While the double flageolet is seldom in use today, it was considered one of the most popular instruments for amateur musicians in the early nineteenth century. The instrument was developed in England, but interest soon took root in Ireland and other cultures across continental Europe as well as the Americas. It was even used by Gilbert and Sullivan as a stage prop in Iolanthe (1882) and The Sorcerer (1877), thus cementing the physical instrument’s status as a cultural phenomenon and not necessarily tied to its unique sound (MacMillan 2010, 569). As with any societal fad, musical or otherwise, there were several instrument makers who attempted to capitalize on its quick rise to fame at the turn of the century. William Bainbridge (fl. 1803–40) was one such figure and the markings on his instrument, included in the DUMIC collection and shown below, confirm this race for recognition as the “inventor” of the double flageolet.
The traditional “English flageolet” is a woodwind instrument that is played on a whistle-shaped mouthpiece made of ivory. It has six finger holes on the pipe with ivory studs that help the player to identify where they should position their fingers. Some early versions also have a hole on the back of the instrument, though it was quickly replaced with a key or nothing at all. As the instrument was further updated throughout the century, metal keys and extensions were added to increase the range of the instrument. The double flageolet unites two English flageolet bodies with a single headstock piece, therefore allowing for air to enter both pipes simultaneously. Its sound is similar to that of a recorder but is also considered closely related to the transverse flute. The novelty of this instrument is the ability to play two melodic lines at once, rather than being confined to a single melody and an accompanying drone.
Details of Bainbridge’s early life are not known, except that he played the oboe and flute in a few London theaters at the turn of the century. The first dated occurrence that can be ascribed to him is a patent granted for his “octave flageolet” in 1803, which extended the range of the English flageolet. He filed several subsequent patent requests in the same year, and thus became the most acknowledged flageolet maker in England at the time. Despite what his many patents may suggest, he was unable to secure a patent for his double flageolet. And even though his double flageolets had “inventor” inscribed on the headstock (shown below), he was also not technically the inventor either. Historian William Waterhouse has traced the intellectual property for the double flageolet to the clarinetist John Parry, who constructed an independent frame for two of Bainbridge’s octave flageolets to be placed into (176). The first instrument maker to patent the double flageolet was Thomas Scott in 1805. Bainbridge’s insistence on inscribing “inventor” and “patent” on his double flageolets points to his insistence that he was indeed the original creator, even when he wasn’t.
Considering the long history of the double flageolet’s predecessors is crucial to understanding its own origin, in particular because it seems the instrument’s developers were deliberately touting creative originality. Historian Douglas MacMillan has traced the origin of the word “flageolet” to the thirteenth-century trouvères, when “Muset de Lorraine wrote of a shepherd playing a wooden ‘flageolet,'” (559). Composer Guillaume de Machaut also composed a piece for flageolet though, as MacMillan states, these early descriptions likely bore no resemblance to the nineteenth-century instrument and was more akin to a kind of recorder. Samuel Pepys is most notable when tracing the instrument’s history, for he records several of his experiences playing the “flagilette,” sometimes accompanied by his wife (ca. 1661–69): “At night into the garden to play on my flagilette, it being Mooneshine—where I stayed a good while…” (Girdham 2002, 397). Even during the seventeenth century the instrument was seen as one for amateurs and for “casual music making.” The flageolet had a brief stint in professional music circles during the eighteenth century, when it was used by Handel and others to imitate birdsong. The effect of mimicking birds became popular enough for an instruction book to be published on the subject in 1730, entitled The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (398).
Origins of the double flageolet are not merely limited to its own history, but also connect to that of the double recorder. The earliest surviving depiction of a double recorder in western culture is contained within a series of paintings of St. Martin, created by Simone Martini in the fourteenth century. Several other pieces of visual art show figures playing double recorders during this period, ca. 1321–1500, including the angel shown below from a fifteenth-century fresco. Roger Blench has noted that double recorders had been in use far earlier than this in non-western areas of the world. He suggests that one of the pipes in the Jacquerio fresco is longer than the other, and that the angel’s fingers are in such a position that a drone is being played on the longer pipe while a melody is performed on the other (1). Use of drones on double recorders with unequal length tubes was customary in Indian performance practice. Considered an “ancient folk instrument,” the Indian musical tradition also utilized double idioglot clarinets which soared in popularity throughout the Mediterranean. The identification of double recorders (known as “satara” in medieval India) as folk instruments is essential to the double flageolet’s
connection with this early predecessor. Both recorders and flageolets are soft in tone and volume, and therefore would have been used primarily indoors, or in small, intimate gatherings. While no known repertories have survived for either the satara or its western iteration, the performance of a drone suggests that it would have been used as a solo instrument or to accompany a singer while performing a countermelody. Such practices are not dissimilar to the use of double flageolets in the nineteenth century: they were usually played in salon and popular cultures by amateur musicians to perform English folk tunes on them.
Perhaps the most high-profile performance of the double flageolet occurred in 1805 when the clarinetist John Parry played his own, previously mentioned version of the instrument in several repeat performances of John Braham’s All’s Well on stage at the Covent Garden Theatre “to great applause” (Waterhouse 1999, 176). This moment undoubtedly had an impact on the popularity of the instrument within social circles that could afford to attend such an event and purchase the instrument thereafter. It also comes as no surprise that Thomas Scott applied for a patent in the same year, so he could capitalize on the heightened interest.
Those who made and sold double flageolets catered to the middle and upper classes, or those who participated in salon culture at the time. It became quite fashionable to play the instrument in private gatherings, and the advertisements and handbooks that accompanied flageolets points to this use. Some publications refrained from using musical notation and instead developed a tablature system, though many others did incorporate music notation. According to historian Jane Girdham, the appeal of the instrument was its “sweetness of tone and ease of acquirement” rather than celebrating its virtuosic capabilities. The instrument’s repertory reflects this, that which includes simple duets and arrangements of English folk tunes (400). Surviving advertisements focused on branding the instrument as simple to learn and easy to pick up within an hour or so of practice. Even Bainbridge remarked on its simplicity: “I never yet met with a Performer (and some of them very indifferent ones) but what was able to play several Duetts in the short space of a quarter of an Hour,” (407). While there are no surviving financial records that might have shown how many double flageolets were sold in the nineteenth century, it is clear from the instrument’s fashionable qualities, its ease of use, and its exposure to thousands in Covent Garden that Bainbridge and other instrument makers considered it to be quite profitable. Its profitability thus prompted the battle of the “inventor” inscriptions, even when the makers themselves knew this was untrue.
Despite its numerous predecessors, the double flageolet was considered to be a new and exciting instrument that was also musically accessible within nineteenth-century English circles. Surviving flageolets from this period make it clear that authenticity and the status of “inventor” were profitable selling points, even though knowledge of the instrument’s intellectual property became muddled with inaccuracies. That flageolets built by both Bainbridge and Scott bore the same patent inscriptions implies that the Bainbridge name was enough to sell instruments in mass quantities, despite his claims to originality being blatantly false. In this context, then, it seems that Bainbridge may have indeed won the race for recognition, even though he had not invented nor patented the double flageolet.
By Nick Smolenski, Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology, Duke University
