Schuster Boxwood & Ivory 1-Key, D

Note: Due to the ivory rings, this flute is only available for sale in the US.

Pitched at A=430, with a small oval embouchure and small tone holes. Recently cleaned, oiled, repadded and rethreaded here, and in very nice shape considering its age.

A beautiful piece of boxwood, with ivory rings and a single key. The foot ring appears to be a later replacement in an imitation ivory.

The pitch is worth commenting on, since one-key flutes of this shape are sometimes taken for baroque traversos. At A=430 this sits squarely in the classical and early nineteenth century band, where a baroque instrument would be expected at A=415 or below, so this is a simple-system one-key flute rather than a traverso.

The stamp reads SCHUSTER over NEUKIRCHEN. That place name is itself a dating clue: the town in the Saxon Vogtland was renamed Markneukirchen by royal decree from Dresden in 1858, so a flute marked simply NEUKIRCHEN was most likely made before that date. Woodwind making there is documented from the 1770s, and the town's own instrument museum names Schuster among the founding families of the local woodwind trade, alongside Jäger, Jehring, Lederer, Liebel, Otto and Zencker. Production in that period was workshop-based, individual masters working with family successors, rather than the factory output that came later in the century. The museum holds seven instruments from the workshop of Christian Gottfried Schuster, who worked from 1781 to 1839, including two flutes; whether this instrument came from that particular Schuster workshop or another of the family's is not something we can confirm.