On Captain Cook's voyages, nearly 2000 artefacts from the South Seas were collected and brought back to Europe. The most comprehensive collection of these artefacts are at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Georg-August University, Göttingen, including some ancient Maori wind instruments. How did they get them?.....

In southern, Germany archaeological researchers have discovered the oldest man-made musical instrument in the world – made from a 40,000 years old wing bone.... In this place archaeological researchers have found the oldest known handcrafted flutes. The cavern is well known to researchers as an important site for sign of early human efforts; recently members of the same team found the world oldest Venus figure.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Theobald Boehm’s changes to the flute inspired other makers and players to create their own alternative systems. Many were attempts to combine features of the Boehm system with the fingering of the previous simple system instrument.

There are currently twelve piccolos in the collection ranging from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth made in a variety of places including England, France, USA and Australia. In terms of construction they are mainly examples of wooden piccolos and, as with the flutes, some are associated with famous Australian performers.

Over the last thirty years or so several Australian flute makers have emerged making extremely high quality instruments. Jordan Wainwright, for example, is probably the only one to be found professionally making flutes in Australia during the latter half of the nineteenth century. These were simple system instruments with up to eight keys. However, it was not until the twentieth century that Boehm system flutes began to be made in Australia by another maker, Clewin Harcourt.

In previous issues, we have outlined some of the flute systems held in the Powerhouse Museum’s extensive collection, developed by a variety of makers from the mid to late 1700s. The next example to look at is one of the most popular forms of flute, the eight-key, which began to appear from about the 1790s and still has wide appeal today for use in particular musical styles. As noted in our previous article, around 1790, additional keys were added to the six key instrument for C (worked by LH thumb) and an extra key for F creating eight keys. The long F key, as it became known, was introduced since the short F key was inclined to produce E natural for a leap between D and F, due to the difficulty of sliding to the key from a hole.