Flutes, a category of musical instrument that belongs in the woodpipe family, are musical instruments that take the form of a pipe with holes made into them on both ends and along the body. The method of playing a flute is relatively simple on paper: one just needs to blow wind into one end of the instrument and the wind vibrates within the flute’s body to make the sound that comes out of the other end. It is this characteristic that makes them aerophones: a musical instrument that creates sounds by vibrating a column of air (Wikipedia). However, the flutists can manipulate the resulting sound by covering or uncovering the holes on the flute’s body, allowing them to play different notes that coalesce into a proper song. Anybody can use a flute, but playing a flute requires practice and skills that the regular, unprepared person often does not have. Even amongst accomplished flutists, many still break up their scores into chunks to learn individually before incorporating these parts into one cohesive whole. Like that process, the modern flute is constructed first as multiple different components before being assembled to make the complete flute. The components of a flute include the head piece, the keys, the body, and more. The head piece, in particular, is often subject to trial and error replacement by professional flutists to find one that matches that musician’s style intended sounds (Flute). While modern flute construction and playing is very complex and requires many small parts to successfully perform well, in the past, the flute was a relatively simplistic instrument in both aspects.
Older flutes that existed during the BCs were manufactured very easily. They were often created by simply carving holes into hollow bones or naturally pipe-shaped plants, like the old reed pipes (Wikipedia) in Greece and Rome (Borders). The simplicity of their construction, and the accessibility of their materials, meant that the creation of the flute was independently developed in different places even before long-distance trade was established. Examples of this include the German Geissenklosterle flutes, the Chinese Gudi, the Egyptian Nay, and many more. However, while construction would become more complex over time, the skills required to be a flutist would also change. Since the machines used to make the flutes’ holes make standardized sounds didn’t exist in the past, flutists of the time had to adapt their own flutes’ notes to the surrounding ambience. This adaptability was important because the flute mainly functioned as accompaniment to entertainment, which was important for the citizens within these societies. This means that the commonfolk would play it during celebrations, performances (Tuff), and would eventually integrate it as part of their military music (Borders). One can only imagine how difficult performing with a group of flutists would have been. Nonetheless, there exists one historical fact about the flutes that clashes with all of the above points. Despite the fact that flutes have been depicted in Roman artifacts and Etruscan reliefs (Iowa State University), with even one of the oldest flutes being recovered in Germany (Wikipedia), flutes completely disappeared from Europe between 476 BC until their reintroduction to Europe in the 10th or 11th century AD (Iowa State University).
The accessibility of the flutes and its role as an instrument often used for entertainment purposes would have made it a very relevant part of many cultures presiding within Europe, and yet, the flutes disappeared anyway. Therefore, if one were to look into the circumstances in which the flutes vanished from Europe, some theories can be formulated as to why it happened. Considering the time period in which this disappearance happened, one key event stands out as a major factor behind many of the theories proposed in this essay: the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Being one of the most influential empires of its time, the ramifications of its existence and subsequent downfall severely affected the societies living within and around the empire. This therefore meant that the citizens were scattered, old hierarchies were overturned, and nearby societies started vying for the wealth that the fallen empire had left behind, thereby causing some cultural practices to become scattered amongst the emigrating denizens (Heather). So while some theories about the flutes’ disappearance may list the fall of the western Rome empire as a main contributor, some theories may be less reliant on this event.
Of the theories being proposed in this paper, there is one that stands out because it can be supported by many other pieces of evidence: the idea that flutes did not disappear from Europe, but rather, were only never recorded in any form of written record. The flutes’ absence within written records could hypothetically be the fault of the Christians that later came into power within the Roman Empire following the conversion of emperor Constantine. Prior to the emperor’s conversion in 312 BCE, Christians were unfortunately a very oppressed minority within the empire because it was not as popular as the Roman Empire’s polytheistic religion. By the time the Christians were able to come to power within the Roman Empire, not many were fond of the practices that were associated with their earlier persecutors (Borders). It is not a big leap of logic, then, to assume that certain practices or ways of life may have deliberately been removed from written records to give the empire a different reputation, or to remove traces of Rome’s original culture as its replaced by a new one.
There is also the possibility that, as times changed, the peoples’ taste in musical instruments could have changed as well. The reed pipes, like the Roman’s tibia or the Greek’s aulos, and the panpipe were musical wind instruments that were very popular during that time, and whose existence persisted after the flutes disappeared. So, while these other wind instruments gained prestige through incorporation into major events such as the Greek games (KU Leuven), the flutes may have not been recorded due to its gradually fading importance to the entertainment practices of the Roman empire or Greece. Simply put, their dwindling importance and the additional pressure of outside forces to get rid of them may have removed flutes from most surviving records.
Another possible theory could be that the physical instrument may not have been brought to many other places, rather, staying mostly contained within their societies. Within Greece itself, there is a possibility that flutes, due to its role as musical accompaniment to festivals or performances, may have been undervalued and therefore not properly recorded because of it (Tuff). After all, the widespread popularity of flutes could have made it so that the societies that used flutes as musical instruments for entertainment purposes believed they would never lose the knowledge of how to play these songs. And since both Greece and the Roman Empire both used flutes for the reasons stated above, there is a chance that this could be why there are no records of flutes in Europe. So when the Western Roman Empire fell, during the chaos that was people evacuating and fleeing their ransacked homes, it is also very likely that bringing their musical instruments alongside their other belongings may not have been a priority for them (Borders). So whether it be because the fleeing peoples of Rome did not think the instruments valuable enough to preserve, or because human complacency made it so they didn’t record it, these aforementioned reasons could also be another contributor to the disappearance of the flute from Europe between 476 BC to the 10th century.
Now, while these theories can possibly serve as explanations for the flutes’ disappearance from Europe, some limitations pertaining to historical evidence must be acknowledged. The fact that little to no evidence of middle age flutes within Europe were found outside of art and iconography may imply a few worrying ideas about modern archeologists’ capabilities of recovering physical evidence, specifically. One of them is that, because the flutes were also known to have been created from plant material, they could have simply degraded over time and left no evidence. Much like the stone tablet that holds the record of the Epic of Gilgamesh, if the original source is susceptible to wear and tear, then researchers have no choice but to recognize that there may be pieces of knowledge that will be lost to time because there was no way of preserving things made of organic material. It may also go a certain way to explaining why the oldest flutes ever excavated were bone flutes, and none of the reed-made flutes or the bamboo flutes. Simply put, because these flutes may have been worn over time, one cannot truly prove that plant-based flutes could not have existed there, during that time. Another concern is that the archeologists may be researching the wrong cultures if they are trying to find evidence for flutes in Europe, or are unable to decipher what could be records of flute music sheets (Jasiński). On a more optimistic note, it could also simply just be that the researchers haven’t uncovered the evidence needed to disprove the flutes’ disappearance yet. In summary, there are definitely limitations to the researchers’ ability to find and interpret evidence, especially when the evidence itself may have deteriorated before it could be found, when researching about the flute’s history in Europe.
In the end, while Byzantium eventually reintroduced the flutes to Europe through Germany during the 10th and 11th century AD, the fact remains that the flutes disappeared for such a long period of time. While there are many theories as to why this happened, there are just as many reasons to believe that archeologists and other researchers interested in the history of the flute may never truly find the answer. However, that does not mean that the fragments of information said researchers have managed to recover do not paint a fascinating picture. Recovered Neanderthal artifacts have also included items that resemble these instruments, like the Divje Babe flute (Neanderthal flute). The existence of this artifact implies that the Neanderthals may have engineered the flutes before the homo-sapiens did, showing how easy it was to make one in the past. With how increasingly complex the flutes have become, it is no surprise that its history is just as complicated, containing a mystery that fascinates researchers to this day.
By: Tram Anh Nguyen
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