This is an unrevised OCR transcript of an article written for a friend who edited a music magazine in France. It may seem strange in substance and style.

The most important public collections of woodwind instruments in England are concentrated in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a select number of decorative instruments, while the Horniman Museum has extensive holdings of more ordinary woodwinds, as well as England’s leading ethnic collection. The Royal Academy of Music and the musical instrument manufacturer Boosey and Hawkes also have notable collections. Leading collections outside London include the Bate Collection at Oxford and the Edinburgh University Collection. All of these are well known and well documented. Another fine provincial collection, that of the Castle Museum, York, remains almost unknown,

With over a million visitors a year, this is England’s most popular provincial museum, famous for its displays of Yorkshire life of the recent past in a succession of period rooms, craft workshops and reconstructed streets. However, many of its important collections have never been displayed in their entirety, or even, until recently (1980), systematically catalogued.

The museum has grown around the unparalleled collection of ‘bygones’ amassed, from the turn of this century, by Dr.John L.Kirk, a medical practitioner from Pickering, a small town on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors. Kirk’s work took him to isolated farms and villages, where, as the doctor, he was in a unique position to beg, barter or – in the last resort – buy objects significant of a fast-disappearing way of life. His enthusiasm for collecting – farm equipment, furniture, vehicles, even shop-fronts – is now legendary. In 1932 he decided to dispose of his collection, which the York City Council eventually agreed to house in the Castle precincts. From its opening in 1938 the Kirk collection has been extensively supplemented, almost entirely by donation and still with a preponderance of objects from the North of England.

Kirk’s collecting of musical instruments was wide-ranging – his wife was a musician – but indiscriminate. This is reflected in the layout of the museum’s small and crowded music gallery, where, for example, a virginal of 1651 and a Victorian harmonium ‘with Patent mouse-proof pedal’ are equally treasured. He collected many woodwind instruments from the Pickering area, purchased others from the antiquarian Dr.Richmond, and obtained fine eighteenth century bassoons and serpents associated with church bands.

The collection of woodwind instruments continued to grow after Kirk’s death in 1940, but the new acquisitions were largely relegated to remote store-rooms or were used merely to garnish the period room-settings. In recent years a systematic attempt has been made to identify and document these neglected instruments. And to perform essential maintenance. During this work the extent and significance of the museum’s holdings became manifest.

The woodwind collection consists of well over a hundred instruments ranging in date from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Nearly all the instruments are English; London makers of the early nineteenth century being particularly well represented. Rather more than half of the instruments are the standard sizes of the four orchestral woodwinds, with the flutes forming by far the largest group. The remainder comprises ‘gentleman amateur’ and ‘novelty’ instruments – walking-stick flutes, flageolets, musettes, mirlitons, etc.

Thus this collection gives a uniquely faithful representation of eighteenth and nineteenth century musical taste and activities of a region. In the remainder of this article I shall attempt both to describe some of the more interesting instruments and to say something about the pattern of regional music making they represent.

In major centres like York and spa towns such as Harrogate and Scarborough, music making was, from the mid eighteenth century at least, distinctly cosmopolitan. York had an orchestral society, regular subscription concerts, dances, a theatre band, etc. Wind concertos were regularly featured, and the accounts of the Music Society and surviving sets of parts show that the orchestra had a full complement of woodwind. By 1819 the amateurs of York Musical Society could include four of Beethoven’s symphonies among quantities of other music in their season. At about the same period the large-scale Handel Festivals in the cathedral were using massed wind instruments, local forces being supplemented by players from London. As a cathedral city, York would have had a high number of wind-playing amateurs, and as a military centre an unusual number of professional bandsmen.

In the smaller towns and rural areas concerted instrumental music was a rarity – with one significant exception. Until quite late in the nineteenth century the singing in church was often accompanied by a band, characteristically of stringed instruments, supplemented in the treble by flutes, oboes and clarinets and in the bass by bassoons and serpents. The flute was, of course, widespread in even the most remote rural areas. It was the one woodwind instrument to maintain its popularity against the two great emerging Northern traditions of the choir and brass band.

With these considerations in mind, we can proceed to the instruments themselves.

Duct flutes, so popular because of their ease of sounding, are represented by a fine early eighteenth century treble recorder (Anon.). In England, instruments of the recorder type retained their popularity throughout the nineteenth century, metamorphosed into the characteristic English Flageolet. This collection has several, corresponding with the descant recorder and fingered very similarly. The principal difference is an external restyling to suggest Arcadian associations. There is a chamber above the whistle, into which air is blown through a small ivory mouthpiece made to resemble reed. The more elaborate examples have ivory trim bands and decorative pegs set between the finger holes. The instruments sometimes carry keywork, particularly to provide the lowest semitones and to eliminate a cross-fingered F. The second octave may be produced simply by overblowing, or assisted by a thumbhole at the rear, or by a half hole at the front for the uppermost finger. The development of the English flageolet is associated with the maker William Baines from about 1800. The collection has one of his ingenious double flageolets. Parallel tubes, tuned a major third apart, share a common wind reservoir and are shaped so that the fingers may extend easily across both tubes. Carefully contrived keywork provides extensions to the compass of each tube, and also control ‘flags’ which pivot into each windway to silence it if desired. The instrument is surprisingly flexible in use, and in addition to tunes with drone basses and those in simple thirds, genuine two-part writing, including chromatic work, is possible.

The duct flute principle lends itself to all sorts of ephemeral instruments. The collection contains several choirmaster’s pitch pipes, square-sectioned and with graduated pistons, ocarinas, tin whistles, etc. A Combination Flagelet Flute (Metzler) has alternative head joints to transform it from duct flute to side-blown flute. There are Picco Pipes, the Italian zuffoli, taking their English name from the blind Sardinian who popularised them here as a novelty instrument in the nineteenth century. Although they are only six centimetres long and have only three finger holes, they can sound over twenty notes with overblowing and hand stopping.

In addition to orchestral piccolos and military fifes, the museum has a number of elegant miniature flutes, most commonly pitched in F. They usually have one key, nominally for D#, though one (Dawkins) has four. Such flutes were popular in eighteenth century England. Concertos were written for them and popular songs were frequently published with a suitably transposed flute part crammed onto staves at the margins of the page.

It is impossible here to make more than a few observations about the collection’s forty standard flutes, which offer a representative guide to the instrument’s evolution in the hands of English players and makers. The earliest is a classic one-keyed flute from the mid eighteenth century (Lot:Paris). There are many similar instruments by London makers (Astor, Cahusac, D’Almaine, Florio, Goulding, etc.). The latest of them belongs well in the nineteenth century and point to the characteristic conservatism of English players. By the late eighteenth century, an up-to-the-minute English player might have had four keys (D#:F:D:G#:Bb), but many were content with fewer. A greater degree of mechanisation accompanied the downward extension of compass, and from the mid nineteenth century the eight-keyed flute was widespre4ad (C:C# on interlocking bascules: D#:: F now linked to a long F touch; G#:Bb:C). There are many flutes of this pattern (Blackman, Ebblewhite, Potter, Rudall and Rose, etc.), which persisted, in provincial circles at least, till the end of the century. Only one flute in the collection has more keywork (Rudall and Rose; it has a low B) and none of the instruments have rotary axle mechanism or show any of the reforms of Boehm, Briccialdi, etc. The most advanced feature that any of these flutes show is that a number of the later ones are fitted with pewter plug ‘pads’, bedding into matching metal surrounds screwed over the tone holes, instead of soft pads. The plugs certainly improve the reliability of the mechanism, especially of lower notes. They are surprisingly quiet in action.

The collection’s oboes range from the earliest surviving English instrument (Bradbury) to its modern counterpart (Cabart) with a plethora of keywork. The Bradbury is a unique instrument, the collection’s greatest treasure. It dates from 1710-30 and is one of the very few examples of a true ‘Baroque’ English oboe. Its turnery is elaborate, almost heavy. The top of the instrument swells into a graceful baluster surmounted by a bobbin-shaped finial, instead of the funnel-shaped expansion characteristic of French and German oboes of like period. The bell, with tuning holes, is unusually massive. The keys (C;Eb) are small, dumb-bell shaped nd are sprung from the tube, rather than the reverse of the touches. The touches are, of course, duplicated to permit the instrument to be played with either hand uppermost. An oboe (Goulding) from later in the century rations the branched C touch, but is plainly intended to be played in the modern way, as there is now only one Eb touch. It is an example of a characteristic English type, extremely plain, with a straight top joint and with turnery confined to a modest reinforcement around tenon socket and bell. A later eighteenth century oboe resumes the baluster top, but the concept is now lighter and more graceful. The bore has become a lot narrower too, making the sensational high register, as heard in Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, much more practicable. A similar oboe (Milhouse) has a single octave key. Its eight keys (C:C#:Eb:F:G#:Bb:C: octave key) represent a degree of mechanisation beyond which few English players cared to go before about 1860. By the mid century, the oboe had become a professional’s instrument to a greater extent than the other woodwinds. Small oboes, pitched in G or F and called in England Pastoral Oboes or Musettes, continued to be popular with amateurs. They have a broad bore, wide tone holes, pear shaped bells and usually a single key, though one here is as mechanised as a conventional oboe of the period.

A high proportion of the collection’s clarinets are in C. In England these non-transposing instruments remained popular until well into the nineteenth century because they were easily ‘doubled’ by general wind players. Some of these instruments were played in church bands, where the players would read straight from hymnbooks. The simplest instruments with five or six keys sufficed. The collection shows that by the mid nineteenth century, eight keys were normal, with some advanced instruments having up to twelve. Two of the collection’s clarinets may be described as experimental. One (Gerock) offers an ideal placing of tone holes which were usually displaced from their acoustically correct position by the tenons. This is achieved by making the tenons and sockets much longer than usual and by passing the holes through the socket into a short tube which then passes through a slot in the tenon. A result is that the joints cannot be lapped with conventional thread and then screwed together. They are pushed together and bedded in putty. Another unusual clarinet has a very narrow bore which tapers sharply towards the bell, It also has a pronounced baluster at the top, like an oboe.

Two of the collection’s bassoons are by the celebrated maker Willam Milhouse, and date from the last quarter of the eighteenth century. They are of a standard six key pattern. The four old-established keys for F:D:Bb:G# have been joined by closed thumb keys for Eb and F#. A Gerock of a little later is similar, but the keys are on brass saddles instead of the usual grooves turned from the material of the tube. Another instrument of the period has two additional thumb keys to give access to the higher notes.