Why I Would Get a New Flute Over an Old One

In reply to a recent post in the Flute Forum regarding different flute scales, after a few posts on history:

I like the history lessons, so I'll share a different aspect of things.

What we call "scales" here are really schema for tone hole placement relative to specifically defined flute tube dimensions. Boehm, in his bid to build a better flute, did one thing better than just defining an acoustically better (relative to flutes of that era) schema for his new flute design: he made it "open source".

This meant that anyone who wanted to build flutes that had similar characteristics as what Boehm did could do so relatively easily, assuming they have the necessary skills.

Boehm's schema had interpolation built in to take into account the different tuning standards of the day. But I don't think the interpolation was as good as it should be, since some of the design decisions that could work for [say] A435 probably didn't apply to A442.

Further down the line, adjustments to the Boehm schema took place, but they were generally shrouded behind trade secrets of individual makers. The Cooper scale is a major "open source" update to the schema of the Boehm flute.

An interesting question to ask is, if the concert flute has already been around for more than one hundred years, why do we still need to create such "improved" schema? I conjecture that it comes from two main drivers: pedagogy trends, and better manufacturing techniques.

Pedagogy trends mean that the manner in which we play and teach the flute has changed over time, so what was originally considered an in-tune schema from the past may not be applicable now. This is evident over the past one hundred years as well, when we move away from older music towards newer sonorities as demanded by the new compositions (and the proliferation of 12-tone equal temperament as The Scale), where nimbleness across different intervals across the different registers of the flute demands an embouchure that is just as flexible. That requirement of a flexible embouchure means that flutes which can be "in tune" without lipping will be much easier to control than those who have more "character' and demand more lipping, for the simple reason that it requires less effort from the player, and that reduction in effort can then be applied to the interpretation of the music instead.

Changes in manufacturing techniques also mean that the original design compromises of less correct intonation to mitigate hard-to-fashion-by-hand parts can be done away with, restoring an acoustically more correct schema that demands better making techniques. Case in point: the C# hole doubling as a vent hole for the second instrument octave that made it much smaller than it should be for a correct C# -- we can now put in the C#-trill hole, which is much larger and thus gives a better venting for a "true" C#. That additional C#-trill requires extending the posts longer to support two axes, or some weird rod-in-rod connection to allow two independent rotating axes (don't ask me how it can be done that way -- I'm not a mechanical engineer!). Doing that with only hand tools without our modern knowledge of manufacturing is nasty, to say the least.

Ultimately though, the player is still the biggest part of the flute's sound. It doesn't matter what schema the flute is in -- what matters is if the flute can assist the player's physical abilities to achieve what the player wants to achieve musically.

I would, however, state categorically that with our modern concert flute, mechanism stability and operability becomes a great limiting factor in general, and sadly it is often only with newer flutes that we get the improvement in mechanism design and precision machining. So, to get a flute that has mechanisms that work well, longer, one might need to just get used to the new scales as they come into vogue. Or hope that we always have great flute technicians who know how to retrofit better mechanisms to our favourited old flutes so that they can benefit from that without losing their tonal character.