(Fr.; Ger. Bebung).
An ornament, not unlike a trill, used in woodwind playing, produced by a quick finger movement on the edge of or above a tone hole (usually the highest open hole). It was described in Dutch, English, French and German sources from 1654 to 1847, including Jacques Hotteterre's Principes de la flûte traversière (1707). One of the few collections where it was explicitly marked was P.D. Philidor's suites (1717–18). In English the ornament was described as a ‘sweetening’ or ‘softening’ of the note. Sometimes called a ‘finger vibrato’, the flattement was not intended to be perceived as a change of pitch. It was applied selectively, usually to long notes, and was often associated with swells. The sign for the flattement (rarely marked in music) was a horizontal wavy line. The flattement afforded considerable control of both speed and amplitude, and was better suited to the short and complex phrasing of the music of the 17th and 18th centuries than modern breath vibrato; the latter is not documented before the 1790s.
In string playing a similar ornament was termed pincé by Marais and others. It was described as a two-finger vibrato, produced by the rocking motion of two fingers pressed against each other. The terms ‘flattement’ and ‘flaté’ or ‘flatté’ were also applied to vocal vibrato. For further information and variant interpretations see Ornaments, §8; see also Vibrato.
B.B. Mather: Interpretation of French Music from 1675 to 1775 (New York, 1973)
G. Moens-Haenen: Das Vibrato in der Musik des Barock (Graz, 1988)
B. Haynes: ‘Das Fingervibrato (flattement) auf Holzblasinstrumenten im 17., 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, Tibia, xxii (1997), 401–7, 481–7
BRUCE HAYNES