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material, with bored holes.135 Certain vase-paintings show the top edge of each tube scooped out to a cup shape as seen from back and front.136 |
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The player held the instrument in both hands, moving it from side to side as he blew across the tops of the pipes. The method of playing naturally favoured gliding up and down the scale, as it was more difficult to dart between non-adjacent notes than in the case of the lyre or aulos. Nevertheless, we do hear in one passage how the player 'jumps from one note to another, wherever the construction of the music summons him'.137 The instrument was quite small, and played in a high register. When it accompanied a singer, it did so in a higher octave.138 Aristotle, however, was acquainted with its use as a solo instrument. Despite its general neglect in polite society, there appear to have been a few executants who cultivated it for public display. A Hellenistic inscription from Magnesia, specifying arrangements for the festival of Zeus the City Saviour, prescribes that an aulete, a panpiper (syristes), and a citharist are to be laid on to entertain the crowd.139 |
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The flute, like the panpipe, dates from time immemorial. Bone pipes with one or more finger-holes are known from palaeolithic, mesolithic, and neolithic sites.140 Among the ancient civilizations of the Near East, however, the flute was prominent only in Egypt; there are Sumerian and Akkadian representations, but they are rare.141 The Egyptian (and Mesopotamian) flute was long and narrow, made of cane or metal, with from three to eight finger-holes towards the lower end. Although held sideways, to the player's left, it was end-blown, not side-blown; that is, the flautist blew across the open end of the tube (as with the panpipe), not across a hole in the side.142 |
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In Greece the flute is not attested before the Hellenistic age, and |
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135 Reinach, loc. cit. |
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136 Paquette, 61 pl. III. 64. This is one of various rim shapes found among the world's flute-type instruments; see NG vi. 664, and below, p. 113. It occurs in the Romanian panpipe: see Welch, 270. |
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137 Achilles Tatius 8. 6. 6. |
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138 Ps.-Arist. Pr. 19. 14. |
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139 Arist. Poet. 1447a26; SIG 589. 46 (196 BC). (It is possible, however, that the syristes could be a flautist; see below.) Cf. also Diod. 17. 72. 5 (Alexander at Persepolis); SIG 1257 (Ephesus, 1st C. AD); Lucian Syr. D. 43; Chariton 6. 2. 4; John Chrysostom, Homil. 37 in Matth., Bibl. Patr. i. 523. |
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140 Baines, Woodwind, 171 f.; NG vi. 312f. |
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141 Sachs, HMI 71 f.; Rimmer, 19. |
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142 Sachs, HMI 90; NG vi. 71-4. |
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