The flute, which requires no description, is, for instance, an essentially soulless instrument; but its marvellous agility and the effectiveness with which its tones can be blended with others make it one of the most useful instruments in the band.  Its native character, heard in the compositions written for it as a solo instrument, has prevented it from being looked upon with dignity.  As a rule, brilliancy is all that is expected from it.  It is a sort of soprano leggiero with a small range of superficial feelings.  It can sentimentalize, and, as Dryden says, be “soft, complaining,” but when we hear it pour forth a veritable ecstasy of jubilation, as it does in the dramatic climax of Beethoven’s overture “Leonore No. 3,” we marvel at the transformation effected by the composer.  Advantage has also been taken of the difference between its high and low tones, and now in some romantic music, as in Raff’s “Lenore” symphony, or the prayer of Agathe in “Der Freischuetz,” the hollowness of the low tones produces a mysterious effect that is exceedingly striking.  Still the fact remains that the native voice of the instrument, though sweet, is expressionless compared with that of the oboe or clarinet.  Modern composers sometimes write for three flutes; but in the older writers, when a third flute is used, it is generally an octave flute, or piccolo flute (Plate III.)—­a tiny instrument whose aggressiveness of voice is out of all proportion to its diminutiveness of body.  This is the instrument which shrieks and whistles when the band is playing at storm-making, to imitate the noise of the wind.  It sounds an octave higher than is indicated by the notes in its part, and so is what is called a transposing instrument of four-foot tone.  It revels in military music, which is proper, for it is an own cousin to the ear-piercing fife, which annually makes up for its long silence in the noisy days before political elections.  When you hear a composition in march time, with bass and snare drum, cymbals and triangle, such as the Germans call “Turkish” or “Janizary” music, you may be sure to hear also the piccolo flute.  The flute is doubtless one of the oldest instruments in the world.  The primitive cave-dwellers made flutes of the leg-bones of birds and other animals, an origin of which a record is preserved in the Latin name tibia.  The first wooden flutes were doubtless the Pandean pipes, in which the tone was produced by blowing across the open ends of hollow reeds.  The present method, already known to the ancient Egyptians, of closing the upper end, and creating the tone by blowing across a hole cut in the side, is only a modification of the method pursued, according to classic tradition, by Pan when he breathed out his dejection at the loss of the nymph Syrinx, by blowing across the tuneful reeds which were that nymph in her metamorphosed state.

[Sidenote:  Reed instruments.]

[Sidenote:  Double reeds.]