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Baroque Flutes

Martin Doyle completed his first set of baroque flutes in early 2000. Originally working with African Blackwood, he modeled his baroque flute design on an eighteenth century Rottenburgh baroque flute. Martin has also made baroque flutes from Irish Boxwood – one of which is featured below.

Above: Martin Doyle baroque flute made in Irish boxwood.

Martin Doyle's Baroque flutes are a classic four piece instrument with a register foot for tuning the bottom note. The ferrules are resin based imitation ivory, the single key if handcrafted in sterling silver and the pitch is set at A=415.

Above: Martin Doyle boxwood baroque flute – foot joint, key and register foot detail.

More images of this Martin Doyle Baroque flute can be viewed here »

Price

• € 1,600.00. For further information, kindly contact Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle playing a Baroque flute

Below is an audio file of Martin Doyle playing the boxwood Baroque flute featured above. Martin plays King of the Blind – a Turlough O'Carolan tune from Nicholas Carolan's facsimile edition of John & William Neal, A Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes proper for the violin, German flute or hautboy, which was first published in 1724.

About Baroque flutes

The following excerpt regarding Baroque Flutes is from Rick Wilson's Historical Flutes Page – an informative and comprehensive website regarding the historical development of flutes.

A revolution in flute making took place in the second half of the seventeenth century. The instrument emerged as the baroque flute with significant modifications including a conical bore, the addition of a key for the right hand little finger, and a more ornate body made in several pieces. It was now fully chromatic (in large part because of the key), but more significantly, it was better suited tonally for a role as a soloist (primarily because of the bore change). The bore change made a big difference in sound – improving the intonation and increasing the volume in the lowest notes in particular – and incidently allowed the finger holes to be placed higher on the tube, making it slightly easier to handle with small hands than a renaissance flute at the same pitch.
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