Voice flute
The voice flute (also the Italian flauto di voce and the French flûte de voix are found in English-language sources) is a recorder with the lowest note of D4, and is therefore intermediate in size between the alto and tenor recorders.
Although sometimes regarded as a small tenor, a tone higher than the usual one in C4 (Montagu 2007, 56; Rowland-Jones 1995b, 51), it was treated historically and is most often in modern times described as a large alto (Bergmann 1961, 228; Hunt 1983, 227; Maclagan 2009; O'Kelly 1990, 24; Seyfrit 2003). Though it has been speculated that the name might refer to the instrument's range, which is roughly equivalent to that of the soprano voice, the origin of the term "voice flute" is obscure (Hunt 1957, 86; Maclagan 2009).
Revived in the early twentieth century along with other sizes of recorder, it is used today as it was in the eighteenth century—as a substitute for the transverse flute—though it also has a small repertory of music composed specially for it, from both the Baroque and modern periods.
The voice flute was a popular size of recorder in the eighteenth century, especially in England. It offered an alternative instrument for amateurs to play music written for the transverse flute, since both instruments are at the same pitch. The usual clef used for recorder parts was the French violin clef, with G on the bottom line of the staff. Imagining this clef in place of the treble clef and using the normal F-alto fingerings on a voice flute renders music composed for flute or violin in the original key (Rowland-Jones 1995b, 51). Although the rather large number of surviving eighteenth-century voice flutes suggests this may have been a common practice at that time, there is little documentary evidence to support the idea (Davis 1983, 63; Montagu 2007, 56). Parts intended for this instrument were also often written in transposed notation, so the player could imagine he was playing an ordinary alto in F (Montagu 2007, 56; Seyfrit 2003).
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