Everybody loves the flute. Along with the drum, it's among the oldest of musical instruments, going back 35,000 to 40,000 years. In those days, they made flutes from bear bones, mammoth tusks and ...

Remember the recorder? It's that small plastic instrument — looks kind of like a flute or clarinet — that's often the first instrument children learn to play in school. Or, at least, they used to. But ...

The recorder used to be an instrument people wanted to hear. As a 1946 article in The Atlantic explained, it gets mentioned lovingly in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Paradise Lost. One ...

Pity the poor recorder, tortured in a thousand classrooms by reluctant schoolchildren. It’s still the most popular instrument learned in school, according to a survey this week, but is there any sound ...

The recorder often inflicts squeaky torture on parents. Music teacher Valerie DePriest explains why it became a staple in music education. When Lebanon-born George Semaan came to the United States via ...

Many of us know the recorder as the plastic pipe that gets handed out in elementary school music class. More closely resembling a toy than something a rock star would carry, it doesn’t have a ...