recordour

The recorder's name comes from Middle English recordour, from Old French recorder, which meant 'to sing, to warble, to practice a tune.' The Old French word came from Latin recordārī (to remember, to call to mind), but the French sense had drifted from 'remembering' to 'singing' — as in, a bird recalling and repeating a melody. An instrument that 'recorded' was one that sang or warbled. The word has no connection to audio recording, which took its name from the same Latin root through a different path.

The recorder was one of the most important instruments of the Renaissance. Henry VIII owned 76 of them. Shakespeare mentions the recorder in Hamlet (1601): 'Will you play upon this pipe?' The instrument was taken seriously by composers and courts. Giovanni Gabrieli, Heinrich Schütz, and later Bach and Handel wrote for it. The baroque recorder — made of boxwood or ivory, with a warm, focused tone — was a professional instrument.

The recorder's decline began in the mid-1700s when the transverse flute replaced it in orchestras. The flute was louder, had better intonation, and projected further in large halls. By 1800, the recorder had virtually disappeared from professional music. It survived in museum collections and antiquarian interest, dormant for over a century.

The recorder's resurrection came from an unlikely source: music education. Arnold Dolmetsch revived the instrument in the early 1900s as part of the early music movement. By the 1960s, schools worldwide adopted the cheap plastic recorder as a beginner's instrument. The instrument that Henry VIII collected and Hamlet mocked became the first instrument millions of children learn — and often the only one they ever play. The warbling bird became a classroom squeaker.