Work in Progress

[rod]

This baroque flute will soon go to Prague, to a lovely and very talented young woman who is has been playing in various venues around Europe. I made her a blackwood flute a few years ago and it has been played in St Peter's Rome, not a bad venue...

She will soon record compositions by a Czech composer of the 18th century, and this new flute in boxwood, hopefully, will have a sonority appropriate to his specific requirements.

Like an engraved fire arm, a flute must have a sonority and response that first satisfies the player, before we talk about the secondary luxury of perhaps delighting the eye, so my reputation would crumble overnight if word got around that it looks better than it plays. We shall see, as I am about to start working on tuning and voicing. Presently it is a fancy looking broom handle with a hole down the middle just about finished with what I call the 'corpus'. Next comes the task of giving it a 'spiritus'. We shall see...

Thought it might be of interest to see a few snapshots of work in progress, while it is still unfinished and with some workshop saw dust everywhere.

Rod

 

[Andrew Biggs]

Hi Rod

It looks GREAT!!! You're really getting into this plating thing and it's looking really good and very appropriate for the piece.

Cheers
Andrew

 

[mtgraver]

Thanks Rod, that is a beautiful piece of work, elegant in the flowing lines. If only my ears could tell a difference.
Mark

 

[Marrinan]

Absolutely wonderful! Are you a flutist yourself? How is the "tuning" accomplished if that is not a trade secret? Your an amazing artist. Someday you have to venture to the engrave-in at Scott's- Fred

 

[GTJC460]

Outstanding! Your work is always a pleasure to view.

How does the sound compare in a wooden VS metal flute?

 

[rod]

Thank you all for your kind remarks!

Fred, a similar question came from SEngraver, and I responded:

SE,

Thank you! You ask a pertinent and penetrating question. When we look at the modern silver flute, developed to have a loud sound and good tuning, the holes are positioned where the theoretical position suggests, and that is not a place where the human fingers have been designed to reach with comfort. So mechanisms have evolved since the 1800's to transmit the movement from a comfortable finger position and by various linkages to the tone hole where a padded lid closes the hole, such that one can barely see the main body of a silver flute, saxophone, oboe, or clarinet, mostly we see the complex cluster of linkages added to the instrument body. All of this works very well to give equal strength to each 'equal tempered' semitone of the scale (this modern scale has only recently been invented in Bach's time, and we humans have been tooting on flutes for 9000 years plus).

Now cut back to the 1700's and earlier. Fingers alone closed the holes, except in this case, the engraved key covers the unreachable E flat hole. The next small hole above that is smaller than we want. but we have to bring it north from where it should be, so the finger can reach it, hence a quiet note. So also, the other holes are an ergonomic compromise, they need to be reached by the average human hand. Furthermore, they are small so that semitones may be player by 'cross fingering', that is, we close various holes down stream from the upper opened hole. It gets worse, the tone holes are undercut inside the flute and have about a half a dozen asymmetric profiles in such undercutting for various reasons. The end result is, that playing on the old flute gives certain strong keys signatures, and others that are soft. This entered into the character of music composition in the 1700's. Bach chose his flute sonata in E major, a kind of soft key, to match certain emotional responses and subtleties, which disappear when the same sonata is played in the bold, loud, and very equal strength silver flute. It is such esoteric differences that put food on my table. Why, because very few flute players can get jobs playing in modern symphony orchestras, they take up chamber music as an alternative, and to them, often the old flutes with the above sonorities open a new aesthetic door, to the extent that eventually they grow to like the style, and order a flute from me or one of my colleagues.

Perhaps I have gone too far?

best

Rod

 

[rod]

Fred,

I forgot to answer your question as to "are you a flutist". I know my way around the baroque flute, but would never pay to hear myself. I can blow as well as any, but my fingers are now suffering from too many decades of hammer and chisel to be very nimble. The flute is sort of my ball and chain, that I need to be immersed in 24/7, so I play guitar, fiddle, mandolin, and sing when it comes to musical fun ...mostly Scots songs and tunes, but I have dabbled in American music, and used to open for a few great names in various clubs during the good ol' days .... John Lee Hooker, Sonny and Brownie, etc. I was kind of the cheap white trash warm up gig guy, and it worked out well. Got to hang out with my heroes!

Rod

 

[BrianPowley]

Nice work, Rod. I always enjoy the craftsmanship and I fully appreciate the aspect of the physical limitations of these "older" style flutes.
In many ways, it takes a pretty resourceful musician to be able to play a lot of different tunes, based on the range of the instrument alone.
Oh---the engraving is a nice touch also!

 

[Roger Bleile]

"Got to hang out with my heroes! Rod"

We all have our heroes and Rod is one of mine.

Roger

 

[rod]

And you are two of my special heroes, Brian, and Roger!

Here am I, thousands of miles from my homeland, and I'm pals with another flute engraver, who also engraves for a President of the USA, another who writes books and dictionaries on engraving, and would you believe it, Brian is deeply connected to Scotland's two cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Roger can sit down with me and sing by heart some esoteric Scots songs that few people have even heard of!

Thank you, good buddies!

Rod

 

[Sam]

Rod, you've come such a long way since we first met. You were dang good then, but you're just continuing to improve with each job. This is absolutely BEAUTIFUL work that is so tastefully done. Your combination of silver and gold is just wonderfully elegant and in a class of its own. Of course I've seen you a dozen times and I've seen your beautiful flute work as well, but what I'd REALLY like to see is the look on the player's face when they open the case and see their new flute for the first time. I can imagine the thrill they must experience!

Hats off to you my friend!

 

[mrthe]

Beautyfull work! very elegant!

 

[dimovengraving]

When I look the pictures , I crave to play the flute ... or at least hear the sounds
A very beautiful work - like a colour, lines and all

 

[Arnaud Van Tilburgh]

Looks real nice Rod, when I was a kid we all had to learn playing the flute, not one like this of course. So I was wondering what the metal engraved part is for and what it does?

arnaud

 

[Mike Cirelli]

Very nice Rod.

 

[Tira]

Always enjoy your in progress photos, Rod. Thanks for the eye candy - the stuff day dreams are made of!

 

[rod]

Thank you for your kind remarks, all... Tira, Sam, mrthe, Arnaud, Mike, Evgeni!

I think it is okay to mention here, for those who do not know, that our Administrator, Tira, is a superb player of silver flute, at the professional level, so sometimes when we meet up at various engraving events, we play a few duets. The old style wood flute is quite different to play than silver flute, yet immediately Tira produces a good sound, she has an ability to quickly find the character of this old style.

Arnaud, the engraved key on the flute covers a seventh tone hole that cannot be reached by the finger, so that another name for this instrument is the "one keyed flute". Your country, Belgium, is a Mecca for people like me, and I visit often, especially to the Grand et Petit Sablons in Brussels, to study old flutes in the Museum. The director was so kind, way back in 1978, he let me stay for ten days in a 17th century apartment above the one section of the museum, and I could wander the museum in the evening time when it was closed.... a dream for me, yet it was real. Nearby, at the conservatory, I would meet often with the world famous baroque flute player and conductor, Barthold Kuijken, one of the famous brothers that form the Kuijken Quartet. Bart has been a good friend, a wise and generous critic over the decades...something that we all yearn for if we wish our work to improve. Is it not wonderful that we all can have similar generous critiques of our work on this and other forums! So Belgium is a great centre of gravity for Early Music, and your neighbouring Netherland, particularly Den Haag and Amsterdam, where I often linger.

Sam, your were so good to have faith in me, when I first traveled to spend time with you, as I was wandering in the dark. You gave me a friendly push into the deep end of the swimming pool, where the heavy hitters sometimes meet, indeed the water was just fine in such forums as this, and where so many masters turn out to be decent and generous pals! Perhaps being able to pick a few songs on the guitar also gave a timid beginner a chance to sit around with you, Abigail, Tira, Ron Smith, Fred, Brian, Barry, and others, but hey, I'm not complaining, I got over my nerves at being in the same room as Winston Churchill one time. He, Martin Strolz, and I ended up swapping old songs till 2 am! There is a lot of good humanity out there in the world.

Rod

 

[Titian]

looks great. I love it.

 

[MexicanEngraver]

i like the design !!!

 

[SamW]

Intriguing and most interesting work Rod...and what an interesting group of people!