A Listing of Inventories, Sales, and Advertisements Relating to Flutes, Recorders, and Flageolets, 1631-1800 (review)

This self-published e-book extends the compilation the author began with "A Listing of Inventories and Purchases of Flutes, Recorders, Flageolets, and Tabor Pipes, 1388-1630" in David Lasocki, ed., Musicque de joye: Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Renaissance Flute and Recorder Consort, Utrecht 2003 ([Utrecht: STIMU Foundation for Historical Performance Practice, 2005], pp. 419-511; also available at http://library.music.indiana.edu/reference/inventoriesto1630.pdf; accessed 10 January 2011). The present listing (version of 26 May 2010) is arranged chronologically and then alphabetically by city within four main sections: Western Europe except for British newspapers (161 pp.), advertisements in British newspapers (40 pp.), advertisements in American newspapers (129 pp.), other English-language advertisements (mostly from India; 7 pp.), plus three appendices: Dutch references to the recorder and flageolet after 1800 (7 pp.), references to the recorder in American newspapers after 1800 (2 pp.), and additions to the previous listing for 1388-1630 (11 pp.).

Lasocki's citations from inventories and sales records consist mainly of direct quotations extracted from previously transcribed sources—all fully credited—with translations into English where needed. Lasocki was seldom able to consult the original sources, but the transcriptions on which he relies seem generally accurate, although the veracity of the primary documents of course cannot be confirmed. Usually he quotes only phrases referring specifically to flutes and related instruments, but sometimes he provides lengthy passages, for example from estate inventories, that place the instruments in welcome context.

Lasocki lifts newspaper advertisements from databases and facsimiles, both online and in print, as well as from previously published studies. Newspaper ads are notorious for typographical errors but Lasocki lets the ads speak for themselves with minimal editorial intervention. Nevertheless, because readers cannot distinguish errors in the originals from possible typos in transcription (for example, Dairy for Daily, p. 292), the originals must be consulted before these ads are quoted further. Discrepancies that occasionally occur between Lasocki's versions and, for example, transcriptions of the same ads by Nancy Groce, Musical Instrument Makers of New York; A Directory of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Urban Craftsmen (Stuyvesant, NY: Pen-dragon Press, 1991) ought to be resolved.

That American listings far outnumber British ones here might be explained by the greater number of historical American papers that have been made readily accessible; similarly, London newspapers have been surveyed more thoroughly than papers from other British cities. The paucity of Italian, Belgian, Spanish, and other Western European listings suggests that statistical conclusions regarding the relative popularity and spread of various flute types would be premature.

In addition to searching databases, Lasocki has combed material from an impressive range of printed secondary sources, mostly journal articles and local music histories. A bibliography of these publications would have been useful in itself and would have reduced redundancy, as when Louis Pichierri's Music in New Hampshire, 1623-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960) is cited thrice in full on two adjoining pages. Incidentally, it is disconcerting to find entries from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, British and French colonial North America, and Romania in the "Western Europe except for British" section. Extracts regarding the recorder in America after 1800 never mention the word "recorder"; instead they use the old-fashioned term "English flute."

This trove of raw data cannot easily be read and assimilated, but it is of enormous potential value to organologists, collectors, curators, and music historians. Among other things, the advertisements name many obscure dealers in music and instruments, who commonly also sold other sorts of dry-goods; this information and the instruments' prices, where given, put the flutes, etc. into a broader mercantile perspective. While Lasocki focuses on just a few types of woodwinds (surely the most numerous), his sources often mention other instruments, allowing us to glean clues to the distribution and possession of...