Terry McGee wrote:
PB+J wrote:
Francis O'Neill doesn't bother much with the flute in his histories of Irish music--he barely mentions it.
Ah, perhaps you haven't been looking in the right place. Page 409 of Irish Minstrels and Musicians (Capt. Francis O'Neill), starts Chapter XXVII: The Flute and its Patrons. It starts:
"No musical instrument was in such common use among the Irish peasantry as the flute. From the "penny whistle" to the keyed instrument in sections it was always deservedly popular." O'Neill goes on to talk about the advantages of the flute, and document a number of famous fluters from his period and before, starting with Oliver Goldsmith.
O'Neill himself was a fluteplayer, fiddler and piper. "In our own case, we had the good fortune to be taught the flute by Mr Timothy Downing....". There's a statue of Francis playing the flute at the O'Neill family home in Tralibane, Co. Cork.
No I actually posted that here once before. He does say that lots of people played flute, and recalls hearing flutes from a distance over the hills, but when it comes to documenting musicians, flute players get scarcely a mention--its pipes, first and foremost, and the fiddle. In the quote you added he goes on to say that anyone serious as a musician--anyone desiring to make money at it--played the fiddle or the flute: "
No one but a born musician, or one who had no other outlet for his musical instinct, was likely to learn to play the flute." Flute players are only a tiny part of "
Fascinating Hobby" and "
Irish Minstrels and Musicians." For example, you can search both at Google Books, and in
Irish Minstrels the flute is mentioned on 33 pages, while the fiddle is treated on 78 pages, at much greater length, and the pipes get 89 pages. In
Fascinating Hobby there are no mentions of the flute OR the fiddle, but 100 pages treating the pipes
(Also I've been to see the statue and posted pictures of it here a couple months ago. Believe me, I've been spending quite a lot of time with O'Neill, including all the original letters Irish archivists were willing to let me see!)
I think it's odd the way he treats the flute--like it's the instrument of the amateur and the extremely poor. He says, as you note, that once you got a flute you didn't need to do or buy anything else--no strings or rosin or reeds or bow hair, so in that sense it was the friend of the poor. But in pictures of the Chicago Irish Music club a lot of people are playing flutes, and flutes are among the earliest commercial recordings of ITM.
So I think we'd agree the flute was widely played in Ireland in, say, 1860, but for some reason it's not held in the same regard as other instruments by the primary historians of Irish folk muisc