Oldest wooden flute in Europe... so far.

[Loren]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c6T6suvnhco

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YcGZfVehez0


Not just ancient people could make music with only one note. So can modern people! First video is Francis Bebey and the second are Pygmy musicians. Very very cool stuff! Check out other songs by Francis Bebey where he uses the same flute.

Heh heh, Mr. Bebey invites you to step outside your (musical) box.

It would be a fun experiment to take a few great musicians/improvisers/composers and give them something like that instrument, nothing else, and see what they would come up with. I imagine Stevie Wonder wouldn’t struggle for even a moment, while others would be hard pressed to come up with a way to musically use such a “limited” instrument. Bach probably wouldn’t have minded it so much, lol.

[bigsciota]

RE: Sri Lanka, by the 1800s it had had a continuous European presence for 3 decades. Before that, it was very well-connected to much of the rest of Eurasia for millennia, and has been quite cosmopolitan and diverse for much of its history, stretching back thousands of years. All of this to say that there's a tendency to view cultures and folk musics as somewhat stagnant or drawing upon primeval sources (like possible shared Indo-European heritage), when the reality that everything is in constant flux, with influences coming and going.

In the case of that flute, especially given that it has a six-hole layout much like the European simple-system flute, I'd imagine that the design is an adaptation of indigenous Sri Lankan bamboo flutemaking to some European influence. I'd actually be willing to bet that, given the decoration, lack of wear, and the fact that this came from the personal collection of a British colonial official with an interest in studying the local culture, this flute was made specifically for him, possibly as mainly a ceremonial/decorative piece. A quick glance at the British Museum's other Sri Lankan flutes (they have a remarkable collection of other people's stuff over there!) from the same collection show a split between nicely preserved decorated ones (with intricate patterns like this one) and rougher-looking, completely undecorated ones, which were likely "players' instruments."

[GreenWood]

@ Nanohedron.

"Absolutely" , and unfortunately the museum page did not say exactly which culture it came from

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collectio ... -0703-1630

I don't draw assumptions though, I just don't remember seeing any other flutes with that kind of triangular design and banding , though surely there will be others? What I notice though is that there are really quite strong tendencies in design and art, and that they tend to be deeply ingrained in whatever culture. For example the only other obvious crosshatching and diagonals which I know of that is representative of a culture is the likes of

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vi ... Grande.ppm

Which are from this area of Portugal around 2500 BC... and maybe why the design caught my attention in first place. Still, even if this sort of design was ancient European, it still is possible Indo-Europeans emulated it and took it with them...the whole subject is very much an "amaginarium" for hypothesis.


For the linguistics and Indo European migration and so on, it is an area of great academic debate and argument, Johnnie Galacher gives an overview here (only first part of video, rest is question)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2ikS5Ta4BR4

In reality it is not clear the extent and timeframe of all the different cultures and people's of the time. In now Germany, some models say late neolithic Indo European presence for example.

I don't know, and tend to observe from the sidelines .

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@ Mr. Grumby

Yes, there are some very old bone flutes, the oldest ones are all bone...right the way back to if they are not sure if they are toneholes or woolly hyena (?) bitemarks . Though they give a lot of clues I don't have much affinity for them... I just always imagine they were being played... well.... by the butcher (no offence to butchers meant at all or in any way whatsoever at all at all at all)

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@ Conical bore

A bronze age referee whistle, oh dear .


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If it was a flute or not I think just rests on whether it had a fipple or was end/side blown. What use it served is something else though, I think music for the fact it is decorated? So I went to look up overtone flutes and miniature flutes, and these are different perspectives offered, remembering that it is about 15cm long only after all:


A miniature Japanese pipe flute plays a song

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kKw-v_qkSiQ

A koyok is similar, here making bird sounds I think


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qr6-Gpm6II


A koudi flute... this one has toneholes but it is to show the range of pitch possible on such a small instrument.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m2NqEqVKQW4

What I wonder on the one from the lake is if the end blown part might also be able to be covered or part covered and the flute blown via tonehole .


@ xabeba and ecadre

Thanks, I was wondering if it was possible at all to get overtones on such a small instrument.

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Overtone flutes are longer usually, but not everyone is familiar with them so I'll just post some representative links.


How to make a traditional one from willow bark

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eSrXDZdwihU

A tutorial that gives an idea of sounds

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0e47JpKHBm8

What goes on in the forests of eastern Europe

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QPby01qNro8



Just have to figure out now how flute playing three thousand years ago ended up as trad. Shouldn't be too hard but I think I will go and do a bit of sanding and leave that to others

[GreenWood]

RE: Sri Lanka, by the 1800s it had had a continuous European presence for 3 decades...

Hugh Neville

"Editor of the Taprobanian (a local cultural affairs journal) and a local civil administrator, Nevill was a great collector of material of all kinds from Sri Lanka (bronzes, manuscripts, stone, etc). His collection, made between c. 1865 and 1897) is spread across the BM, BL and V&A. Hugh Nevill compiled his collection of Sinhalese manuscripts, now in the Oriental and India Office Collections of The British Library, while working as a civil servant in Sri Lanka between 1869 and 1888. It is impressively wide-ranging, with manuscripts on a wealth of subjects, from poetry to medicine to Sinhalese ritualistic poetry with, 19 volumes of bound paper manuscripts,containing the texts of the two major cycles of ritualistic legends in Sri Lanka"


I don't think he was collecting tourist knicknacks. I also think it's a bit unfair to assume nice looking instruments with 6 toneholes came from or were for the west...and the locals played rustic poorer versions only ? Pre "discovery" north American flutes also had 6 toneholes, for example.

[bigsciota]

I don't think he was collecting tourist knicknacks. I also think it's a bit unfair to assume nice looking instruments with 6 toneholes came from or were for the west...and the locals played rustic poorer versions only ? Pre "discovery" north American flutes also had 6 toneholes, for example.

I didn't say either of those things. It's just that, in general, if you've got two sets of instruments, one group with relatively little wear and lots of decoration, and one in decidedly more worn and with little to no decoration, one conclusion you can draw is that there was a bit of a split between the instruments that got played a lot and the ones that didn't. It's not unique to this situation at all; think of all the flutes played by great Irish fluters that were held together with hose clips!

As for flutes in pre-Columbian North America, there are relatively few surviving specimens and I have yet to see one that closely matches the layout of the European six-hole simple system flute, certainly not as much as the flute you linked does. I have yet to see them all, of course, so I can't say for certain. I'd honestly be very surprised if somewhere, sometime, some flute maker in North America didn't make it that way, even just as an experiment. I can say that saying that they "had 6 toneholes" as some kind of rule is completely ahistorical. The Breckenridge flute, for example, has four holes. If you want to include Mesoamerica as well I think I've seen some tlapitzalli examples with six holes, but no one is going to confuse them for a Western flute!

Mainly, my post was intended to point out that we don't need to think back nearly as far as the proto-Indo-Europeans to explain similarities in flute styles between Europe and Sri Lanka. And that's not even getting into convergent evolution. When you get down to it there are only so many ways the laws of physics will allow you to get noise by blowing into or around a tube, so flutes will end up with some similarities!

[GreenWood]

I don't think he was collecting tourist knicknacks....

I didn't say either of those things. It's just that, in general, if you've got two sets of instruments, one group with relatively little wear and lots of decoration...

No conclusion was meant on my part Bigsciota. Also comes to mind is that ceremonial flutes might be very well kept, for example. Some cultures also are just very much that way. For the six holed flutes

https://www.flutopedia.com/brokenflutecave.htm

is what I was remembering, but there are all kinds from the region, and in many regions. However usually any region or culture will have a distinct set of flute types easily identifiable as its own.

I'm no expert on the theme though .

[kmag]

There are no tone holes, is that right, just the embouchure hole? I wonder if this would qualify as a musical instrument in that case. Maybe more of a signaling device like a modern referee's whistle?

It could have been used like this flute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbNoqhdSjAQ&t=1s

[david_h]

It could have been used like this flute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbNoqhdSjAQ&t=1s

It's not long enough to get that many overtones, as I think someone already said or implied.

[GreenWood]

It could have been used like this flute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbNoqhdSjAQ&t=1s

It's not long enough to get that many overtones, as I think someone already said or implied.

It is about half the size of a tin whistle ? What was noted before is that a tin whistle can reach various overtones e.g.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aPrP3f0utKk

And other effects as well.

Plus there is one tonehole, plus the end can be covered to whatever degree chosen. I think that would give some scale.

The thing is this, a lot of the instruments linked above are fippled. Some ancient bone flutes were quena like it seems though, and to me it seems like this is a line of instruments in Europe that dissappeared somewhere along the line. The Ney or Kaval are true endblown but without notch , and are positioned differently to say a quena. They are implied as more recent near eastern origin also. The there is the svirel from Russia said "end blown" but I could not find an example of one that was without fipple. Then there is the greek flogera, this one seems notched, if it is one

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/505130

And this says rim blown

https://ipfs.yt/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJn ... ghera.html

But this one looks positioned like a Ney

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bB6oMPrKYY4

Few videos so I don't know.

So in short, the question of how it might play, and be played, is quite open...

?