct flute; see Organ, §III) and other instrumentalists’ terms into a logical whole. There is wide variation in the geometry both of the windway and of the mouth, resulting in considerable differences in tonal quality, dynamics, ease of overblowing and harmonic content of the sound, each pattern of duct flute being designed to fulfil the musical and tonal requirements of the culture within which it is used.
The way that the duct is formed also varies widely (see Flute, fig.1 (h–k)), ranging from the player’s tongue inserted into the top of an otherwise empty tube to the elaborate internal and external duct where a partition, either natural (e.g. a node in the cane) or artificial (e.g. wax), forces the air out to travel below a decoratively carved wooden block, and thence to the instrument’s mouth. Examples of the latter type may be seen in pre-Columbian Mexican codices, and are still found in Central America; they include the courting flute used by some North American Indian peoples such as the Apache. In South-east Asia, e.g. in Flores and with the palwei in Myanmar, a strip of leaf (or nowadays often of plastic) is used instead of the carved wooden block. The most widespread type of duct is formed by an internal block of wood, pith, wax or other material, with a windway between it and the inner wall of the flute. An external ring of leaf or bamboo, tied round the top of the instrument, is common in Indonesia, the outer wall of the head of the suling being reduced in thickness under the ring at one point to leave a duct down which the player’s breath may be directed to the mouth. Slide-blown duct flutes, usually with a small nozzle protruding from the side into which the player blows (the air then turning a right angle as it passes into the instrument), are known from India and also Europe, where flageolet-flutes were made in the first half of the 19th century for the amateur who wished to appear to play a ‘proper’ transverse flute without acquiring the necessary skill. Wheatstone and other makers produced a clip-on duct for this purpose, and similar artifices are still available. The use of paired or grouped duct flutes (‘multiple flutes’), with more than one pipe blown simultaneously, goes back to antiquity. They have been found in Mexico, and are still played in Paraguay, Tibet, Baluchistan, India and Yugoslavia.
A fairly common form of ephemeral duct flute is the willow whistle, made by stripping a tube of bark from the wood in the spring; some of these (e.g. in Norway, Switzerland and the Balkans) are played as harmonic flutes, with a finger stopping the lower end to obtain the harmonic series of both open and stopped pipes. The absence of finger-holes does not invariably preclude musical performance.
SachsH
J. Kunst: Music in Flores (Leiden, 1942)
A. Baines: Woodwind Instruments and their History (London, 1957, 3/1967/R)
L. Picken: The Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (London, 1975)
E. Emsheimer: ‘Tongue Duct Flutes: Correction of an Error’, GSJ, xxxiv (1981), 98–105
JEREMY MONTAGU