Late one evening in 1919, the Dolmetsch family joined a huge crowd of people waiting for a train at Waterloo Station in London. The family was returning home from a concert at which they had performed. Inside one of their bags was an old kind of duct flute called a recorder.

At that time, recorders were rare instruments.

Seven-year-old Carl Dolmetsch put the bag down to rest his arms. Just then, the platform gates opened and the crowd of travellers surged forward. It was only when the train left the station that Arnold Dolmetsch discovered that his son had left the bag on the platform! The rare recorder was lost!

Arnold Dolmetsch set about making a new recorder in his workshop. Fortunately, he had made careful drawings and measurements of the old recorder. But it took a long time before Arnold was satisfied with the new instrument. He decided to make more recorders so that more people could learn to play them. The Dolmetsch family set up production in a factory. By the 1930s, the recorder was becoming as popular an instrument as it had been 200 years before.

Are you wondering what happened to the recorder that was lost at Waterloo Station? Well, many years later it was found for sale in a junk shop. It was returned to the Dolmetsch family.

And Carl, the seven-year-old who lost it? He grew up to be a talented musician and craftsman.

In and out of favour

When the recorder was a fashionable instrument in Europe, composers wrote pieces of music especially for groups of recorder players. Then musical fashions changed. Composers began writing music for larger and larger orchestras. Audiences enjoyed listening to dramatic music in large concert halls. But the recorder was not suited to large places — it is best suited to small, intimate musical gatherings where its gentle sound can be appreciated. So people stopped playing and making recorders.

Today, the recorder is popular again, thanks largely to the Dolmetsch family. Recorders are not too expensive to buy or difficult to learn to play, so they are a good instrument for young people to choose. Recorders come in different sizes. The large recorder is the bass, which plays the low notes. The smallest is the sopranino, which plays the highest notes.

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dodoEntertainment, Home Theater, Multimedia, Music13 Nov, 2008