ABSTRACT
The Renaissance flute seems to have been played more in Italy and especially in Germany during the seventeenth century. In the sixteenth century flute can be documented in virtually every form of music, with other winds, strings and voices, playing chansons, madrigals, airs, motets, solo diminutions, and dances, in Italy, Germany, England and France. The term 'Renaissance flute' is used to denote the keyless, cylindrical flute as distinct from the one-keyed conically bored Baroque flute which did not come into general use until the 1680s. That the Renaissance flute could and did play 'in the new expressive style' can be shown by looking at surviving music from seventeenth-century Italy and Germany, where the flute is an equal partner to the violin and voice. Renaissance flutes have been passed over by players who have not had experience with original instruments and consider the modern copies to be inferior versions of the Baroque flute.
