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.