Springtime and Other Essays

by Sir Francis Darwin

Wind Instruments.

One of the most ancient of wind instruments is the panpipe, which used to be familiar in the Punch and Judy show of our childhood, when it was accompanied by another ancient instrument—the drum. The panpipe consists of a row of reeds of graduated lengths which are closed at the lower end and into which the performer blows, much as we used, as children, to blow into a key and produce a shrill

whistle. It is illustrated in an Anglo-Saxon Psalter of the early eleventh century, which is preserved in the Cambridge University Library. The whistle which we have all made in our childhood by removing a tube of bark from a branch in which the sap is rising, is an advance on the panpipes, since it includes a method of producing a thin stream of air which impinges on a sharp edge, whereas in the panpipes we depend on our lips for the stream of air. These whistles are closed at the lower end, and yield but a single note. But in the tin penny whistle the tube is pierced by six holes for the fingers, and on this instrument one may hear the itinerant artist perform wonders. An instrument of this type, known as the recorder, played a great part in the early orchestra. It differs from the penny whistle in being made of wood, and in having eight instead of six finger-holes; the additional ones being for the left thumb and the little-finger of the right hand. The recorder seems to have been especially popular in England, indeed it was sometimes known as the fistula anglica, i.e. the English pipe. The instrument was made in different sizes; and I shall not easily forget the astonishing beauty of a quartette of recorders played by Mr Galpin and his family. In Plate VI. are shown the great bass recorders, in regard to which the author is careful to point out that the bassoon-like form shown in No. 1 and No. 5 does not alter the pitch of the instrument, which depends on the length of the tube measured from the fipple.

Mr Dolmetsch, in his book

The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIlth and XVIIIth Centuries, p. 457, writes:—

“At the first sound the recorder ingratiates itself into the hearer’s affection. It is sweet, full, profound, yet clear, with just a touch of reediness, lest it should cloy.”

“The intonation . . . right through the chromatic compass of two octaves and one note is perfect, if you know how to manage the instrument; but its fingering is complicated, and requires study.”

The flageolet is the nearest living relative of the recorder. What is known as the French flageolet is especially reminiscent of the ancient instrument in having a thumb-hole, or rather two such holes. It has the pleasant archaic feature of its lowest note being produced by thrusting the little finger of the right hand into the open end of the tube. The most curious development of the flageolet is found in the double or triple pipes which were made in the closing years of the eighteenth century. I remember Mr Galpin demonstrating the truth of his assertion that duets and trios can be played on one of these curious instruments.

A much simpler instrument known as the tabor pipe [85] was in general use in the twelfth century. Its essential feature is that it has but three holes, so that it can be played with one hand, thus leaving the other hand free to accompany the melody on the tabor or small drum hung round the neck of the performer or from his wrist. Its working compass

is an octave and three notes, though two shrieking higher notes can be produced. The French form of three-holed pipe is known as the galoubet. There was also a bass galoubet, which is known from the figures in Praetorius (1618), and from one solitary instrument which has escaped destruction. Mr Galpin has a copy of it in his great collection, and I have had the pleasure of playing on it. The instruments of the genus recorder have been finally beaten in the struggle for life by the flageolet, and perhaps especially by the true flute, which Mr Galpin, for the sake of clearness, distinguishes as the cross flute. It seems to be a mistake to consider the flute as a modern instrument, as it was popular about the year 1500, and is shown in an illuminated MS. of 1344 preserved at Oxford.

The flute as used about 1600 had but six holes, but the D# key for the little finger of the right hand came into use about the end of the seventeenth century, and about 1800 several keys had been added to enable the performer to play with less cross-fingering.

Dolmetsch, op. cit., p. 458, claims that although the one-keyed flute of the eighteenth century has a weak tone, it is more beautiful than the modern flute.

He adds that a flautist has recently studied this instrument, guided by Hotteterre le Romain’s book (1707), and can play more perfectly in tune than “he ever did before upon a highly improved and most expensive modern instrument.”

The concert-flute of the present day is an elaborate

instrument covered with keys, and it has, I believe, been suggested that its tone is injured by this elaboration. Bass flutes have been made, one 3 ft. 7 ins. in length is mentioned, whose lowest note was an octave below middle C.

Shawms. [87]

The next class of wind instruments dealt with by the author is that of which the oboe and bassoon are typical. Mr Galpin refers to a reed-pipe with which I am very familiar; it is made from a dandelion stalk pinched flat at one end. Its principle is that of the oboe. I well remember admiring its tone as a child, and lamenting its very brief life, for it soon got spoiled. The reed of serious musical instruments is made of two pieces of cane which are flat at the free or upper end and terminate below in a tube which fits on to the instrument. This is an ancient type of instrument, for the Roman tibia is believed to have been played with the “double reed,” i.e. of oboe-type. I may here be allowed to quote from my Rustic Sounds, p. 5: “The most truly rustic instrument (and here I mean an instrument of polite life—an orchestral instrument) is undoubtedly the oboe. The bassoon runs it hard, but has a touch of comedy and a strong flavour of necromancy,

while the oboe is quite good and simple in nature and is excessively in earnest; it seems to have in it the ghost of a sun-burnt boy playing to himself under a tree, in a ragged shirt unbuttoned at the throat.” A figure is given (Galpin, p. 159) of a goat playing on a shawm [88] from a carving of the twelfth century at Canterbury. The name is believed to be derived from calamaula, a reed-pipe, which was corrupted to chalem-elle and then to shawm. Shawms were made of various sizes, from the small treble instrument, one foot long, to the huge affair, six feet in length. The name Howe-boie, i.e. probably Haut-bois, was applied to the treble instrument as early as the reign of Elizabeth; while the deeper-toned instruments retained the name shawm. The bassoon is only a bass oboe rendered less cumbrous by the tube being bent sharply on itself. A tenor bassoon, known as the oboe da caccia, or teneroon, also existed, and if my memory serves me right, Mr Stone rescued one of these instruments from the band of a London boys’ school. A teneroon of Mr Galpin’s is shown at p. 168 of his book, where it appears to be about seven-tenths of the size of the ordinary bassoon.

The next class of wind-instrument is that of which the clarinet is the modern representative. It has a rich but somewhat cloying tone, and, to my thinking, none of the mysterious charm of the oboe. It is characterised by a single vibrating plate or reed, and the current of air from the performer’s mouth

passes between it and an immovable surface of wood. In our country this type of reed was found in a most interesting instrument, the horn-pipe [89a] or pibcorn, which is said to have existed in Wales as late as the nineteenth century. One of these curious instruments is in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries, and is shown in Plate VII. It was given to the Society by Daines Barrington, who describes it in the Society’s Archæologia for 1779. In a Saxon vocabulary of the eighth century the word Sambucus (i.e. elder-tree) is translated swegelhorn. Now the word swegel was applied to the tibia or leg-bone; it is therefore of remarkable interest to find that, according to an old Welsh peasant, the tibia of a deer should be the best tube for the pibcorn. [89b] This name, which means pipe-horn, is very appropriate, since the tube of the instrument bears at either end a cow’s horn. To the upper one the performer applied his mouth. He had no means of regulating the reed as a clarinet or oboe-player has; the reed was left to its own sweet will, as is also the case with the reeds in another ancient instrument—the bagpipe, to which a few words must be given.

Mr Henry Balfour believes that both these instruments came to us with the Keltic migration from the East. Or, as Mr Galpin suggests, we may owe the bagpipe to Roman soldiers, “for the tibia utricularis was used in the Imperial army.” It is quite a mistake to suppose that the bagpipe is in

any special way connected with Scotland. Illuminated missals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries show how common the bagpipe was in England. But the Scots must at least have a share of the credit of preserving the bagpipe from extinction; and the same may be said of another Keltic race, the Breton, in whose land I have heard the bagpipe accompanied by a rough kind of oboe.

Mr Galpin tells me a pleasant story of a bagpipe hunt in Paris. He discovered, in a shop, an old French musette (bagpipe), the chanter or melody-pipe of which was missing. He did not buy it until in a two days’ hunt all over Paris he discovered the lost chanter, when he returned to the first shop, triumphantly carried off the musette, and thus became the owner of this rare and beautiful instrument.

The drone, which forms a continuous bass to the “chanter,” was not an original character of the bagpipe, but appeared soon after the year 1300. A second drone “was added about the year 1400, for it is seen in the ancient bagpipe belonging to Messrs Glen of Edinburgh,” which bears the date 1409.