The Making of World Flutes

All cultures have their specific ways of constructing their flutes, which fit within their particular and usually unwritten music theories, aesthetics, and practices. Folktales and mythology, like music iconography, however, offer very little reliable descriptive information about flute construction techniques or even flutes as material objects; artistic license, such as exaggeration, understatement, ambiguity, hyperbole, deception, exists in both the narrative and visual arts. To understand why cultures construct their flutes in the ways they do, the narrative arts with their use of metaphor, symbolism, double entendre, and other ways of saying (and writing or singing) things often provide indigenous perspectives about processes, including flute construction. This chapter discusses the construction of some world flutes in three case studies: the Warao of Venezuela, the Buganda of Uganda, and the Japanese.