$3,000 Flute

When Georges Barrere arrived in the U. S. 30 years ago he was roundly twitted because he wore a luxuriant spade beard, long pointed mustachios. Through these he managed to play a flute with uncommon skill, but it was not the wooden instrument his colleagues knew. The young Frenchman played a silver flute. Of the 30,000 professional flautists now in the U. S., all but five use an instrument of silver or some cheaper metal. But Georges Barrere, peer of them all, has gone two steps ahead. Ten years ago he took to playing on a $1,000 gold flute. Last week, for the first time in Manhattan, he demonstrated a flute made of platinum. Price: $3,000.

Flutes have been made of wood, bamboo, ivory, jade, rubber, porcelain, crystalline glass, papier-mache, wax and human thigh bones. Flutes have been played by nose as well as by mouth. They were played by Cleopatra's father, by Benvenuto Cellini, Henry VIII, Frederick the Great, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Oliver Goldsmith, George Washington, the first John Jacob Astor. Theobald Boehm, a Bavarian court musician, made the first metal flute in 1847. Professor Dayton Clarence Miller, flute-playing physicist at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, was first to experiment with platinum, proving that the denser the metal, the better the instrument's tone.

Density of silver is 10.5; 14-karat gold, 13.2; pure gold, 19.3; pure platinum, 21.5. Georges Barrere's new flute is 90% platinum, 10% iridium, a combination used for the finest jewelry, rating 21.6 in density. But Mr. Barrere plays any flute so expertly, transmits so much personal charm to his audience, that those who heard him last week, tootling away between two potted palms in a salon at Sherry's, wondered whether they were being impressed by the player or the instrument. Case for the platinum flute would have been more convincing if Barrere had given his listeners a chance to hear the silver and the gold flutes again. But scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories swore that the platinum one was best, said that Barrere had blown all three instruments for them, sounding the same two notes for more than two hours.

At 59 Barrere still wears his old-fashioned beard, the sharp mustachios now flecked with grey. And his wit is still equal to any amount of teasing. Of his platinum flute, he says: "I don't play it to show that I have a bank balance or that Depression is over." About his whiskers: ''Why should people make fun of me any more than of Charles Evans Hughes. . . . Think of Sousa or the Smith Brothers. . . . While other artists waste a valuable part of each day playing with a razor or being mutilated by their favorite barber, I am having a glorious time working."

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