Chiff and Fipple Forums

When I look at art I always assume it as exageration because the artist will try to emphasize his perceptions. Some of this is quite amazing, such as how "brightness" appears out of a picture, somehow relating better than say a photograph. That doesn't mean that there is an agenda though. My take on that picture is less cynical, I view it as a composition of various existing mundane realities into one frame. The teacher I can relate to and playing flute is not nescessarily entertainment but refinding oneself or composure, can be meditative.

I don't see any characters as "dirty", just natural or "rustic". Maybe we should rather ask why we have such an obsession with perfectionly cleanliness nowadays as a position to start judging by ?

Ultimately a lot is relative, eye of the beholder, and I'm not sure if an artist would be more talented painting an unequivocal representation than one which allows a full range of relatively subjective impressions to be found by any number of viewers ?

Mr.Gumby wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 6:31 am In the case of the two paintings by Helmick, they're very accurate in their detail, the furniture, the bird cage, the plaited straw cradle. Also the grip of the fluteplayer in the second image.

They also share the general posture of the flute player (though one has crossed legs) on a chair that is too small for them but in each case furnished with what may be a step for use of the chair by a small child. Maybe Helmick's paintings were an assemblage of things he had made detailed sketches of.

Helmick and his audience didn't think it odd that a room with only the bare necessities (or less - no pot or kettle) was occupied by someone who could afford a flute. A flute that looks too small to have found long use in the 20th century. Doing an image search for Helmick pulls up lot of similar scenes from houses of those at various levels of society. Several also sitting on chairs that look a bit small.

The pictures reminded me of a similar simple cottage scene from a calender page that one of my forebears thought worth putting in a frame. I hadn't looked who it was by until now but a bit of clicking brought up a similar batch of rural scenes in Scotland by Henry John Dobson who was about 10 years younger than Helmick. There was clearly a market for that sort of thing. The rural Scots look just as poor but have no flutes (and bigger chairs)

Timber was scarce in Ireland. Chairs were often small-ish, made from what was available to country people.

As with another set of paintings posted earlier, I have the impression the flute player is the same person. Here is one more from Helmick



https://www.adams.ie/95442/Howard-Helmi ... lot_detail


But I'm not sure it is meant Irish ? That would make ask though if Helmick was friends with a flute playing school teacher, or if he just had a fondness of introducing themes with a flute player present.

I was just putting away a few things I picked up recently, into an archive box with stuff I picked up in the past. Long story short, I found this in the box, among a pile of old Irish music related postcards. I had forgotten it was there at all. Early 20th century, pre-1915.

Mr.Gumby wrote: ↑Fri Nov 18, 2022 9:14 am Early 20th century, pre-1915.

Caption is unambiguous. Is that another flute that looks too small to be rescued from the back of a drawer for later 20th century session playing?

The flute hold in the last Helmich image linked by Greenwood does not look so well observed. Even my small-handed flute doesn't have such a big gap between the top- and bottom-hand holes. Looks more like a D flute though. That bottom hand fourth finger perhaps looks like where it would be if it was holding an Eb key open.

Also found living in the dark recesses of my hard drive: Kara Lochridge's 2004 thesis 'Where can I get a flute like yours?'. Pertinent to this discussion, it appears to have been scanned by Google books so it should be retrievable.

Mr.Gumby wrote: ↑Mon Nov 21, 2022 8:22 am Also found living in the dark recesses of my hard drive: Kara Lochridge's 2004 thesis 'Where can I get a flute like yours?'. Pertinent to this discussion, it appears to have been scanned by Google books so it should be retrievable.

yes it's available on google books for free--a very valuable piece of work

Ah, that brings back memories. Brian Berryman, myself and Kara Lochridge in the kitchen of the Mariners Inn, at Boxwood Festival in 2002.



I don't know why most of the beer bottles were clustered in front of me....

And this link should take you to Kara's thesis:
https://www.google.com.au/books/edition ... frontcover

For some reason the google.com.au link was causing problems for me here, so here is an alternate link to the same document:

https://books.google.com/books?id=rcDWA ... dge+thesis

Prehaps of interest? An old collection of tunes for the violin, flute, and oboe, publ. 1724:
https://www.itma.ie/shop/a-collection-o ... xuGGuutHOo

Also mentioned in Lochridge's "Where can I buy a flute like yours"

Steampacket wrote: ↑Tue Nov 22, 2022 8:14 am Prehaps of interest? An old collection of tunes for the violin, flute, and oboe, publ. 1724:
https://www.itma.ie/shop/a-collection-o ... xuGGuutHOo

Also mentioned in Lochridge's "Where can I buy a flute like yours"

...were going to mention the cover photo of that, but as it was Dublin etc. thought not...

Henry or John Houghton, Organ trophy, 1724, St Michan’s Church




Half way down at

https://theframeblog.com/tag/francis-bindon/

I've been lurking on this thread since its inception, but I must finally say there is a hell of a lot of evidence of flutes being around in Ireland since about the same time period they became popular on the continent and some showing earlier. I'd say too much evidence to give full credence to the "flutes were not in Irish music camp until they ended up in pawn shops post Boehm" theory.

Keep up the research folks...I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Eric

Something has been bothering me with these images, and I think it's surfaced. Look at the flute in the centre of the carved wooden panel. We can see it's a baroque style one-keyed flute. In particular, note the very large difference between the diameters of the head and foot - the ratio is very pronounced. Now look at our flutes in the Boxwood Festival image with Brian and Kara - the difference in diameters just noticeable at that distance. Now look at the flute being played by the "Flautist - well known all over Ireland" - again we're seeing more of a baroque style instrument, though his clothing is much more recent. Are our artists working more from very old images or examples of flutes?

Now we've been told that when Boehm's new flute finally took hold, lots of old flutes became redundant and fell into the hands of Irish musicians. I know that happened in the 1970s because I witnessed it. But we're not so well off for eyewitness accounts back in the 19th century. But is it also possible that baroque instruments, rendered less useful with changing pitch, and increasing power needs by the onset of Classical and Romantic music also might have fallen into the hands of country players, well before Boehm? Would this explain the anachronistic look of the Flautist's flute?

Interestingly, the wooden panel seems to be loaded with baroque-era instruments. The central flute appears to be strapped to a viol (note the frets). Elsewhere we see recorders, hautbois ("high wood" - early oboe). Is this a jumble of abandoned instruments we are looking at?

Going back to the flute in the middle of the panel, note that the fingerholes (almost pointing down) are seriously out of line with the embouchure hole (almost pointing up). And I thought I was extreme in setting the embouchure hole back! Could be just chance of course - the sculptor working from a badly set up model. Or could be a little artist's joke.

But note also the lack of the terminal flourish we expect on the bottom end of baroque flutes, the same as we see on recorders. And note the unusual length of the foot. And is that a little side hole we can just make out facing us a diameter or so up from the bottom?

Hmmm, I can almost hear the sculptor thinking out loud: "this is going to have them puzzling when the Internet gets invented"....

Jayhawk wrote: ↑Tue Nov 22, 2022 12:26 pm I've been lurking on this thread since its inception, but I must finally say there is a hell of a lot of evidence of flutes being around in Ireland since about the same time period they became popular on the continent and some showing earlier. I'd say too much evidence to give full credence to the "flutes were not in Irish music camp until they ended up in pawn shops post Boehm" theory.

I don't mean to pick on you, but you put it quite succinctly so I'll quote you here. I do think that a fair bit of the discussion here is equating "the flute in Ireland" and "the flute in what we know today as 'traditional Irish music,'" when those are actually two separate things. The simple system flute was quite a popular instrument in the 18th and 19th centuries in a lot of the western world, and in a broader historical sense flutes have been around all over the world for millennia. So finding evidence of flutes in Ireland isn't super surprising; the question in my mind would be how much of a link we can draw to what we consider "Irish flute playing" to be today.

For example, one thing I've noticed about flute playing among "gentlemen" and the middle class in that time is that song airs and improvisations seem to have a prominent role. How many of them would have been playing for dancers, as opposed to either playing for themselves or a non-dancing, listening audience? And does that change how we perceive their place int he history of "traditional Irish music," considering that its definition is usually heavily based around dance music? Do all roads lead to Matt Molloy, or are there instances of the flute in Ireland that lead elsewhere, or are dead ends? And how far back in history is it even very useful to use the term "traditional Irish music?" After all, you can hardly point to evidence of the guitar in 19th century America as evidence of rock guitar playing.