Flute rental from Presto Instruments

Flutes were originally made out of animal bones and were used in Europe in the Paleolithic era. It was not until the sixteenth century during the Renaissance period that the prototype of the flute that plays such a prominent role in the modern orchestra first emerged and came into widespread use.

The term “flute” was originally applied both to pipe instruments held sideways and pipe instruments held vertically. Thus, the vertically held recorder was also called a “flute.” Up until around the middle of the eighteenth century (the era of Baroque music), the word “flute” was commonly used to describe the recorder. To distinguish the transverse flute from the recorder, it was referred to in Italian as the flauto traverso, in German as the Querflöte, and in French as the flûte traversière-all of which mean “sideways held flute.”