It’s crucialy important to understand the difference between flute making, flute repair, and flute restoration. In particular historical restoration.

I think I’ve been particularly lucky in that my path through making, repair, and onto restoration began in the era where very many people in Ireland played 19th century, and even occasionally 18th century flutes.
In those years, which probably extended up to the early 1990s, I believe I worked on something approaching the entire canon of English/London made simple system flutes, certainly those that were made in any quantity, accumulating in the process a huge reservoir of knowledge of their design, materials, and workmanship.

In my mind, the process of restoration is simple. To the greatest extent possible, to return the instrument to it’s original condition, using historically accurate materials and techniques.

But of course it’s not quite that simple, but to make it as simple as possible there are, I think, two basic approaches.

Firstly, to be meticulous with techniques and materials, to the extent that forbids the use of, for example, modern adhesives, or carbon fibre reinforcement.

This approach is taken to the extreme by some museum conservators, as epitomised in “The Care of Historic Musical Instruments. Robert L. Barclay Ed.” some of whom believe that no original elements of a woodwind instrument should be replaced or modified, essentially condemning them to silence.

Also note the difference in approach to stringed instruments.

Consider…If the mid 19th revolution fronted by Boehm hadn’t happened, and the simple system flute was still the norm, how would that affect the conservation/modification argument?
Remember that possibly the best known musical instruments in the world, the violins of the Italian makers such as Stradivarius, Amati, Guarnerius, have been so modified for modern use – necks shortened, neck angle changed, steel strings with a much higher tension resulting in reinforcement of the sound board – that the sound is now totally different to the original makers intention.

But then…
What might be considered a more pragmatic approach, which allows some modern materials, particularly where these are not visible on the surface as it were.

An important thing to be remembered is that the original makers did not make the instruments with this sort of restoration in mind. A cracked head joint would often be replaced, not repaired, and perhaps not even by the original maker.

The elephant in the room here (in a sense literally, given CITES legislation) is the dilemma of preserving the physical structure of a musical instrument or preserving the function ( as a tool for making music) that was originally intended.

There’s no simple answer to this, but you’ll find something of my approach to this area in some of the posts on my FLUTEMAKER BLOG.

Since closing the order book, historical restoration has been my main area of interest, so I’m interested in hearing from those looking to have flutes restored.