New toy

A while back, I was thinking. Playing the flute or whistling on a bottle is the exact same technique; but, in my opinion, the sound that comes from a bottle has some interesting overtones, making for a nice sound. Since the material of which an instrument is made is in large part responsible for the overtones that it produces (apart from the technique used by the musician), I wondered if nobody had ever come up with the idea of making a flute in glass.

Turns out that, of course, this has already happened. In fact, the modern concert flute wouldn't have been possible without one Claude Laurent, a Parisian instrument maker who received a patent for "a new [method of] making flutes from crystal"; part of his patent described a method of attaching the valves to the instrument. It was this method which was used by Theobald Boehm when he invented the fingering system that defines the modern concert flute.

The price of an intact Laurent flute today is, of course, beyond my budget; and it doesn't look like there are any glass flutes being made that use the Boehm system. But that doesn't mean there aren't any glass flutes being made anymore; indeed, a short look around the Internet quickly turned up Hall Crystal Flutes, a family-owned business from Rochester in the US state of Washington. As the price was not too insane (49 USD for the instrument, plus almost the same amount for shipping it to Belgium), I ordered one of their piccolos in C.

Last wednesday, a woman from the post office rang my doorbell, with a pakage containing the new instrument. Unfortunately, however, it had a customs tax of slightly more than what was in my wallet at the time, which meant I could only fetch it from the post office the next day. At least I could pay in plastic there.

After having had it for a few days, I can make a few observations:

• For someone who's been used to the Boehm system for as long as I have been, I thought the fingering system would be very confusing, but it's not too bad.
• As I bought a piccolo and not a flute, the sound is fairly sharp, and not entirely what I expected of it. Having said that, it's certainly not too bad, and I expect I'll be able to improve with time.
• Playing the highest notes on the fingering chart is challenging, and I've thus far not been able to produce the very highest note on that chart. Since playing a piccolo (any piccolo) is always slightly more difficult than playing a regular flute, however, especially in the higher octaves, that's not too unexpected.
• Playing sharp or flat notes requires me to open one of the holes slightly. Getting a correct sharp or flat requires, obviously, to open the hole to the exact correct amount, which will require quite some practice to do well. But I'm sure I'll get there, eventually.

I've been playing a few diddlies on it for the past few days, and it's been fun so far. We'll see where this leads us.