The history
More than 40,000 years from a hollow bird bone with finger holes to silver flutes and bamboo bansuris on concert stages around the world.
A flute is one of the oldest things people ever made on purpose to make music. You blow a thin stream of air across an edge, and the air inside a tube starts to ring. For thousands of years people cut holes in bone and bamboo to change the note, then musicians, makers and scientists slowly worked out where the holes should go and why the flute sings at all.
c. 42,000–43,000 years ago
Oldest flutes widely accepted as flutes
Geissenklösterle cave, Germany
c. 7000–5700 BCE
Oldest playable flutes
Jiahu crane-bone flutes, China
c. 433 BCE
Oldest surviving side-blown flute
Chi from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, China
1707
First method book for the transverse flute
Jacques-Martin Hotteterre, France
1832
Ring-key flute with holes placed by acoustics
Theobald Boehm, Germany
1847
Cylindrical metal concert flute
Theobald Boehm, Germany
1930s–1940s
Seven-hole concert bansuri
Pannalal Ghosh, India
1952
Woman principal in a major US orchestra
Doriot Anthony Dwyer, USA
60000 BCE – 3000 BCE
Ice Age people carve flutes from bird bones and mammoth ivory. Much later, farmers in China make crane-bone flutes that can still play a scale today.
53000 BCE
c. 50,000–60,000 years ago
In 1995 archaeologists found a cave bear cub's thigh bone with round holes in a row. The National Museum of Slovenia shows it as a Neanderthal flute. Many scientists think the holes were more likely bitten by hyenas or other carnivores, so it may not be a flute at all.
Why it mattered. It shows how hard it is to prove that a bone with holes was made to make music.
41000 BCE
c. 42,000–43,000 years ago
Flutes carved from a swan's wing bone and from mammoth ivory were found in the Geissenklösterle cave. In 2012 a team from Oxford and Tübingen radiocarbon dated bones from the same layers to about 42,000 to 43,000 years ago. That made them a few thousand years older than anyone had thought.
Why it mattered. They are among the oldest musical instruments ever found, and they already have finger holes to change the note.
33000 BCE
c. 35,000 years ago or more
In 2008 archaeologists dug up 12 pieces of a flute carved from the wing bone of a griffon vulture. Put back together it is about 22 centimetres long and has five finger holes. The team published it in the journal Nature in 2009.
Why it mattered. It proved that a real musical tradition existed when modern humans first spread across Europe.
7000 BCE
c. 7000–5700 BCE
Six complete flutes, and pieces of about 30 more, were found in graves at the Neolithic village of Jiahu. They are made from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes and have five to eight holes. In 1999 scientists played the best one and heard a scale not far from do-re-mi.
Why it mattered. They are among the oldest playable instruments in the world, so we can actually hear the notes ancient people chose.
500 BCE – 1500
Side-blown bamboo flutes appear in China and India. They enter sacred texts and stories, above all the flute of Krishna, and slowly travel west into Europe.
433 BCE
c. 433 BCE
The tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng was sealed around 433 BCE with a whole orchestra inside, including 65 bronze bells. Among the instruments were two chi, lacquered bamboo flutes blown from the side like a modern flute. The tomb was found by chance in 1978 and the instruments are now in the Hubei Provincial Museum.
Why it mattered. It is the earliest known flute held sideways, the same way as a bansuri or a concert flute today.
0
c. 200 BCE – 200 CE
The Natya Shastra is an ancient Sanskrit guide to drama, dance and music. It discusses the bamboo flute, called vamsha or venu, among the instruments of the stage. Scholars disagree about its date, but most place it somewhere between about 200 BCE and 200 CE.
Why it mattered. It shows the bamboo flute was already a serious instrument in Indian music around 2,000 years ago.
150
c. 1st–3rd century CE
Old Tamil poems from the Sangam age describe the flute, called kuzhal, as the most popular wind instrument of its time. One poem, the Perumpanarruppadai, describes how a flute was made, with holes burned into bamboo using red-hot embers. The exact dates of these poems are still debated.
Why it mattered. It is one of the earliest descriptions anywhere of how a flute was actually made.
900
c. 800–1000 CE
The Bhagavata Purana, most likely written down between about 800 and 1000 CE, tells how the cowherd god Krishna played his flute in the forests of Vrindavan. The music was so beautiful that the gopis, the cowherd women, left their homes to follow it. Krishna the flute player, often called Venugopala, became one of the best-loved images in Indian art.
Why it mattered. Krishna's flute made the bamboo bansuri a sacred instrument that millions of people know by heart.
1000
c. 10th–12th century
Side-blown flutes seem to have reached Europe from Asia through the Byzantine Empire, and then spread to German-speaking lands and France. That is probably why Europeans long called it the German flute. The exact route and dates are uncertain because few early flutes survive.
Why it mattered. It brought the transverse flute into the music that would later grow into the orchestra.
1285
c. 1285
The French poet Adenet le Roi mentioned the side-blown flute in a poem written around 1285. It is usually counted as the first literary reference to the transverse flute in western Europe.
Why it mattered. Words in old books help historians track instruments that have rotted away.
1450 – 1830
Makers in Paris reshape the flute in joints with one key. Kings and teachers write the first flute lessons, while in Japan monks play the shakuhachi as meditation.
1475
c. 1470s
From about the 1470s Swiss soldiers used small, shrill side-blown flutes called fifes, with drums, to send signals. As Swiss troops fought across Europe, the instrument spread with them. By the late 1500s flutes were also playing in court and theatre music.
Why it mattered. A loud, simple military flute helped carry the transverse flute into every corner of Europe.
1650
c. 1600s
In Edo-period Japan, wandering komusō monks wore basket hats over their heads and played the shakuhachi, an end-blown bamboo flute with five holes. For them it was a tool for meditation, which they called suizen, blowing Zen. After the sect was abolished in the 1800s, the shakuhachi became a musical instrument anyone could learn.
Why it mattered. The shakuhachi shows the same edge-tone trick used for a completely different purpose: calming the mind.
1680
c. 1670s–1680s
Toward the end of the 1600s, makers in Paris, apparently the Hotteterre family, rebuilt the flute. They made it in separate joints with a tapering (conical) inside and added one key for the little finger. The new flute was sweeter, better in tune and could play music written for violins.
Why it mattered. Its one key was the first step on the road to the many-keyed modern flute.
1707
Jacques-Martin Hotteterre published Principes de la flûte traversière, a guide to the transverse flute, the recorder and the oboe. It showed how to hold the flute, shape the lips and finger each note. It is the earliest known method book for the transverse flute in any language.
Why it mattered. It turned flute playing into a skill that anyone could learn from a book.
1741
December 1741
When Frederick II became King of Prussia, his flute teacher Johann Joachim Quantz joined his court for good. Frederick reportedly played several sonatas and concertos at concerts every evening. Quantz made eleven flutes for him and added a second key to help with tuning.
Why it mattered. A royal flute player made the flute fashionable across Europe.
1752
Quantz published a long treatise on playing the flute, called Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen. It covers breathing, tonguing, ornaments and good taste in music, not just the flute. Musicians still read it to learn how Baroque music was played.
Why it mattered. It is one of the most important music books of the 1700s, and it started from the flute.
1830 – 1900
Theobald Boehm uses science to place big holes in the right spots and invents keys to close them. His metal flute becomes the modern concert flute, and physicists explain the air column.
1832
In 1831 the Munich flautist and goldsmith Theobald Boehm heard the English player Charles Nicholson in London, whose flute had extra large holes and a huge sound. The next year Boehm built a new conical flute with holes placed for good tuning, not for easy reach. Rings and linked keys let nine fingers open and close all the holes.
Why it mattered. It put the holes where the physics wanted them and let a clever mechanism deal with the fingers.
1847
After acoustic studies with the scientist Karl von Schafhäutl, Boehm built a new flute of metal with a straight, cylindrical tube and a head joint that narrows in a smooth curve. Its holes were so big that fingertips could not cover them, so he covered them with keys. Almost every concert flute today follows this design.
Why it mattered. The Boehm flute gave the instrument a bigger, even sound and better tuning across all its notes.
1860
When Louis Dorus became professor of flute at the Paris Conservatoire in 1860, he persuaded the school to make the Boehm flute the official flute for its students. The maker Louis Lot became official supplier of flutes to the Conservatoire. Players trained there spread the new flute and a light, bright French style around the world.
Why it mattered. With Paris behind it, the Boehm flute beat its rivals and became the standard.
1877
1877–1878
In his book The Theory of Sound, Lord Rayleigh worked out the physics of air vibrating in pipes. He showed that the vibrating air pokes out a little past an open end, so the pipe acts as if it were longer, by roughly 0.6 times its radius. Flute makers still allow for this end correction when they place holes.
Why it mattered. It explains why the note of a flute depends on the length of air that rings, not just the length of the tube.
1900 – today
Indian masters turn the bamboo flute into a concert instrument, soloists fill halls, a woman breaks into the top chair of a great orchestra, and scientists finally explain the air jet.
1933
T. R. Mahalingam, known as Mali, gave his first concert at a festival in Chennai when he was only seven. He later used an eight-hole bamboo flute and new cross-fingerings, and he made the flute bend and slide between notes like a singing voice. Most Carnatic flute players today follow the style he created.
Why it mattered. He showed a bamboo flute could copy every curve of the human voice in South Indian music.
1940
1930s–1940s
Pannalal Ghosh, born in Barisal in 1911, took the simple folk bansuri and redesigned it for classical ragas. He made it much longer, about 32 inches, for a deep, rich tone, and added a seventh hole to reach an extra note in the low octave. Before him the bansuri was mostly a folk instrument in Hindustani music.
Why it mattered. He is widely called the father of the modern classical bansuri.
1941
Dayton C. Miller was an American physicist who studied sound and played the flute. He collected nearly 1,700 flutes and other wind instruments, including about 40 from the Munich workshops of Boehm and his successors, and they reached the Library of Congress in 1941. He also translated Boehm's book on the flute into English.
Why it mattered. His collection lets anyone study how the flute changed across centuries and continents.
1949
In 1949 the young French flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and his pianist hired a Paris concert hall for a whole evening of flute music, and it caused a sensation. Rampal went on to give about 120 concerts a year and make hundreds of recordings. He brought back forgotten Baroque music and inspired composers such as Poulenc to write new pieces.
Why it mattered. He turned the flute from an orchestra instrument into a solo star that filled concert halls.
1952
Doriot Anthony Dwyer won the job of principal flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1952. She is widely described as the first woman to hold a principal chair in a major American symphony orchestra. She played there for nearly 40 years, until 1990.
Why it mattered. She opened the top jobs in great orchestras to women musicians.
1960
The physicist Arthur Benade published a mathematical theory of how open and closed finger holes change the air column in a woodwind. He showed that a row of open holes acts like the end of the tube for low notes, but lets higher sounds leak past.
Why it mattered. It explained why hole size and spacing shape both the tuning and the tone of a flute.
1968
John Coltman, a physicist and keen flute player, measured what happens when a jet of air hits the far edge of a flute's mouth hole. He showed that waves travel along the jet, and the time they take to reach the edge helps decide which note sounds and how loud. Blowing faster lets the jet match a higher note, which is why flautists blow harder for the upper octave.
Why it mattered. It explained the edge tone, the heart of every flute, from bone flutes to the bansuri.
2000
Hariprasad Chaurasia, born in Allahabad in 1938, became the best-known bansuri player in the world. He played with musicians such as George Harrison, John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain. In 2000 India gave him the Padma Vibhushan, its second-highest civilian honour.
Why it mattered. He carried the bamboo flute of Krishna to audiences on every continent.
Did you know?
A 9,000-year-old crane-bone flute from Jiahu in China can still be played today.
The Hohle Fels vulture-bone flute was found in 12 pieces and fitted back together.
A flute has no reed: the thin jet of air flipping to and fro across the edge of the mouth hole does the job a reed would do.
Frederick the Great owned eleven flutes made by his teacher Quantz, who wrote about 300 flute concertos.
Boehm's 1847 flute had holes too big for fingertips, so they had to be closed by keys.
The people
1674 – 1763 · Flautist, maker and teacher · France
Wrote the first known method book for the transverse flute, in 1707.
1697 – 1773 · Flautist, composer and flute maker · Germany
Taught Frederick the Great, wrote about 300 flute concertos and a famous treatise on playing.
1794 – 1881 · Flautist, goldsmith and inventor · Germany
Designed the ring-key flute of 1832 and the metal cylindrical flute of 1847 that became the modern flute.
1911 – 1960 · Bansuri player and composer · India (born in Barisal, now Bangladesh)
Lengthened the bansuri and added a seventh hole, making it a classical concert instrument.
1926 – 1986 · Carnatic flautist · India
A child prodigy whose eight-hole flute and singing style shaped Carnatic flute playing.
1922 – 2020 · Orchestral flautist · USA
Principal flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1952 to 1990.
1922 – 2000 · Solo flautist · France
Made the flute a popular solo instrument with hundreds of recordings.
1934 – 2015 · Carnatic flautist · India
Brought Pannalal Ghosh's idea of the long, deep flute into Carnatic music.
born 1938 · Bansuri player and composer · India
The world's best-known bansuri player, awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2000.
1915 – 2010 · Physicist and flautist · USA
Measured how the air jet at the mouth hole drives the flute's sound.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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