(Fr. flûte à coulisse, sifflet à coulisse, jazzo-flûte; Ger. Lotosflöte, Stempelflöte; It. flauto a culisse).
A stopped duct flute, which has no finger-holes, the pitch being altered by means of a piston or stopper, moved up and down inside the cylindrical tube from the lower end by one hand. Folk versions are normally made of cane or bamboo with a cloth-covered, padded piston-head; modern Western examples are usually of plastic or metal, with a tightly fitting leather washer for the piston-head (the principle resembles that of a bicycle pump).
Piston flutes are played in parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific. In Europe they are known principally as toys and, since the second half of the 18th century, have been incorporated in some Bird instruments. The swanee whistle is of 19th-century origin, and was popular in light music in the 1920s (hence its jazz names). Slide saxophones, including a soprano ‘Swanee sax’, were also occasionally used (experimental slide saxophones and clarinets were also built in the latter part of the 20th century). Composers began to score for the swanee whistle at around the same time: Ravel was probably the first, using it to evoke the sounds of a garden at night in L’enfant et les sortilèges (1920–25). It also appears in William Russell’s March Suite (1936) and Leonard Bernstein’s two best-known musicals On the Town (1944) and West Side Story (1957). Five swanee whistles are included in Berio’s Passaggio (first performed 1963), and other composers who have written for it include David Bedford, Derek Bourgeois, Henry Brant (at least three works), Cornelius Cardew, Hugh Davies, Peter Maxwell Davies (at least four works), Jean Françaix, Alberto Ginastera, H.K. Gruber, Krzysztof Penderecki, Hans Werner Henze (at least three works), Robin Holloway, Wilhelm Killmayer, György Ligeti, Francis Miroglio, Dubravko Detoni (three works), Peter Schickele (as ‘P.D.Q. Bach’), Dieter Schönbach, Dimitri Terzakis and the jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock. Percy Grainger devised a ‘free music’ machine in 1950 in which a swanee whistle and two recorders were played from a hand-cut punched paper tape.
The origin of the name is, like its spelling, uncertain; there does not appear to be any direct link with the ‘Swannee’ (i.e. Suwannee) River mentioned in Stephen Foster’s song Old Folks at Home.
B. Hopkin: ‘Slide Whistles’, Experimental Musical Instruments, iii/1 (1987), 10–13
B. Hopkin: Musical Instrument Design: Practical Information for Instrument Making (Tucson, AZ, 1996), 78–9
HUGH DAVIES