Early flute music

Though flutes appear in European pictures of the Middle Ages and in Byzantine images of even earlier, no music specifying the instrument was written down until the sixteenth century.

Anne Smith's chapter on The Renaissance Flute in John Solum's The Early Flute gives some guidance for finding 16th- and 17th-century music for the instrument. Smith's more extensive study, 'Die Renaissancequerflöte und ihre Musik', Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis 2 (1978), 9-76, gives a fuller list.

John Solum's The Early Flute presents lists of solo and ensemble repertoire editions for the baroque flute.

Ardal Powell's The Flute (Yale University Press, 2002) discusses the flute's changing repertoire in relation to the instruments, players, and conditions of its times.

flutehistory.com stocks facsimile editions of early flute music by French, German, Italian, and English in the following series. Most of these pieces are unavailable in modern editions:

• SPES ARCHIVUM MUSICUM L'Art de la flûte traversière
• SPES ARCHIVUM MUSICUM Flauto Traversiere
• SPES Monumenta Musicae Revocata
• Éditions Jean-Marc Fuzeau
• Éditions Minkoff
• Broude Bros. Performers' Facsimiles

We also have facsimile editions of the most important early flute method books.

Music editions
For more on the music editions obtainable on flutehistory.com

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