Elizabeth Ford describes how she came to study the Scottish baroque flute

Elizabeth Ford performing at Edinburgh FluteFling 2017 (c) Gordon Turnbull

Elizabeth Ford is a flute player, academic and publisher who has been involved with FluteFling for a number of years, performing and speaking at some of our events. Her PhD on the early history of the flute in Scotland was published in book format in 2020 and you can read a review of it in this blog.

Here, Elizabeth describes how she became drawn to early Scottish flute repertoire and to study the history of the flute in Scotland.

My research into the history of the flute in Scotland started informally in 2003, as a Master’s student at the Peabody Conservatory. I was just then learning to play baroque flute and was surprised and somewhat demoralized by how challenging it was. My teacher had assigned a suite by Hotteterre, in a facsimile edition, in the original French violin clef.

I was writing my thesis on Hotteterre’s improvisation manual, L’Art de preluder, so this was good for me. But now and then, I needed something to remind me that I had actually been a pretty good flute player before I took up baroque flute, so I was combing the shelves of the library looking for 18^th-century flute music that wasn’t depressingly challenging and that I wasn’t already familiar with. I happened upon Jeremy Barlow’s edition of James Oswald’s Airs for the Seasons. I knew my teacher wouldn’t approve because it was a modern edition, and Scottish; this music was outside the canon and we were not there to challenge the canon. Personally, I think the Peabody Conservatory is exactly the place to do so, but that’s a different topic.

I had always been interested in Scotland, but I didn’t know very much about it as a country or culture. The only recordings of Scottish music I could find at this time were by the Baltimore Consort, which happened to be my favorite band.

I kept my Scottish music tendencies to myself, yet after graduation I started to explore music from Scotland, especially for flute, in greater detail. I kept coming back to Oswald, and how delightful and satisfying his music was to play and to hear. I amassed a large collection of photocopies of music and performed this repertoire any chance I got. I didn’t get into the traditional/art music debate because having been trained in French 18^th-century performance practice, I didn’t know what to do with the questions of national identity and ‘traditional’ as it related to music. I had been taught to think that playing by ear was somehow inferior to reading music…even though baroque music is and was largely improvised.

While a law student a few years later, I acquired Concerto Caledonia’s recording Colin’s Kisses: The Music of James Oswald. It was the most exciting, fun recording I’d ever heard. I had a new favorite band and was completely down the rabbit hole. I started reading as much as I could find in the West Virginia University library about Scottish music, and it wasn’t much. David Johnson, Henry Farmer, and that was it. What I kept coming back to was their assertion that the flute was unknown in Scotland prior to 1725. That really bothered me. One thing led to another, and I contacted John Butt and David McGuinness at the University of Glasgow, who said that this would be an excellent PhD topic.

This is the question from which all my research on the flute in Scotland sprang: how, if there was no flute in the country prior to 1725, was there so much flute music published so early in the century? If an instrument wasn’t known or wasn’t popular, it would presumably take a while before composers or music publishers started marketing for it. But, as I made my way through the secondary literature, I realized that this date of 1725 had never before been challenged.

To me, this was ludicrous. The one-keyed flute was developed in France sometime before 1692 (the first image is on the title page of Marin Marais’s Pieces en trio) by a member of the Hotteterre family. The addition of the key revolutionized music: a formerly one-piece non-chromatic instrument with a limited range became fully chromatic, in three pieces, and with wide range. The flute was very popular in France, and considering the long and well-established relationship between Scotland and France, it didn’t make sense to me that no flutes travelled back home with a visiting Scot. I wondered if music scholarship had become victim to that unfortunate ailment, the Scottish Cringe.

These questions guided me I as began my archival research. I quickly found evidence for the flute in Scotland prior to 1725 in the National Record Office. I know that this can sound like I’m saying previous scholars didn’t do their work properly, but that’s not my intention. My predecessors were not focused on the flute, lacked my background in flute history, and didn’t have any reason to question the date. I then began to challenge the historiography of Scottish music scholarship, and its reliance on antiquarian sources.

So, this is the long story of how and why I study the history of the flute in Scotland. My next task is to determine when it disappeared from Scottish music, as until recently most contemporary Scottish traditional flute players would assert that there is no historic evidence for the flute in Scotland and they must look to Ireland for culture, tradition, and repertoire. This is obviously incorrect, but it has been the prevailing assumption, and I want to know why that’s the case.

Here are some factoids on the flute in 18^th-century Scotland:

1. The earliest iconographical evidence for the flute dates to the 16^th century
2. The earliest mention of the German flute, or transverse flute, is 1702
3. It was primarily played by gentlemen amateur musicians, although ladies and lower class men also played it
4. Musical tastes were similar to those in the rest of Europe: there was a taste for Handel and Quantz
5. The first music for flute published in Scotland by a Scottish composer was William McGibbon’s 1727 Sonatas for Two German flutes, or two violins, and a bass
6. Many compositions were based on traditional tunes, but this is not unusual for the time
7. Much so-called traditional music was newly composed and collected in the 18^th century
8. Flutes were made in Scotland in the first half of the century
9. The idea of traditional music and art music isn’t relevant to music of the 18^th century
10. There is evidence of shared repertoire between flute players and pipers

Some of the major composers for flute are William McGibbon, Mr. Munro, James Oswald, John Reid, Daniel Dow, and Francesco Barsanti. Some known flute players include Susanna, Countess of Eglinton, John Reid, Alexander Bruce, the 3^rd Duke of Gordon, and Robert Tannahill. Flutes were played in homes, concert halls, and taverns.

Here are some excellent recordings of this repertoire:

• Captain Tobias Hume: A Scottish soldier, Concerto Caledonia
• On the Banks of Helicon, The Baltimore Consort
• Adew Dundee, The Baltimore Consort
• Wind and Wire, Chris Norman and Byron Schenkman
• She’s Sweetest When She’s Naked, Alison Melville
• Colin’s Kisses: The music of James Oswald, Concerto Caledonia
• Fiddler Tam: The music of Thomas Erskine, the 6^th Earl of Kellie, Concerto Caledonia
• Mungrel Stuff: Francesco Barsanti and others, Concerto Caledonia
• The High Road to Kilkenny, Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien
• [Ex]tradition, The Curious Bards
• The Reel of Tulloch, Chatham Baroque
• The Caledonian Flute, The Chris Norman Ensemble

Sometime in the 19^th century, the flute seems to have disappeared from Scottish music: it stops being mentioned, it stops appearing on title pages, and there are notably fewer flute manuscripts. I’m interested in knowing why and how this happened, and this exploration of historiography and cultural history will (hopefully) be a future project.

More about the author:

Elizabeth Ford won the 2017 National Flute Association Graduate Research Award for her doctoral research on the flute in eighteenth-century Scotland. She was the 2018-2019 Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellow in 18^th-century Scottish Studies, IASH, University of Edinburgh. Her complete edition of William McGibbon’s sonatas is published by A-R Editions, and her monograph, The Flute in Scotland from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, is part of the Studies in the History and Culture of Scotland Series from Peter Lang Press.

In 2021 (hopefully!), Elizabeth will hold the Martha Goldsworthy Arnold Fellowship at the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, the Abi Rosenthal Visiting Fellowship in Music at the Bodleian Libraries, and the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies-Burney Centre Fellowship at McGill University for research related to James Oswald, Charles Burney, and John Reid. She is co-founder of Blackwater Press.

(c) Elizabeth Ford 2022