A member of the woodwind family, the recorders history is not well known, although examples of it can be found in medieval paintings, and what appears to be a recognizable recorder-type instrument dating back to the Iron Age has been found although it is made of sheep bone rather than wood! The instrument, however, often gets a bad press, largely due to peoples recollections of struggling to learn the instrument in the classroom or perhaps being unfortunate enough to have to teach the instrument to several new classes each and every year.
Considering the fact that it is so commonly used as a learning instrument, it is actually quite difficult to get a smooth, warm tone out of a recorder, and very easy to end up with a screech or a bending note. However, with practice, the recorder can be made to produce a beautiful sound, with its distinct warm, woody tones and even vibrato. The instrument was certainly taken seriously during the Renaissance; Bach, Purcell and Vivaldi wrote music for it.
School Use
There are plenty of very good reasons why the recorder has entrenched itself in the national psyche as a school instrument. First, it is relatively cheap to...
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