Nanohedron wrote:So in other words, there's no reason not to make modern simple-system flutes with a more in-tune F# and Cnat, then?
We are still struggling with the laws of physics and the stretch limitations of our puny hands. And this has been well known since Boehm's time. Remember Carte's helpful image:
He's taken an 8-key flute and put all the keyholes in line with the finger holes, to illustrate that, while ideally all the holes should be laid out in a logarithmic scale, like a guitar fretboard, in an 8-key they end up as several clusters, limited to what we can reach.
Ideally the hole that determines F#, hole 5, should be well up the flute and smaller, and hole 6 (E) should be further down and bigger. But who around here is going to vote for another 3/4" between fingers R2 and R3?
Similarly c# (hole 1) should be considerably further up the flute, to get it up to pitch, but that would make the c natural cross fingering even sharper!
My feeling is, to answer the question we started with, we need to separate out two important issues - the tuning of the notes we do have control over, and the problem notes we don't have control over. Ignore F#, C# and the crossfingered Cnat, and look at the scale of the other notes. Before Siccama that scale was suitable for playing around 430 Hz, and it's probably no coincidence that domestic pianos were tuned about there. Siccama used a range of scale lengths, and Pratten, deriving from Siccama's work, settled on a scale length suitable for somewhere around 445 Hz (possibly Society of Arts Pitch?).
So we find Rudall style originals tend to be a bit flat at the bottom and a bit sharp at the top when tuned to modern pitch, but Pratten's are pretty good. Modern flutes might be the same, or might have been tweaked to make playing less difficult. But while modern makers are free to tweak their scale lengths and get the controllable notes to their liking, they are still limited by stretch in terms of the "problem notes".
Terry