The main use of antique F flutes was/is of course flute military/marching bands where they are used in families of flat keys. Plenty of stuff elsewhere on all that. Also make life easier in other miltary-style bands where many of the other instruments are flat key orientated.
The second, slightly less nice but still pretty good F flute is still available, BTW!
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=60825
Remember these are transposing instruments - you call (and write) the 6-finger note D regardless of what it actually sounds, and so you can play everything you would on a D flute with the usual fingering - it will just sound a minor third higher on an F flute - no problem for a fretted strings accompanist who owns a capo! That won't please other melody players though, as they would have to transpose/learn the tunes with different fingering to match you - just the same as it would be for you if you try to play the tunes to sound at normal pitch on the transposing instrument.
If you do have to fit in with others playing tunes (hymns, whatever) at their normal pitches/in their normal keys and want to do it on F flute (or any other non D instrument) it is usually best to transpose your dots, though if you get good at it, sight transposition is a useful knack (wish I could do it!). You need to bear in mind that on a keyless flute you only have the usual group of closely related keys available unless you want to do loads of half-holing and cross-fingering (there have been plenty of threads on this point over on the Whistle Forum). On a keyed flute it is easier, but the equivalent keys in terms of fingering patterns as transposed will be awkward just as they are on a fully keyed D simple system flute. For example, the key of C on an F flute has D flute A major fingering, i.e. 3 "sharps", one extra in terms of the notes not in your basic diatonic home scale. In addition, because of the different tessitura (range) of the F flute, many tunes, even ones in keys that fit well on it, will run off the bottom or top and need adapting. It is often easier to play tunes truly in F on a C instrument (equivalent to G fingering on a D) than on an F one.
Breton flute players seem to make particularly good use of F flutes,but then, their native music world is dominated by the bombarde in Bb, so the advantages are obvious. Jean-Michel Veillon uses his a great deal.
I have never made huge use of my own F band flute - the occasional song accompaniment for which it happened to be a comfortable match, a few Welsh dance tunes that are in F, C, D minor or G minor and one or two tunes that I choose to play on it for its particular sonority...... I think I've posted some clips played on it on the Clips Thread a couple of times a while back, apart from the ones I've done recently for the F flutes for sale (those were all video clips and are on
my Youtube channel.)
