PURPOSE: Show what a recorder is and how it sounds.

DESCRIPTION: This is a soprano recorder that uses German fingering (as opposed to the more normal "baroque" fingering). Show what a recorder looks like, how it sounds, and use it in other demonstrations illustrating the wave shape or the spectrum. It is also used in the Bottle Band demonstration.

SUGGESTIONS: Practice if you are actually going to play the thing.

The names given to the recorder in various languages are interesting. The German name, Blockflute (with two dots over the u) means a flute made from a single piece of wood (German engineering?). The French name, flute douce and the Italian name, flauto dolce both translate as "sweet flute," undoubtedly because of the very sweet nature of the recorder tone.

The recorder derived its English name from its use during the Renaissance to teach songs to birds. An early form of the sopranino recorder called the bird flageolet was used to play short songs repeatedly for birds, thus teaching them the songs by rote. This process, called recording, was extremely popular for several centuries, and hundreds of short songs were composed and taught to dozens of different types of songbirds.

The figure below shows the frontpiece of a book of such songs, appropriately called "The Bird Fancyer's Delight," published in London, England, in 1717. Click on the figure to see the music for one such song, called Tune for the Woodlark (#1), and hear it played on a sopranino recorder.

Incidentally, birds have perfect pitch. So, if you teach them a song and then you play it in a different key, they will hear it as an entirely different song.

REFERENCES: (PIRA unknown.)

EQUIPMENT: Recorder.

SETUP TIME: None.