Boring for Britain (Dolmetsch Recorders 1920–1980): six brief addenda

Abstract

The parent article to which these six addenda relate appeared in The Galpin Society Journal 76 (2023), pp.32–66; 212–214: ‘Boring for Britain: the Design, Development and Mass Deployment of Dolmetsch Recorders, 1920-1980’. They cover the following topics:

1. Why Dolmetsch recorders were made at low pitch, a1415, in the 1920s and 1930s.
2. Which of two early Dolmetsch recorders owned by F.G. Rendall, now in the University of Edinburgh’s Rendall Collection of Woodwind Instruments, was more probably presented to Rendall as a thank-you gift when he found and returned Arnold Dolmetsch’s lost Bressan treble.
3. When Dolmetsch recorders at high pitch, a1439/440, became generally available.
4. Why Carl Dolmetsch talked of the Stanesby design inspiration behind Dolmetsch recorders, when Arnold had started making them to replace his lost Bressan.
5. How recorders made by Robert Goble in his Headington, Oxford workshop (1947–c1954) compare with Dolmetsches of contemporaneous and rather earlier date.
6. Whether Arnold Dolmetsch was right to claim, as he did in 1915, that the range of the baroque recorder was ‘chromatically complete’ over two octaves and one note. If every note could be played perfectly in tune by those who ‘kn[e]w how to manage the instrument’, even treble top f3 (descant c3), then Carl Dolmetsch’s much later invention of f3 (c3) keywork solved a non-existent problem. His reasons for inventing keywork are considered here, in an effort to resolve apparent contradiction.

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