Enfilade

From Yale UP:

David Lasocki, Robert Ehrlich, Nikolaj Tarasov, and Michala Petri, The Recorder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300118704, $50.

The fascinating story of a hugely popular instrument, detailing its rich and varied history from the Middle Ages to the present

The recorder is perhaps best known today for its educational role. Although it is frequently regarded as a stepping-stone on the path toward higher musical pursuits, this role is just one recent facet of the recorder’s fascinating history—which spans professional and amateur music-making since the Middle Ages. In this new addition to the Yale Musical Instrument Series, David Lasocki and Robert Ehrlich trace the evolution of the recorder. Emerging from a variety of flutes played by fourteenth-century soldiers, shepherds, and watchmen, the recorder swiftly became an artistic instrument for courtly and city minstrels. Featured in music by the greatest Baroque composers, including Bach and Handel, in the twentieth century it played a vital role in the Early Music Revival and achieved international popularity and notoriety in mass education. Overall, Lasocki and Ehrlich make a case for the recorder being surprisingly present, and significant, throughout Western music history.

David Lasocki, formerly head of music reference services at Indiana University Bloomington, has been a researcher of the recorder for over fifty years. Robert Ehrlich is professor of recorder at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction — David Lasocki
1  The Era of Medieval Recorders, 1300–1500 — David Lasocki
2  The Era of Renaissance Recorders, 1501–1667 — David Lasocki
3  The Era of the Baroque Recorder, 1668–1800 — David Lasocki
4  Duct Flutes in the Nineteenth Century — Nikolaj Tarasov
5  The Recorder in the Twentieth Century — Robert Ehrlich
Epilogue — Michala Petri

Notes
Bibliography
Index