An excerpt from

Discourse on the Flute

by Lambros Demetrios Callimahos

May 14, 1931, New York City

Music is one of the fine arts. The goal of music is in the fulfillment of aesthetic ideals. Beauty is the only excuse for art. Beauty in the playing of an instrument is the intangible element to be striven for, whether the beauty lies in the warmth or depth of tone, in the phrasing, in the eveness of execution, in a prodigious technique, or in the graceful appearance of playing. The artist always has the first three: the charlatan usually has the last two.

The flute is a tube, closed at one end and pierced with holes at intervals on which the sound is produced by lateral insufflation of the breath impinged at an angle of about seven degrees on an opening called the embouchure. That same mechanical apparatus however, can be the medium with which to express an artist's thoughts. That alters the status of the flute from a mechanical contraption to a musical instrument. A music box is a contraption.

The prime consideration in flute playing, or in the playing of any instrument, is the aesthetic. It is on this principle that this essay is written. An artist is a musician who has technical mastery of an instrument. A virtuoso has the technical mastery, but doesn't have to be a musician. The artist looks at technique from the aesthetic side, the virtuoso from the brute mechanical side. The artist moves, the virtuoso amazes. As the artist employs his technique only to project the idea intended, he employs a more artistic fingering if possible, as long as tone quality and intonation are the same, in lieu of a crude technical difficulty.

The ideal flute from an aesthetic standpoint would be one without a mechanism and therefore without technical difficulties, and whose tones would be governed by the artist's telepathic impulses. This would relieve the mind of materialistic technical matters and give full sway to the expression of the musical thought, unhampered by physical obstacles. Since however we exist in the realist's material world, the corollary to the non-existent "psychic flute" is a flute of the least complicated construction. This is the six- holed keyless old system flute.

Unfortunately, as for many reasons of tone, timbre, and temperament, not to mention the absence of facility of execution, this must be rejected, we pass successively but unsuccessfully to flutes of from one to thirteen keys. Even though the thirteen-keyed flute, the pinnacle of perfection in the old system, offers greater technical facility, it's notorious inaccuracies of tone, timbre, and temperament deem a consideration of flutes of a different principle.

Such as principle was evolved in 1832 when Theobald Boehm invented a system of open keys, constructing a flute having equality of tone, timbre, and temperament, combined with great ease of execution as compared to the old flute. Before this there were several attempts made to design an ideal system of keys, but since they were not open-keyed, they met with failure. My worthy predecessors, Boehm, Dayton C. Miller, Richard S. Rockstro, and Christopher Welch have all shown in their respective works the merits of an open-keyed flute and have proven that an ideal flute must be of this construction, in conjunction with a cylindrical bore and a headjoint approximately the shape of a truncated parabolic conoid, or the frustrum of a parabaloid.