A word varying in meaning from one authority to another, associated with some part of the sound mechanism of the Duct flute. To Schlesinger and Galpin it was the sharp edge of the lip. To Marcuse and others it represented the whole head of the instrument. To Hunt and Blom it was the block. To Sachs it was the origin of the word ‘pipe’, deriving from Latin fibula and thus referred to the whole instrument. The earliest English usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was by Bacon: ‘Let there be a Recorder made with two Fipples, at each end one’. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the fipple as the flue (i.e. the windway). Since nobody can agree what the term means, to avoid further confusion its use should be abandoned.
Grove (E.H. Hunt)
F. Bacon: Sylva Sylvarum, or A Naturall Historie (London, 1626)
F.W. Galpin: Old English Instruments of Music (London, 1910, rev. 4/1965/R by T. Dart)
K. Schlesinger: ‘Recorder’, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Cambridge, 11/1911)
C. Welch: Six Lectures on the Recorder (London, 1911)
C. Sachs: Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1913/R)
E. Blom: Everyman's Dictionary of Music (London, 1946, rev. 6/1988 by D. Cumings)
S. Marcuse: Musical Instruments: a Comprehensive Dictionary (New York, 1964/R)
JEREMY MONTAGU