The Division Flute

After years of Puritan rule, when making music in public could land you in serious trouble, Charles II came swanning back from France in 1660 with a head full of Lully and a taste for continental excess. Overnight, the nation decided that silence was un-English. Everyone who was anyone began sawing away at violins, puffing earnestly into flutes, or bashing any object capable of producing a vaguely French noise. If it sounded like it might accompany a minuet in Versailles, it was in.

This craving for all things continental created the sort of market that, by 1706, coughed up The Division Flute.

The Puritan Interregnum and the Birth of a Market

Here's what happens when you ban public music-making: it goes underground.

During the Commonwealth, musicians and composers fled to aristocratic households, playing in private chapels where Cromwell's enforcers couldn't reach them. But something unexpected emerged from this repression: a market for amateur music. People wanted to play at home. They wanted instruction books, collections of tunes, methods that could turn a moderately talented gentleman or lady into a passable performer.

John Playford saw the opportunity and ran with it. The son of a Norwich family, Playford was apprenticed on March 23, 1639/40 to John Benson, a stationer in St. Dunstan's Churchyard, and took up his Freedom on April 5th, 1647.¹  During his apprenticeship, Benson employed Thomas Harper as printer, the same Harper who used the printing materials and music-types that had formerly belonged to Thomas Este, and "for close on a hundred years, until the presses and types passed to the Crown in 1686, a great deal of all the music published in England was printed with those same types.² This connected Playford directly to the Elizabethan golden age of music printing.

Playford then held the position of clerk to The Temple Church and established his shop and dwelling house near its door. Throughout 'the whole forty years of his trading,' Playford 'won the trust and friendship—or more truly the affection—of the musicians who contributed to his publications and of the amateurs who bought them.'³ By the time the Restoration arrived, the infrastructure was already in place.

Evidence of this emerging market appears in unexpected places. Playford's wife Hannah ran a boarding school for 'young gentlewomen' in Islington during the late 1650s where students were "instructed in all manner of curious work, as also reading, writing, musick, dancing, and the French tongue." Clear evidence that musical instruction persisted even during Puritan rule.4 That such schools operated openly during the Commonwealth suggests the authorities' grip on private music-making was never absolute.

Playford's attention to provincial customers was not mere marketing rhetoric. Surviving evidence demonstrates that his books circulated far beyond London, reaching Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Northamptonshire.⁵ The Henry Atkinson manuscript, compiled in Northumberland in 1694/5, contains tunes copied from Playford sources, showing how this printed repertoire penetrated even remote regions.⁶ Distribution networks included regional booksellers (William London in Newcastle-upon-Tyne stocked ten Playford titles in his 1657 catalogue⁷) as well as music teachers, London-based agents, and family networks supplying provincial amateurs with metropolitan publications.

What the Restoration changed was the aesthetics. The court returned, and with it came wave after wave of continental musicians.

The Violin Invades England

Before the Restoration, the violin was almost exclusively a court instrument in England, played mostly by imported continental musicians. The English preferred their viols, thank you very much. Quieter, more suited to polite company. But Charles II had spent his exile soaking up French musical culture, and when he reclaimed the throne, he brought those tastes home with him.

The Italian virtuoso Nicola Matteis arrived and caused absolute pandemonium with his playing. Giovanni Battista Draghi settled in London in the 1660s and never left, working in the court and theatre. The Albrici brothers sang in an exclusive Italian ensemble at court from 1663. They were showing the English something they'd never quite heard before: the violin as a solo instrument capable of astonishing technical display.

What's Actually in The Division Flute

The transverse flute was virtually unknown in England at this point. The recorder had been introduced from France in the 1670s and had become fashionable among amateurs. Walsh's collection features nineteen divisions on a ground, showcasing various approaches to melodic elaboration.

Rather than pieces to perform, these are study materials. Examples. Templates for improvisation. The ability to extemporise divisions on a ground was a valued skill, something you'd demonstrate in polite company or in the tavern or wherever musicians gathered. Samuel Pepys certainly thought so. He recorded buying a copy of The Musical Companion on April 15, 1667, noting he 'found a great many new fooleries in it,' and three days later he 'tried two or three grave parts in Playford's new book.'⁸

Despite Playford's marketing claims of enabling self-instruction 'without the Assistance of any Teachers,' his prefatory material consistently acknowledges the need for professional guidance.⁹ In Musick's Hand-maid (1678), he suggests that 'a little assistance from an able Master' would help students master the lessons, and Thomas Greeting's Pleasant Companion similarly directs beginners to seek 'a little assistance of a skilful Master.'¹⁰ Rather than replacing teachers, these printed collections served as teaching aids and standardised repertoire that saved teachers from writing out examples repeatedly while providing students with materials to practice between lessons.¹¹

Playford's Catch that Catch Can found particular success in London's tavern culture. Roger North described a tavern near St Paul's where amateur musicians gathered weekly, noting that 'their musick was chiefly out of Playford's Catch Book,' demonstrating how print enabled recreational music-making beyond elite circles and formal music meetings.¹² This 'Mutuall Society of Friends in a Modest Recreation' (the phrase Playford used to describe his target audience) represented the urban 'middling sort': shopkeepers, foremen, and professional men for whom regular payments to private teachers 'were close to the limit of what seemed affordable.'¹³

The Division Flute and its predecessor The Division Violin were showing you how it could be done, not giving you finished works to parrot back.

The first part of The Division Flute adapts pieces from The Division Violin with modifications to accommodate the recorder's range and capabilities. Different keys, reordered divisions, that sort of thing. The grounds themselves often derived from folk tunes, popular songs, or dance music. Everyone knew these tunes. That was rather the point. You'd recognise the foundation and be impressed by the inventiveness of what the performer built on top of it.

It's worth noting that it is very rare to find these tunes in print before 1651. Probably not more than a score of them appear in earlier publications, and those only in Netherlands collections of the first third of the century. The tunes appear primarily in manuscripts: 'the Fitzwilliam and Lady Nevell's Virginal Books, very occasionally in Cosyn's Virginal Book, Ballet's, Dallis', Elizabeth Rogers' and Jane Pickering's Lute Books, and a few in the lute-collections at Cambridge.'¹⁴ This manuscript circulation is precisely what makes the tradition so fluid and collaborative.

The Manuscript Underground

What makes this repertoire fascinating is how fluid it was. There's a whole network of manuscript sources showing bass viol players, violinists, and recorder players all working with the same material, adapting it to their instruments, swapping techniques, nicking each other's best ideas.

When Playford published The Division Violin in 1684, shortly before his death, he was drawing on material that had been circulating in manuscript among bass viol players. You can trace specific pieces back through various sources, each with different attributions, different strain orders, different embellishments. Take the divisions on Powlwheels Ground. Depending on which manuscript you consult, they're attributed to Powlwheel himself, or Henry Butler, or Peter Young, or Christopher Simpson.¹⁸ The uncertainty is such that even modern scholars remain "uncertain of the true attribution," though the various manuscript inscriptions—"Powlwheel," "P.W.'s own follow," and attributions to "Pol(e)wheele"—suggest Powlwheel himself may have written divisions on his own ground.¹⁹ The bass viol players had their versions. Then the violinists adapted them. Then the recorder players got hold of them.

This wasn't plagiarism. It was how music worked. You heard something good, you adapted it to your instrument, maybe you improved it, and the next person did the same. There's a Newberry Library manuscript that shows bass viol versions of pieces from The Division Violin, but with alterations that suggest the copyist was working from a later edition. You can track the evolution of single pieces across multiple sources, watching them mutate and develop.

The fluidity of ownership paralleled the fluidity of the texts themselves. Surviving copies show multiple owners over decades. One copy of Musick's Delight on the Cithren (1666) bears the signature 'Jarvis Houghman 1715,' while Durham University Library's Pleasant Companion (1676) contains three different owners' names, including both male and female signatures.¹⁵ Blank staves left by printers were regularly filled with additional ornaments, transposed parts, or entirely new pieces, turning printed books into personalised commonplace books that continued to grow throughout their working lives.¹⁶

The physical appearance of these books also tells us something about their nature. About a third of the tunes in The Dancing Master are printed in the 'Old French violin clef' and an assortment of small, archaic music type is used. It has sometimes been suggested that this archaic type may signify 'older' tunes, though this notion has no firm foundation. The varied notation more likely reflects Playford's need to 'scrape together a sufficiency of very small music type' from the available resources of Este's materials.¹⁷ The typography itself is evidence of material continuity with Elizabethan music printing.

Reading's Ground: The Continental Interloper

'Reading's Ground' is a chaconne that appears in several sources, traditionally attributed to the keyboardist John Reading, though Valentine Reading is now considered more likely. It first shows up for recorder in Humphrey Salter's The Genteel Companion (1683), and the versions in both The Division Violin and The Division Flute are simplified from that original.

What makes Reading's Ground distinctive is how thoroughly un-English it is. Most English chaconnes of this period use an ostinato bass, the same harmonic structure repeating throughout. Reading's Ground has a varying bass line, which is distinctly continental, particularly French and Italian. This style was virtually unknown in England before the 1680s and never really took hold. Even the cadences are wrong for English music. They resolve on the last beat of the bar, which is pure French baroque.

In The Division Violin, this is the only piece requiring scordatura tuning, one of the earliest English examples of printed violin scordatura (more on this can be found in The Viola d'Amore).

Though here's the thing: the scordatura isn't actually necessary in Reading's Ground. You can play the entire piece, including the double stops, on a conventionally tuned violin. So why retune? Either it's an association with the Austrian and Bohemian schools of playing, where scordatura was more common, or possibly it's borrowed from folk music practice. The retuning would emphasise sonority over virtuosity, which fits with the aesthetic values of the period.

Some editions tried to publish Reading's Ground with a fixed bass line, attempting to anglicise it into a proper 'ground.' It didn't work. The piece resists that kind of simplification. It remains what it is: a continental import that never quite naturalised.

Salter's Graces and the Art of Ornamentation

Salter's Genteel Companion gives us invaluable details about ornamentation. He explains the graces that recorder players were expected to master. The Beat, executed by shaking the finger on the designated hole and releasing it. The Shake, similar but explicitly marked in the notation. The Slur or Slide, connecting two or three notes with a single breath. The Slur and Beat, a more complex combination. The Double Shake, played by shaking the fourth finger of the left hand while maintaining the other fingers in position.

Cross-Pollination and Shared Repertoire

Several pieces appear in both The Division Violin and The Division Flute: Johney Cock Thy Beavor (also called Newmarket), Green Sleeves, Tollet's Ground. The differences are mostly practical adaptations. Different keys to suit the instrument's range. Octave jumps moved around. Old Simon the King varies more significantly, with notable differences in the bass line.

Old Simon the King has a whole editorial history of its own. The first edition of The Division Violin had errors. The 1685 'Second Edition, much enlarged' made corrections, replacing the eleventh strain with 'The Second Part' and removing a problematic B-flat from the key signature. If you want to perform this piece now, you should follow the later editions and the keyboard version from The Second Part of Musick's Hand-maid (1689), which omit that B-flat.

These variations show how fluid naming conventions and musical transmission were in seventeenth-century England. There wasn't always a single authoritative version. There were versions, plural, each shaped by the needs and capabilities of different instruments and performers.

The Genealogy of Division Playing

You can trace this tradition back through the sixteenth century. Diego Ortiz's Trattado de Glosas (1553) laid out ornamentation techniques for viols. Sylvestro Ganassi's Opera Intitulata Fontegara (1535) did similar work for recorders. Italian theorists and composers including Dalla Casa, Bassano, Rognoni, Bovicelli, and Virgiliano all contributed to this body of knowledge about how to elaborate a simple melodic line into something spectacular.

Christopher Simpson's The Division Viol (1659), subtitled The Art of Playing Ex Tempore upon a Ground, serves as the crucial English link in this chain. It's both an instructional treatise and a bridge between the long Italian tradition and the later English works like The Division Violin and The Division Flute. Simpson explained the principles clearly: here's your ground, here's how you think about dividing it, here are examples of increasing complexity, now go and do it yourself.

Editorial Choices in This Edition

For this transcription, I've made some deliberate choices that deviate from eighteenth-century English practice. I've included a basso continuo line throughout the divisions rather than providing a single line at the beginning or end. This allows for harmonic changes that complement the recorder line, a style that continental musicians were already using but that hadn't quite caught on in England yet.

Neither The Division Flute nor The Division Violin include figured bass numbers. I've kept editorial figures to a minimum but added them where they seemed necessary for clarity.

I've also included selected pieces by Gottfried Finger from his Collection of Musick in Two Parts (1691). Finger was part of that wave of continental musicians working in England, and his pieces provide useful context for understanding what influences were shaping English musical taste.

Why This Matters

The Division Flute represents a specific moment in musical history when improvisation was still central to performance practice, when notation was understood as a guide rather than a prescription, when musicians were expected to embellish and elaborate as a matter of course. It's easy to forget this now, when we treat printed music as almost sacred, when we talk about 'the composer's intentions' as if those intentions were frozen in notation.

But in 1706, music was alive in a different way. The ground was the skeleton. The divisions were the flesh you put on it. And every performer would do it differently, showing off their particular technical facility, their melodic inventiveness, their understanding of the instrument's capabilities.

This edition aims to make that tradition accessible again, to show how recorder players, violinists, and viol players were all drawing from the same well, adapting the same material to their different needs. It's a window into a musical culture that was far more collaborative and fluid than we sometimes imagine. A culture where the line between composition and improvisation was genuinely blurred, where performance was always also a kind of creation.