In Ebay, I found many irish flutes with one key, and these one-key irish flutes look like same with baroque flutes.
What is the difference between one-key irish flutes and barqoue flutes?
Apart from cosmetic differences like external profile and key shape (baroque flute keys are typically square), mainly bore, finger hole and embouchure sizes. Baroque flutes have tiny embouchures and finger holes by comparison, producing a smaller sound but enabling a fully chromatic compass through forked fingerings.
There are many impostors/dodgy examples of both supposed types on eBay.
Does the one-key irish flute have a chromatic scale using a cross fingering and a key without blocking half-hole?
No, but it sounds a lot better playing in D & G. Or rather, you can likely get more or less the same pitches by cross fingering, but they’ll sound very different from the notes you get playing straight. The larger holes of the post-Nicholson wooden flute (which became the ‘irish’ flute) greatly increases the volume & clarity of the sound at the expense of the tone of cross-fingered notes.
If you’re not playing Baroque music, you don’t want a Baroque flute.
All “Irish flutes” as far as I know have bores more or less based on London orchestral flutes (or military band flutes) of the c1830-1880 period.
These orchestral flutes had keys for the chromatic notes. This meant that the bore and open holes could be optimized for maximum volume, abandoning the old bore and hole specs which were optimized for chromatic ability. Keep in mind that during this period orchestra size dramatically increased and orchestras would play in public venues for large audiences, so flutes had to keep up with the demand for greater volume.
When makers started offering flutes specifically for Irish music they would leave off the keys oftentimes, but the bore and open hole specs remained those of the 19th century keyed orchestral flutes.
Flutes went through this transformation twice: the first time was when, in the early Baroque, and due to the music becoming more chromatic, makers reduced the fingerhole sizes and altered the bore of the old Renaissance flute to allow a full chromatic scale to be produced by alternate fingerings. D#/Eb was the one note that required a key. The Baroque flute had a small dark contained tone and many of the crossfingered notes had an odd veiled quality. (Much is lost when Baroque flute music is played on modern flutes.)
Irish fingerings don’t produce a correct scale on a Baroque flute, on F# anyhow. You’d have to carve out Hole 5 to bring it up closer to a true F#.
The maker who routinely offered Irish flutes with that one key, for D#/Eb, was Ralph Sweet, and it always struck me as odd. The most useful key, if you can only have one, might be F natural, that note being much more common in Irish tunes than D#.
Many Irish flutes can do a decent crossfingered Bb and/or G#. The crossfingered C natural is pretty much standard.
Here’s the Baroque flute, very well played. Hard to imagine a flute sound more different than what Irish players are going for.
Thanks for that lovely clip, Richard.
All along, even when the standard ‘professional’ wooden flute was keyed, manufacturers went on making and selling cheaper flutes with few or no keys. There was never a period, pre-boehm, when the majority of flutes in existence or likely being made were 8 key flutes.