notice. There are no real tenor or bass flutes now, those in use being
restricted to the upper part of the scale. The present flute dates
from 1832, when Theobald Boehm, a Bavarian flute player, produced the
instrument which is known by his name. He entirely remodeled the
flute, being impelled to do so by suggestions from the performance of
the English flautist, Charles Nicholson, who had increased the
diameter of the lateral holes, and by some improvements that had been
attempted in the flute by a Captain Gordon, of Charles the Tenth's
Swiss Guard. Boehm has been sufficiently vindicated from having
unfairly appropriated Gordon's ideas. The Boehm flute, since 1846, is
a cylindrical tube for about three-fourths of its length from the
lower end, after which it is continued in a curved conical
prolongation to the cork stopper. The finger holes are disposed in a
geometrical division, and the mechanism and position of the keys are
entirely different from what had been before. The full compass of the
Boehm flute is chromatic, from middle C to C, two octaves above the
treble clef C, a range of three octaves, which is common to all
concert flutes, and is not peculiar to the Boehm model. Of course this
compass is partly produced by altering the pressure of blowing.
Columns of air inclosed in pipes vibrate like strings in sections,
but, unlike strings, the vibrations progress in the direction of
length, not across the direction of length. In the flute, all notes
below D, in the treble clef, are produced by the normal pressure of
wind; by an increasing pressure of overblowing the harmonics, D in the
treble clef, and A and B above it, are successively attained. The
fingerholes and keys, by shortening the tube, fill up the required
intervals of the scale. There are higher harmonics still, but
flautists generally prefer to do without them when they can get the
note required by a lower harmonic. In Boehm's flute, his ingenious
mechanism allows the production of the eleven chromatic semitones