Speaker 1: You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio. Guess what, Mary, what's that?
Speaker 2: My gosh?
Speaker 1: So, do you know that in medieval times bad musicians
Speaker 1: were punished with something called the shame flute?
Speaker 2: Wait, medieval times the theme restaurant, or medieval times the
Speaker 2: historical period.
Speaker 1: Which is a good distinction, but I'm talking about the
Speaker 1: historical period, and shame flutes were the super weird form
Speaker 1: of medieval punishment, which I'm kind of obsessed with now. Basically,
Speaker 1: it was a heavy clarinet looking thing that was made
Speaker 1: of iron and attached to a metal collar. So if
Speaker 1: you're forced to play the shame flute, the color would
Speaker 1: hang around your neck, and then to hold it up,
Speaker 1: your hands would actually be like clasped or locked into
Speaker 1: place around the keys of this non playable clarinet. So basically,
Speaker 1: for offenders, it looked like you were holding up this
Speaker 1: ridiculous flute and playing it.
Speaker 2: So do you know what kind of musical crime would
Speaker 2: cause you to get sentenced to wear the shame flute?
Speaker 1: I don't really. There are a bunch of these shame
Speaker 1: flutes in various museums across Europe. A medieval crime museum
Speaker 1: in Rothenberg, Germany, and there's Amsterdam's Torture Museum, but they
Speaker 1: don't really specify the crimes. They mostly say it was
Speaker 1: for bad musicianship, so maybe it was just invented by
Speaker 1: medieval tiger parents to get their kids to practice more.
Speaker 1: But getting classed into a so called flute of shame
Speaker 1: was only part of the punishment, because after we were
Speaker 1: locked in, offenders would be paraded around the streets where
Speaker 1: the public could taunt them by throwing rotten fruits and
Speaker 1: vegetables at them. But that's just the first of nine
Speaker 1: essential flute facts we've got today, so let's dive in. Hey,
Speaker 1: their podcast listeners, welcome part time genius. I'm Mungishtigula, and
Speaker 1: today I've got my good friend Mary Philip Sandy sitting
Speaker 1: in the studio with me and on the other side
Speaker 1: of the soundproof glass wearing a novelty T shirt that,
Speaker 1: for some reason says my other flute is a shame flute.
Speaker 1: That's our pal Ramsey. What a bizarre shirt anyway, Mary,
Speaker 1: I am thrilled you're here. For listeners who don't know
Speaker 1: Mary is a quadruple hyphen It She was my savior
Speaker 1: on Skyline Drive and a few other shows that we
Speaker 1: made last year, and she's done everything from writing to
Speaker 1: researching to producing. And she's also the host extraordinaire of
Speaker 1: one of my favorite podcasts, ever, Let's Talk About Cats,
Speaker 1: And today I managed to wrangle her into the studio
Speaker 1: to talk about flutes. So, Mary, did you ever play
Speaker 1: the flute?
Speaker 2: So my musical ability is really limited in general and
Speaker 2: specifically to stringed instruments with no more than four strings.
Speaker 2: That's it, That's all I could do. I played the
Speaker 2: violin and the bass. I could not handle anything more
Speaker 2: complicated than that was it for me.
Speaker 1: And no ukuleles, innemics.
Speaker 2: Oh man, I should have thought how that?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: I didn't. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't.
Speaker 2: Maybe, you know what, I'll take it up this summer.
Speaker 1: Do your kids play any instruments?
Speaker 2: My son Julian just started playing the saxophone.
Speaker 1: How's that going?
Speaker 2: It's really annoying.
Speaker 1: I know. I think about all the instruments that like,
Speaker 1: we played in our house, and you know, we started
Speaker 1: on piano young, but every other instrument must have just
Speaker 1: been awful for my parents and for my dog, who
Speaker 1: used to howl when we played the violin or the.
Speaker 2: Clarinet in pain or like cheering you on.
Speaker 1: You know, I used to think it was dueting, but
Speaker 1: I think it's more paid. So why don't we get started?
Speaker 1: So very part of the reason I wanted to do
Speaker 1: an episode on flutes is that I know basically nothing
Speaker 1: about flutes, and also I feel like flutes are vaguely
Speaker 1: in the culture. Like I recently learned that Terry Cruz
Speaker 1: from Brooklyn nine to nine fame played the flute as
Speaker 1: a kid. Lizzo had that big incident where she got
Speaker 1: to play James Madison's crystal flute. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2: How could I forget?
Speaker 1: Yeah? You know what I didn't realize is Downy Madison
Speaker 1: I think saved that flute from the White House from
Speaker 1: a burn.
Speaker 2: It was one of the things that she grabbed when
Speaker 2: she was running out.
Speaker 1: And the library or Congress, which is where that flute
Speaker 1: is now has one of the largest flute collections in
Speaker 1: the world apparently, which is surprising. And of course there
Speaker 1: was Andre three thousand who put out that all flute
Speaker 1: solo album after I've read some quote where he was saying, like,
Speaker 1: what am I going to wrap about now? As a
Speaker 1: middle aged man like my colonoscopy, so he leaned into
Speaker 1: his flute instead, which I really love. So where do
Speaker 1: you want to start today?
Speaker 2: How about with a fact about recorders, which are the
Speaker 2: original flute. And well most of us know and probably
Speaker 2: dread recorders as an instrument of torture. Recorders are actually
Speaker 2: some of the oldest instruments we have. Some of them
Speaker 2: date back to the thirteen hundreds. They were made out
Speaker 2: of bone or wood or ivory, and they were the
Speaker 2: dominant type of flute for a very long time. King
Speaker 2: Henry the Eighth, when he wasn't divorcing people, kept a
Speaker 2: collection of seventy five recorders. He even used to compose
Speaker 2: recorder music, including a banger called if Love Now Reigned,
Speaker 2: maybe dedicated to one of his many wives, I don't know.
Speaker 2: And despite the way recorders are abused in elementary schools
Speaker 2: across the country, very serious composers like Bach, Handel and Vivaldi,
Speaker 2: they all wrote music for the recorder.
Speaker 1: So I've heard all of them, and I really had
Speaker 1: no idea that the recorder was this like serious classical instrument.
Speaker 1: It always feels like like kind of a joke to me.
Speaker 1: So why isn't the recorder taken seriously today?
Speaker 2: Things started to change for the recorder. When the transverse flute,
Speaker 2: you know the ones where you hold it horizontally and
Speaker 2: you blow across it. It's the thing you think of
Speaker 2: when you hear the word flute. Once those arrived from
Speaker 2: Asia in the fourteenth century, they kind of supplanted the recorder,
Speaker 2: and by the mid eighteen hundreds, recorders were no longer
Speaker 2: a part of orchestras or chamber music groups.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting. So I guess this gets into another fact.
Speaker 1: But do you know how recorders got into schools? I mean,
Speaker 1: I love my kids, I love my music. I love
Speaker 1: that my kids play music. But every year, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if you do this, I dread when I
Speaker 1: get that note from the school that the kids are
Speaker 1: going to learn the recorder. Has Julian done this too?
Speaker 2: No? No, he never got a recorder. He never got
Speaker 2: a recorder, straight to the saxophone.
Speaker 1: You are so lucky because I feel like I feel
Speaker 1: like our house is filled with these like squeaking nursery
Speaker 1: rhymes or it was. And I'm kind of embarrassed in
Speaker 1: with this, but we have this like one bookshelf that's
Speaker 1: particularly high. And I bet if you looked up there now,
Speaker 1: they're like three or four dusty recorders, just like it
Speaker 1: hidden because I got so sick of hearing all the squeaking.
Speaker 1: But so tell me how they got into schools.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, like I was saying, the recorder kind of
Speaker 2: disappears in the eighteen fifties, but then in the nineteen
Speaker 2: hundreds it gets rediscovered, and by the nineteen sixties it
Speaker 2: finds its way into pop music, like Paul McCartney plays
Speaker 2: it on the Beatles song Fool on the Hill. It
Speaker 2: gets used in some experimental and avant garde music. But
Speaker 2: there are kind of three main reasons that you find
Speaker 2: them in schools. One, they're simple to play. You can
Speaker 2: make a reasonably good sound by just blowing into it right.
Speaker 2: It's not like the trumpet where you need some technique
Speaker 2: to get it going to get a real sound. There's
Speaker 2: also this composer named Carl Orf who started advocating for
Speaker 2: the recorder in the mid nineteen hundreds. He was a
Speaker 2: big influence on musical education, and his whole thing was
Speaker 2: that if an instrument is easy to play and easy
Speaker 2: to understand, and if it's easy to mimic with your voice,
Speaker 2: like instead of rote memorization, if you can hear something
Speaker 2: and then play it, it helps with musical development.
Speaker 1: Which makes sense.
Speaker 2: It does, it really does. But then the third thing
Speaker 2: was the proliferation of plastic because suddenly you could get
Speaker 2: this instrument that schools could purchase for a few dollars
Speaker 2: or at bulk rates for even less. All of that
Speaker 2: made recorders the starter instrument of choice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which I'm sure is what the graduate they were
Speaker 1: alluding to with that one last plastics.
Speaker 2: The hidden meaning was recorders.
Speaker 1: So I've got a gross fact, and it's probably the
Speaker 1: grossest fact I've ever told on this show, and one
Speaker 1: I can't help from telling you. It's about this guy
Speaker 1: named Le Petomine, aka the Fartist. Do you know what
Speaker 1: this guy?
Speaker 2: Shockingly I don't.
Speaker 1: So he's a flatulence artist who, in I guess the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds only nineteen hundreds, became the highest paid
Speaker 1: performer in France. Apparently he was making over twenty thousand
Speaker 1: francs per show. But he used to appear at places
Speaker 1: like the Mulan Rouge and he'd just kill He would
Speaker 1: show up in a tux and then he had a
Speaker 1: whole routine of fart impressions he would do, from using
Speaker 1: the rude sound to imitate roosters to toads, to a
Speaker 1: dog whose tail got stuck in a door, to a
Speaker 1: mother in law. It just went on and on. But
Speaker 1: for his finale, according to slay dot com, he would
Speaker 1: quote play a flute backwards and then proceed to blow
Speaker 1: smoke rings out of it, which is all very strange.
Speaker 1: This is what Slate writes about it. Quote. Women in
Speaker 1: the audience, especially those wearing corsets, often laughed so hard
Speaker 1: they passed out. One man had a heart attack. The
Speaker 1: Mulan Rouge took advantage of this by stationing nurses around
Speaker 1: the theater and by posting warnings of how dangerous the
Speaker 1: show was, which of course only made people more eager
Speaker 1: to attend. And lest you feel guilty for giggling over
Speaker 1: toilet humor here orre too stuffy to see what's so funny,
Speaker 1: know that La Petromain hobnob with Renoir and Matisse, and
Speaker 1: that Revel adored him. It's high society. In fact, friendly
Speaker 1: Sigmund Freud was so obsessed with him that he kept
Speaker 1: a picture of him on his wall, which is so bizarre.
Speaker 2: I think that's an understatement. Well here's the fact that
Speaker 2: is a little more savory, but still a little scandalous.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and nine, a super devoted music student
Speaker 2: planned out this crazy museum heist just so that he
Speaker 2: could buy himself a new flute.
Speaker 1: So this sounds crazy already, But how expensive was this flute?
Speaker 2: Like tens of thousands of dollars. It was a serious flute.
Speaker 2: So the flute player's name is Edwin rist And in
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine he was studying at London's Royal
Speaker 2: Academy of Music. But according to news articles, he was
Speaker 2: also completely obsessed with James Bond, sure as one does.
Speaker 2: And he figured that a good way to make money
Speaker 2: is to boost something that isn't that important to science anymore,
Speaker 2: but that is still valuable. So he set his sights
Speaker 2: on a collection of bird skins at the Natural History
Speaker 2: Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire, his reasoning being that these
Speaker 2: are feathers and skins from over one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: Any scientific knowledge he can actually get from those things,
Speaker 2: it's been extracted decades ago. But there's an incredible market
Speaker 2: for eggs, feathers and skins in England. It's called the
Speaker 2: Feather Underground. That's a real thing. And Edwin knows he
Speaker 2: can sell these things online for a lot of money,
Speaker 2: so he takes time, He makes a plan, he scouts
Speaker 2: it all out. He pretends to be a grad student
Speaker 2: at Oxford and gets permission to go to the museum
Speaker 2: photograph the collection, maps out the layout of the building,
Speaker 2: and then he breaks in one night by throwing a
Speaker 2: brick at a window and sneaks in with latex gloves,
Speaker 2: a box cutter, a suitcase and fills up the suitcase
Speaker 2: with as many days birds as he can.
Speaker 1: Wait, so I feel like he's so James Bond that
Speaker 1: he breaks a window by throwing a break through.
Speaker 2: Wait, it gets even more, It gets even more Bond.
Speaker 2: Listen to this. He tries to make his get away,
Speaker 2: but he misses his train home, so he ends up
Speaker 2: having to sleep in the train station overnight, which definitely
Speaker 2: is the thing James Bond would do. But the thing
Speaker 2: is Edwin got away with it for like seven or
Speaker 2: eight months. It took the cops that long to catch
Speaker 2: up with him.
Speaker 1: And so how does everyone know about his flute obsession?
Speaker 2: Well, his eBay handle for selling all of this stuff
Speaker 2: online was Flute Player nineteen eighty eight, so that was
Speaker 2: that was the first clue. Sure, But when he was caught,
Speaker 2: he admitted that all his money had gone to a
Speaker 2: flute and he pleaded guilty to both the burglary and
Speaker 2: money laundering. But what's interesting is the judge took pity
Speaker 2: on him. He never really did serious jail time. He
Speaker 2: just graduated from music school, moved to Germany, and started
Speaker 2: making heavy metal flute videos on YouTube. You can find them.
Speaker 2: They're all there. He even doesn't all flute cover of
Speaker 2: Metallica's Master of Puppets.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. I feel like we need to make a
Speaker 1: Spotify list at the end of this for sure of
Speaker 1: heavy metal flute. So here is a dumb one. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite things is looking at ridiculous theories about instruments,
Speaker 1: Like there's this old theory from eighteen ninety six where
Speaker 1: American newspapers began declaring that they finally figured out what
Speaker 1: was causing male pattern baldness, and it turns out the
Speaker 1: culprit was brass instruments like marching bands and trumpets and
Speaker 1: traumbone sections. Or of the reason that America was going bald,
Speaker 1: and this kind of thing occurs for every instrument. This
Speaker 1: is from the site fizz dot org, but it claims
Speaker 1: that in the seventeen twenties, when the flute was more
Speaker 1: commonly played like a recorder like you were talking about,
Speaker 1: women were banned from playing the instrument, not just because
Speaker 1: it looked indecent, but also because it took away many
Speaker 1: of the juices better suited to wet ones, appetite, and
Speaker 1: advanced digestions. So for better digestive health, you don't want
Speaker 1: to play the flute. But flutes weren't just seen as detrimental.
Speaker 1: Other cultures, like the ancient Greeks, thought the flute had
Speaker 1: healing powers, and doctors of that time would claim that
Speaker 1: if you alternated listening to sounds from a flute and
Speaker 1: a harp, you could cure yourself of gout.
Speaker 2: That is a great tip, and we have got more facts,
Speaker 2: but before we get to them, let's take a break.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to part time Genius. We're talking about flutes. So, Mary,
Speaker 1: what do you have up next?
Speaker 2: Well, continuing on my bird theme, here's one. Here's one
Speaker 2: that's fun and I'm sure you've heard of, or maybe
Speaker 2: you haven't. Have you heard of liar birds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're kind of like mocking birds, or really good mimics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And in fact, one of the things
Speaker 2: that's interesting is that for decades now, liarbirds have been
Speaker 2: mimicking a song that they heard someone play on the flute. Apparently,
Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixties, this Australian park ranger named Sidney
Speaker 2: Curtis heard some lyrebirds singing what sounded like the hook
Speaker 2: or fragments of songs. He started looking into it and
Speaker 2: realized that a farmer in New South Wales had played
Speaker 2: these two popular songs from the nineteen thirties. One of
Speaker 2: them was called the keel Row and another was called
Speaker 2: the Mosquitoes Dance. He played them for birds in his
Speaker 2: backyard on the flute, and for some reason, the birds
Speaker 2: loved it. He must have been really good. As one
Speaker 2: ornithologist wrote in two thousand and six, quote today the
Speaker 2: flute song has been heard one hundred kilometers from the
Speaker 2: original source. A human tune is spreading through the lyre
Speaker 2: bird world as they've decided through generations to prefer just
Speaker 2: two shards of our particular music that's.
Speaker 1: Really funny, right, like instead of repeating things like who
Speaker 1: Let the Dogs Out? Or the Thong song. They've chosen
Speaker 1: these songs from the thirties to perpetuate. It's really wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even birds get earworms. So all right, you have
Speaker 2: for your last fact.
Speaker 1: Well, I had been thinking about it talking about Lizzo
Speaker 1: and that flute collection at the Library of Congress, but
Speaker 1: instead I think I'm going to talk about the hyper
Speaker 1: bass flute, which is this massive flute that bends in
Speaker 1: all directions. It kind of looks like someone's playing an anaconda,
Speaker 1: like it's super thick, and it's twenty six feet of
Speaker 1: flute that's bent into geometric shapes, and it is so
Speaker 1: rare that there are only two of them. I don't
Speaker 1: know why I'm so obsessed with it, but it's partially
Speaker 1: because the sounds are so low that it occupies an
Speaker 1: octave below a piano.
Speaker 2: Wait, that's fascinating. What kind of music can you play
Speaker 2: on it?
Speaker 1: Then I read that's so low pitched that some of
Speaker 1: the tones can't even be heard by human ear, which
Speaker 1: is crazy. But I was curious, and I found a
Speaker 1: video of this guy, Peter Sheridan, who is a low
Speaker 1: flute specialist. That's a job. It's also an amazing thing,
Speaker 1: and it's so sweet. He's got a whole video series
Speaker 1: of him showing off different types of loaf flutes. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't really sound like music. It almost sounds like
Speaker 1: percussive and low pitch breaths. I mean, you can tell
Speaker 1: the distinct tones, but it's often apparently paired with electronic
Speaker 1: music and loops. And my favorite part of this whole
Speaker 1: thing is that Sheridan has this album of electronic, avant
Speaker 1: garde hyper based flute. It's called Groaning Oceans, which is
Speaker 1: I think a fair description of what the music sounds like.
Speaker 2: Okay, so here's my last fact, which I think is
Speaker 2: kind of sweet. In twenty fifteen, more than fifty thousand
Speaker 2: people tuned into a college flutist's recital after his Facebook
Speaker 2: invitation accidentally went viral. So I found this story in
Speaker 2: The Independent. But twenty fifteen, this amateur flutist, a student
Speaker 2: at the University of California, made a Facebook event, as
Speaker 2: one did back then, for his senior flute recital, and
Speaker 2: with it, he included this photo of him with his flute.
Speaker 2: He's sort of standing there smiling. He's got the flute
Speaker 2: over his shoulder, he's got a sweater. He looks just
Speaker 2: so wholesome and so happy, and the invitation reads, the
Speaker 2: year's coming to an end soon and I will be
Speaker 2: performing my final senior recital. Exclamation point. Please come out
Speaker 2: and support if you can. You will hear some beatboxing, jazz,
Speaker 2: and may even see some dancing. Plus there will be
Speaker 2: some refreshments. Who can say no to that? So he
Speaker 2: sends this out to maybe seventy people that he hopes
Speaker 2: will show up, you know, family and friends. But suddenly
Speaker 2: the number of attendees just starts to grow. It goes
Speaker 2: up to one hundred and forty people, and then it
Speaker 2: catches fire overseas. People in the UK get obsessed with it,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, there are memes of this guy.
Speaker 2: His name is a Zem. There are memes of a
Speaker 2: Zem with Oasis, him getting knighted by the Queen. Twitter
Speaker 2: goes wild too. People are tweeting things like if you
Speaker 2: aren't going to a Zem senior flute recital, I don't
Speaker 2: want to know you. And so many people are jumping
Speaker 2: on the bandwagon now that he's blown up. How many
Speaker 2: of you were at the junior recital? So by this
Speaker 2: time there are a hundred I'm sorry, this is so funny.
Speaker 2: By this time, there were one hundred and four thousand
Speaker 2: people signed up to attend this thing, and when it
Speaker 2: actually live streamed, there were fifty thousand computers tuned in.
Speaker 2: There were people throwing viewing parties all over England. And
Speaker 2: for his part, a Zeem was super chill about the
Speaker 2: whole thing. He just thought the attention was really funny,
Speaker 2: and he was delighted that one super fan even traveled
Speaker 2: all the way from the UK to see his forty
Speaker 2: four minute flute performance live in person.
Speaker 1: That is incredible. Yeah, and it feels like a time
Speaker 1: when the Internet was kind of like a kinder, gentler place. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think as much as I love my
Speaker 1: shame flute fact and the one about the French artist,
Speaker 1: I think the story wins you this week's trophy. Do
Speaker 1: you want to give a speech or thank anyone?
Speaker 2: Well, I want to thank Azim. I just want to
Speaker 2: thank Azeem for being a Zeem.
Speaker 1: That's it, Well makes sense. Well, I want to thank
Speaker 1: you for being here to discuss what's obviously one of
Speaker 1: the most important and pressing topics of our time. And
Speaker 1: I've got to give a special thank you to Anna
Speaker 1: Green for the research help on this episode. That is
Speaker 1: it for this week's Part Time Genius. Thank you all
Speaker 1: so much for listening. That's such a great fact.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: It feels like everything now is so manufactured.
Speaker 2: It does right exactly. It would be branded now.
Speaker 1: Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongashtikler
Speaker 1: and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was engineered and produced by the Wonderful of Dylan
Speaker 1: Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive
Speaker 1: produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with
Speaker 1: social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and
Speaker 1: Viney Shore. For more podcast from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.