The taborer’s pipe is a whistle; it happens to be made of wood, but its musical structure is precisely that of the penny whistle, except in one important particular, that it has but three holes in place of six. The pipe is therefore a poor relation of that beautiful but extinct instrument the recorder [103b] which is only a wooden whistle. The recorder has a low, hollow, but most effective tone, and I shall never forget the ravishing effect of a quartet of recorders as played at a concert given by Mr. Galpin, the well-known authority on old English instruments. The taborer’s pipe has none of the sweetness of the recorder; it is essentially a shrill instrument; indeed, I am told by a philologist that its old German name Schwegel contains a root implying shrillness. Another old German name is Stamentien Pfeiffe, which my philological friend tells me does not occur in the best German dictionary, and is of unknown origin.
As I have said, the pipe has but three holes (stopped by the index, middle finger and thumb); these give four fundamental tones, which however do not occur in the working scale of the instrument.
In the penny whistle, and most wood-wind instruments, the octave or first harmonic gives the means of extending the scale. But in the taborer’s pipe the whole of the workable scale consists of harmonics; what corresponds to the lower octave in the penny whistle—the non-harmonic or fundamental part of the register—can only be faintly sounded. It is the first harmonic or octave of the lowest of these faint notes that forms the bottom note of the scale of the three-holed pipe. [104a] This note is approximately D of the modern flat pitch. By successively raising the middle and index fingers and then the thumb, E, F, and G are sounded. Then all the finger holes are again closed, and by a little extra impulse given to the breath A is sounded, being the harmonic 5th of the lower D. Then follow B and C as harmonic 5ths of E and F, and the final D as the octave of the lowest tone. Above this a variable number of notes—about four—are producible by cross-fingerings. The ordinary work-a-day scale of the taborer’s pipe corresponds to the 12 or 13 uppermost notes of a seven octave P-F., or to the upper notes of a piccolo. The galoubet’s scale begins on a B flat one-third below the taborer’s pipe. There was also a bass galoubet. This instrument is known from the figures in Praetorius [104b] (1618), and also from one solitary pipe which has
escaped destruction. Mr. Galpin has a copy of it in his wonderful collection, and has allowed me to play on it. [105a]
Mersenne, [105b] in speaking of the performance of an Englishman, John Price, may give to some unwary reader the impression that the said John could play a continuous scale of three octaves. But it is quite clear that Mersenne included the faint D an octave below the lowest harmonic note, so that Price could produce an interval of three octaves but a continuous scale of only two octaves. This is not impossible. I can play two out-of-tune shrieking notes above my high A, or 12th note, so that I can, after a fashion, get within one note of John Price, and I live in hopes of acquiring yet another and tying with him. The uppermost sounds are made by what was technically known as pinching, i.e. crooking the thumb and forcing the nail into the top hole, so that only a minute stream of air escapes. An old pipe of mine shows the mark of the pinching thumb nail. Mr. Forsyth speaks of “an instrument with only a few notes” as being “much restricted in the way of compass”: [105c] this is not quite just to the taborer’s pipe.
In relation to Mr. Forsyth’s discussion on the diauloi, it should be remembered that the double pipe still exists in Russia. It is described
by Mahillon [106] under the name of the Gelaïka. The fundamental tones of the two instruments are the lower F sharp in the treble stave, and the B natural above it. Mahillon adds: “tantot elles se partagent la mélodie, d’autres fois elles font entendre des intonations doubles.”
With regard to the Greek double-pipe, I am sure that Mr. Forsyth is right, and that the bandage (phorbeia), which is commonly said to have served to compress the cheeks, must have had some other use. I have no doubt that he is justified in assuming that the bandage served to support the instrument. In a pipe with three holes on the upper surface a certain amount of grip on the instrument is given by pressure of the little finger above and the thumb below, and with practice it would be quite possible to manage the instrument. Still, the bandage would give freedom to the fingers, and for the four-holed pipe this form of support would be absolutely necessary. My conclusions are based on experiments on the penny whistle temporarily converted into an instrument for one hand.
In speculating on the evolution of the taborer’s pipe, it must be remembered that its harmonics (on which, as I have said, its scale depends) are those of a cylindrical pipe, and a pipe that is long in relation to its bore. I like to think that it had its origin in some of the many natural hollow cylinders found among plants, for instance, the reed grass that grows in fens and dykes, or the elder which supplies a pipe when its pith is bored out, and is
perhaps more familiar as the parent of pop-guns than of musical instruments. Then again, there are the hollow stalks of umbelliferous plants, such as angelica and hemlock. The late Mr. Welch, in his interesting book on Recorders, pointed out [107] that sambucus the elder, calamus the reed, and cicuta the hemlock all occur in classic verse in relation to rustic music. Indeed the word calamus still lives, though corrupted to the French chalumeau and still further altered to the German Schalmei and the English shawm.