respectively; they were employed exclusively with the military drum.
Mersenne’s[23] account of the transverse flute, then designated “flûte d’Allemagne” or “flûte allemande” in France, and an “Air de Cour” for four flutes in his work lead us to believe that there were then in use in France the soprano flute in
the tenor or alto flute in
and the bass flute descending to
. The museum of the Conservatoire Royal of Brussels possesses specimens of all these varieties except the last. All of them are laterally pierced with six finger-holes; they have a cylindrical bore, and are fashioned out of a single piece of wood. Their compass consists of two octaves and a fifth. Mersenne’s tablature for fingering the flute differs but little from those of Hotteterre-le-Romain[24] and Eisel[25] for the diatonic scale; he does not give the chromatic semitones and the flute had as yet no keys.
| Fig. 4. Fig. 5. |
| Fig. 4.—Bass Flute. From Museo Civico, Verona (facsimile). |
| Fig. 5.—Bass Flute. Brussels Museum. |