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The elegant, keyless, cylindrical flute of the sixteenth century had a reedy, penetrating sound, closer to the cornetto than to any other wind instrument of the day. It had an impressive range of two and a half octaves and an evenness of tone quality that would not be matched again until the nineteenth century. Its dynamic flexibility and responsiveness to subtleties of articulation endowed it with a vocal quality. And, for all its outward simplicity, it was capable of a startling virtuosity. Together with its bass and descant variants, it played a full part in that distinctive sixteenth-century musical phenomenon: the instrumental consort. The very idea of such a consort swept across Europe like a scented breeze intimating the coming of spring. It brought the promise of new possibilities of expression and participation in music making. It is hard not to see in the consort principle, with all its various implications for communal music-making, both a product and an instrument of humanist influence.
