R.S. Rockstro’s seminal and controversial late C19th Treatise on the flute is often referred to in flute-interested circles for all sorts of reasons, but is fairly difficult to lay hands on. It is not currently in print so we are dependent on the second hand market or public libraries to access it. Then, it is an obscure publication that never had a large circulation, and my experience is that even those libraries which own a copy (usually only larger County Central Libraries or Universty Music Libraries, in GB at any rate) don’t usually have it on the public shelves because it is so rarely asked for. The two occasions in my life I found it in a library (in Exeter and then in Cardiff), it had to be ordered up from the “stacks”.
About 4 years ago, when I first started venturing onto the Internet (in my local public library!) I did a search for it for reference purposes which almost by chance brought up a second hand set of the 1980s facsimile reissue of the 2nd Edition (of 1928) published by a Dutch specialist flute literature publisher (now sadly defunct) available from an online-trading book store in Holland at an affordable price, so I jumped at the chance and made it an early Xmas presie to myself that year!
Enough background: I have several times here on C&F made reference to Rockstro’s comprehensive fingering charts for the “old” (as he terms it) 8-key conoid flute including basic, alternative, “sensitive” and special context usage fingerings with evaluations of their usefulness, advantages and disadvantages, plus a shake/trill chart. (He has charts for later types of flute too, including Bohm which I haven’t bothered with). It is a fantastic resource.
I have now scanned the Simple System ones onto my computer and compressed and pasted the images into a Word document. I’m not planning to upload the 10 resulting images here because Copyright subsists on the 1986 facsimile - one or two pages OK, but I think more would be pushing the issue in a public forum… Drawing up derivative copies to evade the copyright issue (and clarify Rockstro’s less than ideal graphics and layout) would be too time consuming a task for me at present! (I may have a go in the future, but don’t hold your breath!)
However, if anyone is interested in seeing/having these charts, please pm me. I do not think e-mailing out a few copies to direct requesters of my compilation document really constitutes a serious breach of copyright (morally at any rate, if still questionable legally!) on an out-of-print specialist reference work that is extremely unlikely to be reprinted in the foreseeable future.
Even better, if there is anyone here who has the time and interest and would like to undertake re-setting the content of the charts in nice modern computerated ways to make them clearer to read and easy to post on the web without breaching copyright, please let me know - I’m more than happy to collaborate with advice, proof reading etc. It would be great to be able to make it readily accessible and permanently available here on C&F.
