(Fr. flûte d'echo; It. fiauto d'echo, flauto echo).
A
term, encountered in several late 17th- and early 18th-century sources, whose
meaning remains in doubt. On one occasion it apparently signified treble
recorders: an aria from Bononcini's Il fiore delle eroine (1704) is
scored for ‘2 flauti’ and ‘2 flauti eco’; the four instruments have an
identical range (a''–d'''), and the flauti eco imitate the
phrase endings of the flauti, perhaps from offstage. However, Etienne
Loulié mentioned ‘deux flutes d'echo’, one loud, one soft, in his Elements
ou principes de musique (1696), and James Paisible played ‘the echo flute’,
and once ‘the small echo flute’, in London concerts between 1713 and 1719.
Perhaps these references are to two recorders tied together. In 1668 the
woodwind maker Samuel Drumbleby had shown Samuel Pepys how to do this with
flageolets; and Sir John Hawkins reported that John Banister (ii), a colleague
of Paisible's, ‘was famous for playing on two flutes [recorders] at once’.
Pairs of recorders with differing tonal qualities have survived (by Peter
Bressan, London, early 18th century, private collection, Tokyo; and Johann
Heitz, Berlin, early 18th century, Grassi-Museum, Leipzig; Münchener
Stadtmuseum), and a similar pair (anonymous, Saxon, late 18th century,
Grassi-Musuem) is even joined together with a brass bridge. On the title page
of his Fourth Brandenburg Concerto (1721), Bach calls for two ‘fiauti d'echo’.
The parts have a range of f'–g''', generally avoiding f
''' (significantly, a difficult note to
obtain on contemporaneous treble recorders). They could have been intended for
joined pairs of recorders, but musically there seems no reason for anything but
treble recorders, the ‘f’ and ‘p’ markings being indications for tutti and solo
passages rather than dynamics resulting in a marked echo effect.
DAVID LASOCKI