Quena!

For Mother's Day, I took myself to the House of Musical Traditions and scored a bamboo quena.  It's a notched, end-blown flute (NEBF hereafter, because I am lazy).  Since I have no experience in making instruments of any kind, I thought I should get a real NEBF to see if/how I could play it, and how it was made.

I can get sound out of it, but not really reliably.  Progress! But need practice.  With this as a template, I can measure off proportions for trying to make a NEBF out of some PVC pipe I picked up at the hardware store.

I think I also need to lay hands on an actual archaeological report (or two or six) documenting some of the actual Anglo-Saxon flute finds.  I think I've sort of assumed that because I saw one bone flute in the news that was a NEBF, obviously all early bone flutes were the same.  That might not actually be the case.

Graeme Lawson's website lists his publications, which include analysis of several Anglo-Saxon flutes.  None of them are easily available (read: free and on the Internet) but I can check my local university card catalogue and see what turns up.