I was in my local music store, shopping for guitar parts, when I saw an unusual flute. It was a standard silver flute, but the head was at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the body. The body had a neckstrap ring on the back. The store owner showed me it was meant to be held like a whistle, but with the mouthpiece still in its’ proper place, like an upside-down L. That meant the body was about 4 inches right of center. Not sure who the maker was. Never saw one like it before, though.
Scott
“For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.”
[ This Message was edited by: ScottStewart on 2002-06-14 17:25 ]
Yeah, they’re pretty neat. I’ve never tried one, nor seen one except in pictures, but I think that it would be a little handy. It would look kind of goofy… I don’t know who makes it, either, but I have seen it on a site somewhere before.
Jessie K., someone who used to post here frequently, got one of these because of back problems (if I’m remembering right). Follow this link to her posts about and pics of:
That pic is interesting, but it’s not the flute I saw today. The one I saw actually just curved over similar to a bend in a conduit pipe, into a gentle L shape. There were no angular bends, just one easy bend. From what I understood, it was a factory job, manufactured as an option. It was just the headjoint, and the body had a ring on the back similar to a sax.
The original idea of playing a flute vertically should be credited to Carlo Tommaso Giorgi (as I’ve posted before) who devised the system in 1888 (which had square tone holes and keys!) and then in 1896 came up with the 11-holed keyless “flauto Giorgi” (the 11th hole was on the side of the flute for the side of the upper finger, or LH1, for the C-nat) . Held like a whistle, the end of the flute was flat and you blew across it like a bottle instead of into it like a fipple. (some great examples in the Bate collection and the Dayton Miller Collection) Incidentally, while Giorgi actually made some money on this invention (and the flute was briefly popular), he amassed quite a fortune as the Italian agent for…an American plumbing goods manufacturer.
Guess he found better uses for the pipe than as flutes!
Giorgi died in Viareggio, Italy, in 1953, one month shy of his 97th birthday.
