Music: As Easy As Lying

It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. So said Hamlet, explaining how to play a recorder.

Now Hamlet's ancient pipe is discoursing again.

The recorder was antique even in Shakespeare's time. Although in England and Germany the recorder never quite became extinct, elsewhere it became a museum piece like the crwth (a type of Welsh fiddle), the nose flute, the theorbo. Five years ago, when a man asked for a recorder at G. Schirmer,...

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