Welch doubts whether hemlock or similar stems would be strong enough for the suggested purpose. They certainly would not stand rough usage, but it is possible to make a taborer’s pipe out of an Angelica stem, for I have one. It is husky and out of tune, but it shows the thing to be possible.
This connexion between music and the form of plants is not without interest from a wider point of view. We ask ourselves why hollow cylinders occur so commonly in vegetable architecture. That rough teacher, the struggle for life, has taught plants that a tube is, mechanically speaking, the best way of arranging a limited amount of formative or building material. The hemlock or the reed can thus make stalks of ample strength and at comparatively slight cost. There is romance in the fact that plants made tubular stems to their own private profit for unnumbered ages before the coming of man: the hollow reeds waiting all these aeons till Pan should come and make them musical.
The pipe and tabor have probably come down to us less changed than any other wood-wind instrument, with the possible exception of the panpipes; both flutes and flageolets have become covered with keys, while the pipe still has no more than three aboriginal holes, one for the thumb behind and two for the fingers in front. I have wasted some time in trying to make out how the early taborers held their pipes, but musical instruments are generally drawn with hopeless inaccuracy. I have been rewarded by finding that a boy in Luca della Robbia’s bas-relief (Fig. 5) at Florence holds the pipe just as I do, [108a] between the ring and little fingers, which keep the instrument steady even when all three holes are uncovered. There is an interesting point connected with the true or French flageolet. This instrument has six holes arranged in two triads, a thumb and two fingers of the right hand, and the same for the left, so that if all holes are open there would seem to be nothing to steady the pipe. But in Mr. Welch’s book (p. 50) is a figure from Greeting’s Pleasant Companion [108b] showing how the flageolet
should be held, and this, curiously enough, is one of the best views of what I hold to be the proper grip for the taborer’s pipe.
The tabor is still much as it was in Fra Angelico’s day (judging from the angel above referred to), and indeed in earlier times, as shown in the piping angel in Lincoln Cathedral. We can see what a drum-maker calls the ropes and braces [109a] for tightening the parchment; the snares are also shown in many early drawings of tabors. These are pieces of gut or of horse-hair, stretched across the drum-head, which add a spirited rattle to its tone. Why the first edition of the Dictionary of Music went out of its way to say that the tabor had no snares I cannot guess.
In many of the mediaeval drawings the artist is shown beating his drum on the snare side. I had fancied that this was only one more instance of the bad drawing of musical instruments, but when I saw the careful work of Luca della Robbia, in which the tabors are all beaten on the snare side, I could no longer doubt. I was, however, glad to find in a French account [109b] of the Provençal 3-holed pipe or galoubet, that this custom survives. In Luca della Robbia’s work a single snare-cord is shown instead of four to six catgut lines as in modern drums and this is also true of the Provençal instrument. So that both the characteristics that seemed strange to me in Luca’s tabor survive in Provence.
It may not be generally known that the French for the snare of a drum is timbre; this is the original meaning of the word, and its familiar use to mean the characteristic tone of a musical sound is later. According to Darmstetter the word ‘timbre’ is own brother to ‘tambour,’ both being derived from a low Latin form of tympanum.
The tabor-stick has changed since the early centuries. In some of the old drawings the taborer is striking his instrument with a bludgeon, instead of the light and elegant sticks such as are to be seen in Mr. Manning’s collection at Oxford. Such implements were doubtless treasured by the taborer. Valmajour, the tabourinaire in Daudet’s Numa Roumestan, possessed a drum-stick which had been in the family for 200 years.
The way of holding the drum has not always been the same. Nowadays we are told to hang it from the thumb or wrist. But in many early drawings it is apparently firmly strapped or tied to the forearm, or even above the elbow. [110a] The Lincoln Angel and Luca’s boy have tabors supported by a string round the neck, and this I find to be the best method.
I hope that the drum may long survive in Provence with its ancient companion the pipe. [110b] A different instrument, however, supplies an accompaniment to the galoubet in the Basque provinces. It is a rough sort of lyre with six or