From Ice Age Caves to Krishna's Bansuri: The Story of the Flute
The Swabian Jura, southern Germany, tens of thousands of years ago. By the light of a fire in a limestone cave, someone takes the hollow wing bone of a griffon vulture, cuts a row of finger holes into it and blows. In 2008, archaeologists excavating the cave known as Hohle Fels found the pieces of that flute, and dated it to around 40,000 years ago, one of the oldest known musical instruments in the world.
The flute's story begins there, in the Ice Age, and runs through almost every civilisation since. It was played in the courts of ancient Egypt, in the temples and fields of India, in the palaces of imperial China and the salons of eighteenth-century Europe. Few instruments are so simple in principle, a tube and a breath of air, or have taken so many forms on the way to the gleaming metal flute of the modern orchestra.
The first flutes
The Hohle Fels flute is not alone. Nearby caves in the same region, including Geissenklösterle, have produced flutes made from bird bone and even from mammoth ivory, a far harder material to hollow out. These finds suggest that music was already an established part of life for the early modern humans who lived there. A pierced bear bone found at Divje Babe in Slovenia has sometimes been described as a Neanderthal flute, but many researchers think its holes were made by animal teeth, and its status remains debated.
On the other side of the world, at Jiahu in central China, archaeologists have found a set of flutes made from the wing bones of cranes, dating to roughly 9,000 years ago. Some of them can still produce notes, a startling link to the music of a Neolithic village.
Ancient Egypt and the reed flute
In ancient Egypt, the flute appears in tomb paintings and reliefs from the time of the Old Kingdom onward, more than four thousand years ago. These were long, end-blown flutes, held at an angle and played by blowing across the open top edge. Musicians are shown playing them alongside harps and singers at banquets and ceremonies. The tradition of the long, oblique end-blown flute continued in the region, and the ney, still played across the Middle East and in Sufi music, belongs to the same broad family.
India's bansuri and the flute of Krishna
In India, the bamboo flute has a special place in both music and religion. In Hindu tradition, the god Krishna is constantly pictured playing a flute, often called the venu or murali, and devotional stories tell of the cowherds and animals of Vrindavan drawn to its sound. Countless paintings and sculptures show him with the flute held sideways at his lips, and for many people in India the instrument remains closely linked with devotion and love.
The side-blown bamboo flute known in the north as the bansuri was long a folk instrument. In the twentieth century, the musician Pannalal Ghosh developed a longer, deeper bansuri and brought it fully into the concert world of Hindustani classical music. Later players, above all Hariprasad Chaurasia, made it one of the best-loved voices of Indian classical music worldwide. In South India, the smaller bamboo venu has its own tradition in Carnatic music.
China's dizi and xiao
China developed its own family of bamboo flutes. The side-blown dizi is known for a distinctive buzzing brightness, produced by a thin membrane stretched over an extra hole in the tube. The vertical, end-blown xiao has a soft, breathy tone associated with scholarly and contemplative music. Both remain central to Chinese folk, opera and orchestral music today.
Europe and the baroque traverso
Side-blown flutes were known in medieval Europe, and by the Renaissance they were played in consorts of different sizes and as military fifes. These were simple cylindrical tubes of wood with six finger holes. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, makers in France, associated especially with the Hotteterre family, redesigned the instrument. The new baroque flute, or traverso, was made in several sections, had a conical bore that narrowed towards the foot, and added a single key. Its tone was soft, warm and expressive.
The baroque flute became hugely fashionable. Johann Joachim Quantz wrote a famous treatise on playing it in 1752 and taught the instrument to Frederick the Great of Prussia, a dedicated flautist who also composed for it. Bach, Telemann and Handel wrote for the flute, and Mozart later composed concertos and quartets for it. As music grew more chromatic, makers added more keys, but each one was a compromise, and playing in tune in every key remained a struggle.
Theobald Boehm reinvents the flute
The breakthrough came from Munich. Theobald Boehm (1794–1881) was a professional flautist, a goldsmith by training and an energetic inventor. Unhappy with the uneven tone of the flutes of his day, he set out to rebuild the instrument from first principles. In 1832 he introduced a conical flute with a new system of ring keys, which let the tone holes be placed where acoustics demanded rather than where the fingers happened to fall.
In 1847 he went further, presenting a flute with a cylindrical metal body, a carefully shaped head joint and large tone holes, all controlled by an ingenious key mechanism. This Boehm-system flute was louder, more even and easier to play in tune across its range. It was adopted first in France and more slowly elsewhere, but it eventually became the standard concert flute used around the world. Wooden simple-system flutes, meanwhile, lived on in folk music, especially in Irish traditional music.
The flute today
The modern flute plays everything from Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune to jazz solos and film soundtracks, while the bansuri, dizi, ney, pan flutes and Native American flutes carry their own living traditions. Despite all the metalwork, every flute still works the way those Ice Age pipes did: a stream of air split against an edge, setting a column of air vibrating.
You can explore several of these flutes yourself on HarmonyHub, where the virtual flute lets you play a concert flute, bansuri, pan flute or Native American flute free in your browser using your number keys. To discover more instruments from India, visit the Indian instruments page. Forty thousand years on, a breath across a hollow tube still makes music.