Goulding & Co. Boxwood & Ivory 1-Key, D

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

A nice player with a sweet, resonant tone. It sits around A=430 when cold and comes up to somewhere near A=438 to 440 once thoroughly warmed. The pinned cracks are holding really well and the whole instrument seals nicely.

Dark-stained boxwood with ivory mounts and a single silver key. The wood is dark through and through, inside and out, though the socket end has rubbed lighter over the years, which is what points to a stain rather than a naturally dark timber. The head joint is unlined and the tone holes are small.

The pitch settles a question worth raising, since flutes of this shape are sometimes taken for baroque traversos. At A=438 to 440 this is a classical-period English flute rather than a baroque instrument; English flutes around 1800 sat near A=437, where a traverso would be expected at A=415 or below. The unlined head points the same way, to construction before Richard Potter's tuning-slide barrel became universal in the 19th century.

The barrel is stamped GOULDING & Co over LONDON. Goulding was one of the great Georgian music houses, founded by George Goulding in the mid-1780s, music sellers to the Prince and Princess of Wales, and trading from New Bond Street between 1804 and 1808. The firm passed through a well-documented series of partnership names, including Goulding, Phipps & D'Almaine from 1798, Goulding, D'Almaine & Potter from around 1810, and Goulding & D'Almaine from 1823. The plain GOULDING & Co mark on this flute, with no partners' names, therefore belongs to the earliest phase of the business, and comparable one-key examples carrying it are catalogued to between 1787 and 1810. Sources differ on whether the firm built instruments in its own workshop or stamped work bought in from trade makers, so the flute is best described as a Goulding-marked instrument of that period rather than attributed to a named hand.