Pipe with a Pedigree

This summer, in such diverse settings as a Universalist church on Cape Cod, a 16th century hacienda near Taxco, Mexico, and a leafy glade on the shores of California's Lake Arrowhead, hundreds of amateur U.S. musicians are taking part in a series of workshops. Their subject: advanced noodling. Their instrument: the recorder, a kind of glorified penny whistle with a pedigree.

Among today's grand array of orchestral instruments, the humble recorder -- usually a foot-long wooden pipe with seven holes for the fingers and one for the thumb -- looks like a pipsqueak. Yet its sweet warblings, wistful twitters and charming coos work such a Pied Piper spell over modern audiences that the recorder has become the fastest-rising instrument in the U.S. With more amateurs taking up the recorder than the violin, cello, viola and bass combined, the number of players has climbed from 100,000 in 1955 to 750,000 last year. The American Recorder Society now boasts 53 chapters in the U.S. and Canada, as well as a learned quarterly, The American Recorder. Fo cal point for much of the interest is on campus, where professional recorder players draw packed audiences. In par lors, schools and summer resorts, week end musicians are meeting to play in everything from duets to 50-piece recorder orchestras.

As Easy as Lying. The recorder derives its name from the archaic meaning of the verb "record," that is, "to sing like a bird." Its origins have been traced to the 12th century, but its heyday came in the late 17th and early 18th century, when Bach, Purcell, Telemann, Vivaldi and Handel wrote a wealth of music for it. Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and Pepys celebrated its endearing combination of solemnity and sweetness, and King Henry VIII was an avid noodler on his collection of 77 recorders. As orchestras grew larger, however, the gentle voice of the recorder was replaced by the stronger tones of the transverse flute. Then, in the early 1920s, an English musician, Arnold Dolmetsch, began making and playing recorders, and started a revival that spread slowly to Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the U.S.

The comeback of the recorder has been stimulated by the resurgence of interest in baroque music. More than that, the instrument has several appealing points. It is inexpensive, ranging from $3 to $10 for popular home models, up to $700 for a seven-foot professional contrabass that resembles an anti tank weapon. It is easy on the neighbors, and playing it, as Hamlet observed, "is as easy as lying."

With just a few hours of practice, a neophyte can tootle Yankee Doodle, and in a matter of weeks he can play duets. On the other hand, real expertise is as difficult to achieve on the recorder as it is on the violin. There are only a handful of virtuosos: Holland's Frans Bruggen, Germany's Hans-Martin Linde and the U.S.'s Bernard Krainis and LaNoue Davenport.

And With a Future. The enthusiasm they have engendered has prompted such modern composers as Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Milhaud and Britten to enrich the recorder repertory with new works. Equally significant, a new generation of devotees is being bred in many U.S. elementary schools, where the recorder has been adopted as the primary tool for teaching music. With thousands of students being introduced to the recorder each year, it is certainly a flute with a future. Muses Los Angeles Recorder Enthusiast James Hartzell, a U.C.L.A. administrator: "In this mechanical age, many people have a real need to express themselves. Making music on the recorder is a great relief from work and the daily routine."

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