It is self-evident that the number of recorders on this planet exceeds that of all other musical instruments combined. Perhaps we should all know something of its history, its traditions and its tasks.
For some years now I have kept note of literary and other references to the recorder which I encounter, either first or second hand (see interactive database). I intend here to pursue several broad themes which emerge perfectly naturally from these references.
The recorder is an open-bore, internal duct flute with holes for 8 fingers and a single thumbhole which also serves as an octaving vent.
Until recently the oldest specimen of a recorder was thought to be an instrument now housed in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. It was excavated from the moat of a small castle near Dordrecht in Holland which is known to have been occupied only between 1335 and 1418, at which time the moat was flooded until its excavation in 1940. Thus the so-called 'Dordrecht' Recorder' would seem to date from about 1400.
A second more or less complete medieval recorder dating from the 14th century, the so-called 'Göttingen Recorder', has been reported from northern Germany where it was found in a latrine in 1987.
A third 14th-century recorder fragment has very recently come to light. It was found in the town of Esslingen (near Stuttgart), Southern Germany where it was excavated from the sediment of the mill channel of the Karmeliter-Monastry. Interestingly enough it shows the very same characteristic turning profile as the Göttingen recorder (Hakelberg, 2002).
Largely because a two-dimensional representation cannot show holes on the upper side of the instrument and the thumb-hole underneath in the same picture, the iconography of end-blown wind instruments is somewhat unreliable before about 1511 when Sebastian Virdung published a comprehensive treatise on wind intruments in Basel, his Musica getutscht which included illustrations of a consort of recorders. Their thumbholes are clearly illustrated diagramatically and fingering charts are provided
A quartet of nearly identical instruments appeared in Musica instrumentalis deudsch by Martin Agricola published in 1528 in Wittenberg. As you can see, these recorders are not unlike the Dordrecht instrument.
Many earlier illustrations show recorder-like instruments first appearing about 1200. An illustration in the Hunterian Psalter of 1170 (Glasgow), has long been taken as the earliest of these. But rather than believing what you read in history books look at it more closely for yourself here. As you can see from an even closer detail, the fellow is actually having trouble with his bagpipe! He looks as if he has forgotten the fingering.
It is possible that this miniature of Die Frauenlob of ca 1300 (Heidelberg) includes a recorder player. But it might just as well be a transverse flute.
On the other hand, The Nine Muses from Martin le Franc's Le Champion des Dames (1440-42) almost certainly depicts a recorder. So does Francesco da Cossa's delightful Triumph of Venus (1470, Ferrara), though these appear to be of a different kind.
A recorder of this new kind is shown in The Concert, a tapestry from ca 1500 (Musee des Thermes et de l'Hotel de Cluny, Paris). The new kind of instrument emerging at this time and coexisting with recorders of the Dordrecht kind is that which we associate with the renaissance recorder.
The subesequent history of the morphology of the recorder and its transmogrification into the baroque style recorder most of us know today is a long and tangled tale indeed.
I could continue on with it for a long while, but in the process you would probably all be transmogrified from this:
into this:
which I would hate!
A more extended account of the very early history of the recorder may be found here.
So let's go back to the to the beginning and consider something more interesting, like how the recorder got its name.
Outside England there was no single word to differentiate the recorder from other kinds of internal duct flutes or the equally popular transverse flute.
Although the Canterbury Tales (1340-1400) makes no direct reference to the recorder it is possible that Chaucer's gay young Squier who was "Syngynge or Floytynge, al the day" played a recorder. But I wonder if he wasn't simply 'flirting' instead!
In his House of Fame Chaucer makes reference to woodwind musicians "that craftely begunne to pipe, both in doucet and in rede". This has been taken to imply recorders and shawms respectively.
However, the earliest reference to the recorder as such is provided by the household accounts of the Earl of Derby (later King Henry IV) for 1388 which mention
"Et pro j fistula in nomine Recordo— empta London' pro domino iiij s iij d".The superscript horizontal line following the 'o' is an abbreviation for 'ur' in English court hand. Thus although the critical word looks like 'Recordo' it should really be rendered 'Recordour' and the entire entry should be translated:
"and for one flute by name of Recorder bought in London for my lord, three shillings and four pence".Note that wheras the word 'fistula' (flute) is treated as a common noun, 'Recordour' is treated as if it were a proper noun like 'London', and that it is qualified by the word 'nomine'. This would seem to indicate that the word (and probably the recorder itself) was new to the language or at least unfamiliar.
It is possible that the recorder purchased on behalf of the Earl of Derby was for his own use. The future Henry IV was a keen amateur musician (Trowell 1957). Indeed, a piece in the early 15th-century Old Hall manuscript is ascribed 'Roy Henry', though the latter might refer to his more famous son who became Henry V. It is tempting to think of the Earl of Derby playing music with his wife. Among the purchases 'pro domina' for the Countess of Derby are strings and pegs, presumably for her gittern.
An English/Latin dictionary the Promptorium Parvulorum (1440) gives "recorder or lytyll pype" as the translation of 'canula' citing an earlier dictionary the Campus Florum as the authority. This latter has evaded all efforts to locate it. It appears not to be the book of the same title in the library at Peterhouse, Cambridge.
As you can see, the words 'recorde', 'recourdour', 'recorders', 'recordys' appear in English poems from ca 1440 onwards. It is worth noting that in its literary debut, namely Lydgate's The Fall of Princes (1431-1438), the recorder appears in the hands of a supernatural being in a pastoral setting:
Pan, god off Kynde, with his pipes seuene
Off recorderis fond first the melodies.
And Mercurie, that sit so hih in heuene,
First in his harpe fond sugred armonyes.
Holsum wynes thoruhfyned from ther lyes
Bachus fond first, of vynes heuy lade,
Licour off licours corages for to glade.
The Fall of Princes is a translation in 36,000 lines of a French version of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum.
Many of the early poetic references to the recorder are to be found amongst those interminable lists of which the medieval mind was so fond. My favourite example is Holland's Buke of the Howlate (? 1450):
" thus our ladye they lofe, with liking and list,
Menstralis and musicians mo than I mene may,
The psaltery, the citholis, the soft cytharist,
The croude, and the monycordis, the gythornis gay,
The rote, and the recordour, the ribup, and rist,
The trump, and the taburn, the tympane but tray;
The dulsate, and the dulsacordis, the schalm of assay;
The amyable organis usit full oft,
Clarions loude knelis,
Portativis and bellis,
Cymbaclanis in the cellis
That soundis so soft."
As we have seen a 'canula' could be a recorder or a 'lytyll pype'. Ergo a recorder could be a pipe, also. This confusion (and more) is amply documented in literature. For instance, it is made as clear as mud in a wonderful punning passage in Wits Fits and Fancies (1595) which pivots around this confusion and even brings in some botany, too:
"A merrie recorder of London mistaking the name of one Pepper, call'd him Piper: wherunto the partie excepting, and saying: Sir, you mistake, my name is Pepper, not Piper; hee answered: why, what difference is there (I pray thee) between Piper in Latin and Pepper in English; is it not all one? No, Sir, (reply'd the other) there is even as much difference betweene them, as is between a pipe and a recorder."
Another and far more curious appellation for the recorder was that of 'still pipe' or 'still flute'. The first use of the general term 'still music' seems to have been in the Privy Purse expenses of King Henry VII for the period 1485-1509 which notes payment to "styll mynstrells", presumably purveyors of soft and fragile music.
On New Year's Day, 1511, King Henry VIII (who actually played the recorder himself) also employed "styll mynstrells" who were paid rather better than their louder brethren, the sackbut (or trombone) players. Needless to say, "the Queen's mynstrells" fared worse than either!
In George Gascoigne's Jocasta (1579) we find the stage direction:
"Before the second Acte, did sound a very doleful noise of flutes ... In the order of the fifth and last dumb show, first the still pipes sounded a very mournful melodye, in which time there came upon the stage a women clothed in a white garment, ...."
Note the women clothed in a white garment.
In John Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1600/1602) "still flutes sound softly" while Strotzo stages his repentance and dies with the question on his lips: "What strange portent is this?"
In The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613/1634) a joint effort of John Fletcher and William Shakespeare "still music of records" is indicated for a scene involving sacrifice and portent.
The term 'still music' is employed for the last time in 1634 when recorders are called for to accompany Cupid in Thomas Heywood's Love's Mistress.
The word 'flute', too, could imply recorder rather than the transverse flute, and indeed it usually did so until late in the 18th century.
During the Civil War (1642-1660) the theatres were closed and many stage musicians fled to the continent where they could make a living. On their return, the wind players amongst them came equipped with instruments which were the latest in French technology. The recorder was now in three parts with a far more sophisticated bore giving it an extended range and a tonal character of far greater fexibility.
It was probably this baroque recorder that so enchanted Samuel Pepys when he heard them played at the 1667 revival of Philip Massinger & Thomas Dekker's The Virgin Martyr:
"Not that the play is worth much . . . . . . But that which did please me beyond any thing in the whole world was the wind-musique when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife; that neither then, nor all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think of any thing, but remained all night transported, so as I could not believe that ever any musique hath that real command over the soul of a man as did this upon me; and makes me resolve to practice wind-musique, and to make my wife do the like."
This new style of instrument brought with it yet another name, that of 'flute douce'. In George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676 Sir Fopling Flutter enquires:
"What, you are of the number of the ladies whose ears are grown so delicate since our operas, you can be charmed with nothing but flutes doux and French hautboys?"
There is a rather pointed counterpart to this passage in Thomas Shadwell's A True Widow of 1679:
"But how go matters in France? What new foppery is turned up trumps there?"
"Wit and women are quite out of fashion; so are flutes doux and fiddlers; drums and trumpets are their only music."
Shadwell may simply be implying that the French are now only interested in war – women surely never go out of fashion! In fact, the decline of the recorder in France dates from about 1700 when La Barre astounded society with his flute-playing, followed later by Blavet.
The English verb 'to record' meaning 'to get by heart, to commit to memory, to go over in one's mind, or to repeat or say over as a lesson', dates from as early as 1225 (OED2). Thus in Chaucer's Troylus (ca 1374, iii. 2: 51) we read:
Lay al this mene while Troilus Recordyng his lesson in this manere.In Caxton's Jason (ca 1477, 37):
If ye will recorde the lessons and epistles of loue by the space of ten yere.And in 1656 Hales' Gold. Rem. (published 1673, i. 142) we read that:
The Gardiner whilst he prunes his Vines and Arbours, may record some one of David's sonnets.
About 1510 this old verb seems to have been applied to birds for the first time and, by extension, to humans with the meaning of 'to practise or sing a tune in an undertone; to go over it quietly (eg by humming it) or silently'.
In Barclay's Mirror of Goodly Manners of ca 1510 (printed in1570, E vj) we read:
Therfore first recorde thou, as birde within a cage,And in 1530 Palsgr. 681/2 writes:
. . . thy tunes tempring longe,
And then . . . forth with thy pleasaunt songe.
This byrde recordeth all redy, she wyll synge within a whyle.After a gap of some 50 years we read in Thomas Watson's England's Helicon of ca 1580:
"Now birds record new harmonie,
And trees do whistle melodies;
Now everything that nature breeds,
Doth clad itself in pleasant weeds."
How else might a tree "whistle melodies" but by being turned into a recorder?
And in John Lyly's Euphues and his England (Arb.) 278 of the same year we find:Where vnder a sweete Arbour of Eglentine, be byrdes recording theyr sweete notes . . .
In George Peele's The Old Wive's Tale (1595):
Also in 1595, Valentine, one of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, muses:"The lark is mery and records her notes."
"Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,
And to the nightingale's complaining notes
Tune my distresses and record my woes."
And in Shakespeare's Pericles (1608/9) we read:
"............ to the lute
She sung, and made the night-bird mute,
That still records with moan."
In this context it is worth mentioning the delightfully silly English pre-occupation with training caged birds to sing. The Bird Fancyer's Delight (1717) describes how this may be done with a variety of species including nightingale, bullfinch, blackbird, canary, woodlark, skylark, linnett, parrot, mynah bird and house sparrow by placing them in a darkened cage and playing a suitable tune to them over and over again on a bird flageolet or a small recorder.
In passing, I note the use of so-called bird organs in teaching caged birds to sing. The bird organ or serinette, a French 18th-century invention, was a small barrel organ. One may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.As late as 1871 we read in Darwin's Descent of Man (I. i. ii. 55):
The young males [birds] continue practising, or, as the bird-catchers say, recording, for ten or eleven months.And in Hardy's Tess of D'Urbervilles (1891) when Tess arrived at the house of Mrs D'Urberville the first question her new mistress asked here was "can you whistle tunes?" She wanted Tess to whistle to her bullfinches and "teach 'em airs that way". Tess had "caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited these songsters admirably" so she found the lessons "no such onerous business once she had regained the art." Philip Gosse's Traveller's Rest (1937/1949, Cassell) gives a full account of the methods of teaching advocated in The Bird Fancyer's Delight. He deplores "the diabolical practice of blinding chaffinches to improve their singing."
The recorder has long been used to imitate birds in music, as many of the references to Purcell and Handel and their contemporaries demonstrate. Lines like "Hark how the songsters of the air", "Hark how the lark and linnet sing", "Hark! how the songsters of the grove", "Hush ye pretty warbling quire" say it all. Purcell's Timon of Athens (1694) calls for "a Symphony of Pipes [ie alto recorders] imitating the Chirping of Birds". In a review of of Handel's Augelletti in The Spectator for 5 March 1711, Addison noted that caged birds were loosed on-stage to the detriment of the audience's attire during which a soprano was accompanied by a sopranino recorder, two flutes, two violins, viola, and continuo.
In Charpentier's "Que je sens de plaisir" from Fest de Ruel (1685), the woodwind players switch from transverse flutes to petities flutes (small recorders) for the verse "N'entens-tu pas les oyseaux d'alentour?". Montéclair scores for a recorder quintet when Iphise talks to the birds in Jephté. More explicit references to bird-song come in items like Jacob van Eyck's popular solo for soprano recorder the English Nightingale from Euterpe (1644)/Der Fluyten-Lusthof (1646/9); William William's Sonata in Immitation of Birds (1700) for two alto recorders and continuo; Robert Orme's trio-sonata The Imitation of several Birds (1700); Tori's aria Son rosignolo for soprano, sopranino recorder (flagolet) and continuo; Antonio Vivaldi's chamber concerto Il Gardellino, RV90, for recorder, oboe, violin, bassoon and continuo, and his aria Cara sorte for soprano, sopranino recorder (flautino) and continuo; Couperin's The Nightingale in Love, The Vanquished Nightingale, The Caged Skylark and others which are often played on the sopranino recorder. Also from the Baroque era are a tenor aria from Reinhard Keiser's opera Orpheus in which the fluttering of the "flying singer" (Ihr fliegenden Sänger) alternates with five recorders (AAAAT) and obbligato harpsichord with very fast-moving notes, and a soprano aria from the same composer's Arsinoe, accompanied only by four recorders.
The recorder is not often associated with birds in paintings. A notable exception is found in Tintoretto's Contest between the Muses and the Pierides (1544-1545), an early work (Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona), and his only major oil painting on wood. From Ovid we learn that so great was the acclaim given the nine daughters of King Pieris that they deigned to challenge the Muses. But Calliope on her own outsang them. They did not accept their defeat gracefully (judged by an impartial jury of water-nymphs), and abused the Muses so much that, in their bickering, they found themselves turned into chattering magpies. One of the Pierides plays the organ surrounded by her sisters who sing and play soft instruments organ, lutes, vielle, viol, and a pipe suggestive of a recorder. Three large magpies with outstretched tail feathers carry away music (left), a ? recorder (centre), and a vielle (right). In a painting of this same subject by Pelligrino Tibaldi (1527-1596) the Pierides dance as they sprout wings and feathers and turn into magpies, whilst the Muses play cymbals, harpsichord, viol, timbrel, transverse flute, lute, violin, cornet and a duct flute (flageolet or recorder) with a flared bell.
Richard Houston's Hearing (1753), a mezzotint, after Francis Hayman (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven) depicts a young woman who stares wistfully at a bird, momentarily uncaged, responding to the tune she has just played. In her hand is a very slender, cylindrical duct-flute (flageolet or recorder); a music book (The Bird Fancier's Delight, perhaps) lies open on the table before her. In art and literature a caged bird is a common enough emblem of female entrapment. The recorder adds a certain frisson to this.
The recorder has been deployed in musical bird song in our own time, too, with works such as: Michael Ball's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Jürg Baur's Pezzi uccelli, David Beck's Swan Vistas from his Sound Bites for recorder and piano, Axel Borup-Jörgensen's Chant d'oiseau, Gerhard Braun's Nachtstücke and Gärten der Nacht, Cesar Bresgen's Kuckucksduette and Nachruf für eine Amsel, Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde where a recorder is used to imitate the cooing of the dove, Ferdinand Bruckmann's Ornithologische Suite, Zillah Castle's The Blackbird's Song, James Chaudoir's Chant de Oiseaux, Christopher Dell's Calling the Bird, Agnes Dorwarth's Birdbook (2002); Benjamin Dwyer's Crow (1999), Flora Wilson's A Late Lark, David Foreshaw's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1996); Ingo Frankhauser's Ein Scherz mit der kleinen Terz, Elli-Marie Fix's Il Cucu: ein fröhliches Kinderkonzert, Morten Gaathaug's Birds in my Night, Toshio Hosokawa's Birds Fragments IIb, Wilhelm Keller's Kleine Vogelpredigt, Konrad Lechner's Ferner Vogelsang and O the cuckoo, Hans-Martin Linde's Music for a Bird, Robin Orr's Rondeau des Oiseaux, Gabrela Ortiz-Torres' Huítzitl [Hummingbird] (1989), the aptly named Ian Parrott's Cock-crow from his Duo for recorder and cello, Hinoharu Matsumoto's Le premier oiseau, L'oiseau invisible and L'oiseau du vent, Fritz Schieri's Kuckuck ruft's aus dem Wald, Etienne Rolin's FlashBackBird (1998), Jenö Takács' Waldmusik, Olav Anton Thommessen's The Block-bird, Kaori Tsutsui's Birdsong for Recorder and Birds – One day in the forest, Margaret Lucy Wilkin's Aspects of Night, Gerd Witte's Kleine Vogelsuite, Markus Zahnhausen's Toccata (for a hummingbird).
Australia is, of course, an ornithologist's paradise and there is a wealth of recorder music depicting Australian species, including Geoffrey Allen's The Currawong Suite (a sort of magpie), Amanda Baker's Phoenix Songs, Nigel Butterly's The White-throated Warbler, Margaret Coggan's Kurrawongs (a sort of magpie), June Epstein's Mr Nightingale (an operetta), Anne Ghandar's Music for Ibisis, Anthony Gilbert's Igórochiki, Paluma, and Flame-Robin, Malcolm Tattersall's Native Companions Dancing, Peter Tahourdin's The Rogery Birds, Benjamin Thorn's Birdcall on One Fingering, Much Cuckoo, Dawn Chorus, The Great Emu War, and Canard – canard, Gillian Whitehead's Korimako (New Zealand Bell-bird).
We might include Danish composers Ole Kühl's Layers and Prayers here. Are those "layers" hens, perhaps?
It often seems to be overlooked that the instrument 'the recorder' possibly got its name in 1388 (household accounts of the Earl of Derby) , and certainly by 1440 (Promptorium Parvulorum) well before birds first 'recorded' in 1510. Nonetheless, one would give a lot to know exactly what instruments were intended in these lines from The Booke of the Pylgremage of the Sowle of 1483:
When they hadde these instrumentes they recorded songes besyly tylle that they were . . . parfyte ynowe in al maner musike.
Amongst the literary references to the recorder gathered to date a significant number are associated in some way with the supernatural. We have already encountered several of these.
The recorder features in many depictions of angel choirs.
There might be one in this Jesse Tree of 1411 (British Museum). See detail here and a closer detail here.
A cherubic recorder-playing angel can be found in a Triptych by Giovanni Bellini in the Chiesa di Santa Maria Gloriosa del Frari in Venice.
A positively exquisite one graces The Coronation of the Virgin (ca 1607) by Guido Reni (1575-1642). See detail here.
And there certainly is a recorder playing angel in this angel choir from El Greco's Annunciation (ca 1590) although, typically, he seems to have lost his part while all about are playing their's!Another angelic recorderist by El Greco may be seen in his Imacculate Conception of 1607-1610 (Thyssen-Bornemiza Collection, Prado, Madrid).
Recorder playing angels also occur in literature. The earliest manifestation of this might well be Chaucer's House of Fame (1340-1400), a dream vision, owing quite a bit to Dante, in which the poet meets and hears the harpers Orpheus, Orion, Eacides, Chiron and, lastly, Glascurion (a famous Welsh bard) and the pipers "many thousand tymes twelve".
We have already encountered the description of an angel choir from from the mid-15th-century Buke of the Howlate.
In an early 16th-century Cornish miracle play, Ordinale de Origine Mundi, recorder playing minstrels are included in King David's band.
Likewise in Stephen Hawes' Passetyme of Pleasure (1509) a recorder player is amongst those musicians who "did sytte about their ladyes mageste", the lady in question being "dame Musyyke".
Thomas Campion's exquisite devotional song Come let us sound the praises of the King's king (1601) affords the striking lines:
"But when once thy beams do remove my darkness,
O then I'll shine forth as an angel of light,
And record with more than an earthly voice thy
Infinite honours."
Well, of course these angel choirs and their Earthly surrogates contain all manner of instruments and there is nothing remarkable about the appearance of recorders in them. But, unlike other instruments, for the recorder this association with the supernatural extended to spirits of all kinds, portents, miracles, death, resurrection and to fake funerals. Unfortunately time allows only the briefest sampling of these. They are brought together in an Interactive Database here for the first time.
Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1561) begins every act with a dumb show accompanied by music. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 1 call for flutes (ie recorders) for "a company of mourners" for the murdered Ferrex.
John Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1600) affords us our first fake funeral for which "the still flutes sound a mournful cynet" as a coffin enters. However, the coffin's occupant is latter found to be alive!
In Shakespeare's As You Like It "still music" is requested for the entrance of Hymen "leading Rosalind in woman's clothes and Celia".
In his Midsummers Night's Dream "still music" is called for when Oberon casts his spell over Bottom. In this scene we have a ritual beheading, magic and symbolic rebirth.
In John Fletcher's Bonduca (1613/1647) the stage directions for a Druidic ceremony involving sacrifice stipulates recorders.
In Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Mayd in Cheap-side (1613) "recorders dolefully playing" accompany the entrance of the coffins of Touchwood junior and of Moll. This turns out to be a double fake funeral!
In Beaumont & Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (1610/1619) recorders play for a wedding masque of gods and goddesses.
Such references come thick and fast and continue on unbroken well into the 18th century. It seems likely that the solemn and ethereal tone of recorders played together readily created in the listener a sense of mystery, of majesty or holy dread, much as the electronic confections of our own age do for horror films.
Perhaps one of the most moving examples of such use of the recorder is the Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell (1697) with words by Dryden and music by John Blow:
"Mark how the Lark and Linnet Sing,
With rival Notes
They strain their Warbling Throats,
To welcome in the Spring.
But in the close of Night,
When Philomel begins her Heav'nly lay,
They cease their mutual spight,
Drink in her Musick with delight,
And list'ning and silent, and silent and list'ning and
list'ning and silent obey.
Struck dumb they all admir'd the God-like Man,
The God-like Man,
Alas, too soon retir'd,
As He too late began.
We beg not Hell, our Orpheus to restore,
Had He been there,
Their Sovereigns fear
Had sent Him back before.
The pow'r of Harmony too well they knew,
He long e'er this had Tun'd their jarring Sphere,
And left no Hell below.
The Heav'nly Quire, who heard his Notes from High
Let down the Scale of Musick from the Sky:
They handed him along,
And all the way He taught, and all the way they Sung.
Ye Brethren of the Lyre, and tunefull Voice,
Lament his lott: but at your own rejoyce.
Now live secure and linger out your days,
The God's are pleas'd alone with Purcell's Layes,
Nor know to mend their Choice."
This quotation encapsulates almost all we have discovered so far of the recorder's associations making reference to birds, Gods, heavenly choirs, resurrection and miracles. It's scored for two countertenors and two recorders; after all, Purcell was a countertenor and, as you can see from the comprehensive list of his works which include the recorder, was fond of this instrument.
These associations were not confined to England. In the Spanish theatre, recorders were associated with religious events. In La gran columna forgos, San Basilio el Magno (1596-1603), recorders accompany the discovery of an altar. In El tuhán del cielo y loco santo (1620-1630), recorders accompany the discovery of a Christ figure and the appearance of the Christ child. In France, Lully used the recorder to represent the lamentation of a choir of mourners for the hero in Alceste (1674) and pleas to Apollo for help against the monster in Bellérophon (1679).
In a number of self-portraits of the 17th and 18th centuries, artists are shown holding, playing or contemplating a recorder as a symbol of inspiration, eg. Metsu's (1629-1667) self-portrait Inspiration (Private collection, Roermond), Job Andrianz Berckheyde's (1630-1693) Self-portrait in the atelier (Uffizi Gallery, Florence), and János Kupezki's (1667-1740) Recorder player (Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest).
The recorder has been associated with the supernatural and with religious ceremonies in music, too. In Purcell's incidental music for Nathaniel Lee's Theodosius (168)), two recorders accompany the bass aria "Hark! Behold the Heavenly Quire" as an angel choir descends. In his Dioclesian (1690), two recorders accompany the soprano aria "Charon the peaceful Shade" which concerns crossing the River Styx. In his St Mathew Passion (1727/9), J.S. Bach replaces flutes by recorders (doubled by oboi di caccia) in the recitative and chorus "O Schmerz! Hier zittert das gequälte Herz", describing the suffering of Christ on the Cross. And Bach scores for recorders in the funeral cantatas, namely the aria "Bestelle dein Haus" from Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106 (1707) and the chors "Wenn es meines Gottes wille" form Komm du süsse Todesstunde, BWV 161 (1715). Gluck's famous "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" from Orfeo is thought to have been scored originally for recorder rather than the transverse flute.
Suprising as it may seem, after ca 1600 the recorder often appears in references to disorder and conflict, even war!
In Martin le Franc's Le Champion des Dames (1440-42), Francvouloir and Malebouche seem to be discussing the merits of this 15th century girl's recorder playing. In fact they are arguing about her virtue! From the 16th century onwards the recorder became increasingly popular amongst amateurs. Their intolerable fumblings might often have given rise to conflict. A hint of this is found in the reference from Actes and Monuments, The Book of Martyrs (1563) of John Foxe in which it is noted that Bilney, who gave his life at the stake for his opinions:
"could abide no swaring nor singing ... and when Dr Thurlby, the scholar living in the chamber underneath him, would play upon his recorder (as he would often do) he would resort strait to his prayer."
As we have seen, even the problems of naming the instrument seems to have provoked argument. Remember the Pepper/Piper dispute?
In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream Hippolyta comments on Quince's introduction to Pyramus and Thisbe:
"Indeed he hath played on his prologue like a child on a recorder; a sound, but not in government."
And in King Henry IV, Part 2 Rumour likens himself to a pipe:
"I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth;
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride;
The which in every language I pronounce
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace, while covert enmity,
Under the smile of safety, wounds the world;
And who but Rumour, who but only I,
Make fearful musters, and prepar'd defence;
Whilst the big year, swol'n with some other grief,
Is thought wath child by the stern tyrant war,
And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures;
And of so easy and so plain a stop,
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it. But what need I thus
My well-known body to anatomize among my household?"
In William Percy's The Cuckqueanes and Cuckolds Errants (1601) is the following interchange between Shift and Nim:
"Thats a new song now ..."
"Shift, did'st ever hear better music in thy days, Shift?"
"No, by the crowd of Apollo, Nim, have I.
Why, sirrha, this now was better to me than a pair of recorders, I vow.""A pair of disorders, you should have said, gentlemen"
Of the war-like references perhaps the most fascinating and certainly the most chilling is that in Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) where the angels defeated in Heaven ritually prepare their minds like "warriors old" for the more fatal confrontation to come on Earth:
".............. Anon they move
In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders; such as raised
To highth of noblest temper heroes old
Arming to battle, and instead of rage
Deliberate valor breathed, firm and unmoved
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat,
Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage
With solemn touches troubled thoughts, and chase
anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain
From mortal or immortal minds. Thus they,
Breathing united force with fixed thought,
Moved on in silence to soft pipes that charmed
Their painful steps o'er the burnt soil; and now
Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front
Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise
Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield,
Awaiting what command their mighty Chief
Had to impose."
In Dryden's Don Sebastien (1689) Antonio pulls out his recorder first in order to attract his master's daughter, and later to drown out a woman with whom he is quarrelling.
Lines from masques and operas like "Since the toils and the hazards of War's at an end", "Ye blustering bretheren of the skies", "Why should men quarrel", all accompanied by recorders, continue this particular association well into the 18th century.
Strange to relate, the very last eighteenth-century literary reference I have found to the recorder in William Cowper's translation of The Iliad (1791) has the lines:
So frequent were the groans by Atreus' son
Heaved from his inmost heart, trembling with dread.
For cast he but his eye toward the plain
Of Ilium, there, astonish'd, he beheld
The city fronted with bright fires, and heard
Pipes, and recorders, and the hum of war;
But when again the Greecian fleet he view'd,
And thought on his own people, then his hair
Uprooted elevating to the Gods,
He from his generous bosom groan'd again.
In music, Charpentier associated recorders with the transition from violence into calm or war into peace, as in Médée (1693). Worthy of note here is Telemann's use of two bickering recorders ('a pair of disorders') to evoke Xantippe, Socrates nagging wife, in his well-known trio-sonata in C major. Bach's aria for alto accompanied by two recorders and strings, "Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?" from the cantata of the same name, BWV 81 (1724), depicts the sleeping Jesus in a boat on the Sea of Galilee when a storm frightens his disciples enough to wake him up.
As we have seen, from Chaucer onwards the recorder has been associated with pastoral scenes involving birds, rustics and shepherds. Here is a typical scene from a Shepherd's Calendar of ca 1500.
Intimately bound up with such images are amorous or erotic encounters of various kinds, illustrated exquisitely by this Chelsea porcelain group (from the Art Gallery of Western Australia, right here in Perth) after The Music Lesson (ca 1765), a painting by François Boucher (1703-1770) (from Melburne's Art Gallery of Victoria.). This langorous pair depicted by Louis Silvestre (1675-1760) in an Allegory of Music (Stadt-theater, Lindau) seem more than a little distracted.
Although da Cossa's Triumph of Venus (1470 is explicit enough, those smug little rabbits we saw earlier in the complete picture are often remarked upon as a symbol of fecundity. But the recorders and the pregnant shape of the lute's back are surely an equally obvious reflection of what is going on in the foreground!
Titian (1488/89-1576) exploited the erotic symbolism of recorders in several of his paintings. Here he does so in an early work, the so-called The Three Ages of Man (ca 1510-1515, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), in which a young girl presents two recorders to a youth, who is already holding a recorder in his right hand. Thus a straightforward interpretation understands the iconography to represent childhood or youth, marriage or middle age and old age (Egan 1961). Recently, Joannides (1991) has suggested that the narrative theme of this picture is in fact the legend of Daphnis and Chloe as told by Longus in a Greek 3rd-century manuscript which Titian might have known of through his literary contacts.
And he does so again, in what is thought to be one of his last paintings, and certainly his most blatantly erotic, the Nymph and Shepherd.
It has been said that Titian's Pastoral Concert (Louvre, Paris) is the outstanding masterpiece of the Venetian Renaissance. It is thought to have been inspired by the Poesia card from Andrea Mantegna's 'tarochi' series. The naked figures are the Muses of Poetry. The recorder (which reminds us of the Greek aulos) and the lute allude to Aristotle's Poetica. Thus this painting proclaims the close interrelationship between human beings and nature and between poetry and music.
Other paintings by Titian depicting recorders are his Venus and Cupid with a Lute Player (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), in which Venus holds a recorder (detail) whilst a lutenist turns towards the goddess as if seeking inspiration through gazing at her beauty, and Bacchanal of the Andrians (Prado, Madrid) which depicts two recorders in the hands of women revellers, with a third recorder by the foot of a woman (detail). In Titian's Assumption of the Virgin (Franciscan Church, Venice) a cherub holds a duct flute (recorder or flageolet) beside another who is playing the crumhorn (detail); on the other side of the painting a third plays the timbrel. In the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, is a Portrait of two boys with musical instruments, attributed to Titian (Anonymous loan, 1993) in which one boy holds a lute, the other what looks like a recorder but is probably a six-holed pipe.
In literature uses of the recorder music to accompany amorous scenes, weddings, and entrances and exits of Cupid, Hymen or Venus abound.
In James Shirley's The Grateful Servant (1629) an assignation is arranged for which recorder music is provided as an aphrodisiac:
"............ be prepared
For your first entertainment; these about serve
To quicken appetite."[SD. Recorders.]
"............ I like this well,
I shall not use much courtship. Where's this music?""Doth it offend your ear?"
"'Tis ravishing."
Dryden's Song for St Cecilia's Day (1687) has the lines:
"The soft complaining flute
In dying notes discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers
Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute."
Henry Purcell's Hail Bright Cecilia (1692) set Nicholas Brady's words to music with an obbligato part for recorder:
"In vain the am'rous flute and soft guitar
Jointly labour to inspire
Ardent heat and loose desire."
Lully employed recorders to represent Mercury's pipe in Achille et Polixène and Persée (1682), and again for the pipes of Pan in Isis (1677) and Cadmus et Hermione (1673).
Purcell used the recorder for a number of texts involving shepherds or celebration of the pastoral life in arias such as "We reap all the pleasures we freely enjoy", "How pleasant is this flower Plain" (1688), "Ah, happy, happy life!" (1688), "How blest are shepherds" (1691), "Shepherd, shepherd, leave decoying" (1691).
Vivalidi's chamber concerto La Pastorella RV 95 is scored for recorder, oboe, violin and continuo.
The aria " While Corydon the gentle shepherd" from Johann C. Pepusch's cantata Corydon (1714) has an obbligato recorder part.
Bach's aria "Doch Jesus will auch be der Strafe" from the cantata Schauet doch und sehet BWV 46 (1723), scored for two recorders and two oboi di caccia refers to Jesus the shepherd. In the opening tenor recitative "Er rufet seinen Schafen mit Namen" and the alto aria "Komm, leite mich" from BWV 175 (1925) three recorders and continuo evoke a pastoral atmosphere.
I do hope none of you are feeling like this chap who is so anxiously watching the sundail. Lest you are, let me hasten to assure you that we are very near the end.
I have confined my attention today to references to the recorder prior to the revival of interest in it at the end of the last century by a few antiquarians and scholars. However, one contemporary use of the instrument in a dramatic context demands our serious attention.
On one of his televised escapades, The Three Doctors, Dr Who allows his trusty plastic recorder to fall into the force-field generator of the tardis just before getting stuck in a black hole. Thus the recorder remains the only positive matter in a universe of anti-matter.
With his usual flair for celestial mechanics, Who is able to use this unique recorder to bring about the downfall of the sinister Omega, a rogue Time Lord! Omega is induced to dash the force-field generator to the ground thereby dislodging the recorder which goes off with a 'big bang' and creates a supernova!
Needless to say, Who and company make good their escape a nano-second before this tumultuous event.
What is fascinating here is how, after a lapse of nearly two hundred years all the old associations reappear -- the presence of immortals (Time Lords), conflict (on a cosmic scale), death (Omega's), symbolic rebirth (Who and company escape the black hole), and miraculous events (the creation of a supernova).
It is my sad duty to report that Who's brief tootle on the recorder can only be described as deplorable and that nothing he says or does gives any inkling that he is aware that the instrument is of serious musical intent.
Now after seven-hundred years, Dr Who has come to remind us of a terrible truth. Like all great inventions with obvious power for good the recorder can unleash immense evil, too. As I said at the outset, the number of recorders on Earth exceeds that of all other musical instruments combined. Thus "the still- discordant wavering multitude" now have it in their power to use recorders to blow up the universe. Our only hope lies in turning the tables against that "blunt monster with uncounted heads" by doing our utmost to realize the full musical potential of "this little organ", for as William Congreve had it long ago:
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