flute, in music, generic term for such wind instruments as the fife, the flageolet, the panpipes, the piccolo, and the recorder. The tone of all flutes is produced by an airstream directed against an edge, producing eddies that set up vibrations in the air enclosed in the attached tube. In the transverse flute, the principal orchestral flute today, the edge is on the mouth hole on the side of the instrument, over which the player blows. The oldest archaeological remains of a flute is some 30,000 years old, and the oldest complete, playable instrument is a nearly 9,000-year-old bone flute found in China in 1987. The transverse flute is also an extremely old instrument, universal in ancient and primitive cultures; it was known in Europe by the 9th cent. During the baroque period both the recorder and the transverse flute were used in the orchestra, the latter by Lully in 1672. In the classical period the transverse flute displaced the less-powerful recorder, which could not match its dynamic range. In the 19th cent. the transverse flute assumed substantially its present form after the improvements of Theobald Boehm (1794-1881), who ascertained the acoustically correct size and placement of the holes and devised an ingenious system of keys to cover them. The flute was originally made of wood but is now most often of silver. It is the most brilliant and agile of the orchestral woodwinds, and it also has a considerable solo and chamber-music literature. The transverse flute has been made in several keys, but the C flute has long been standard. The alto flute in G, a fourth below the regular flute, is notated as a transposing instrument.

Woodwind instrument in which the sound is produced by blowing against a sharp edge. In its broad sense, a flute may be end-blown, like the recorder, or may have a globular shape, like the ocarina. In its narrow sense, discussed below, flute refers to the transverse flute of Western music. The transverse flute, a tubular instrument held sideways to the right, appeared in Greece and Etruria by the 2nd century BC. By the 16th century a family of boxwood flutes, with fingerholes but no keys, was in use in Europe. Keys began to be added in the late 17th century. Theobald Boehm's 19th-century innovations resulted in the modern flute, which permits thorough expressive control and great agility. The cylindrical tube may be made of wood or, more often, a precious metal or alloy. Its range is from about middle C to the C three octaves higher. The flute family includes the piccolo (pitched an octave higher), the alto flute, and the rare bass flute. Seealso shakuhachi.

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