An earlier post examined evidence of the fife and flageolet interchangeably occupying the same niche in the accompaniment of dance in late-16th-century France. The fife was otherwise more clearly associated with military music, leading to a question about whether it had a more prominent role in civilian contexts than is generally recognized. Evidence of that being the case toward the end of the 18th century is provided by published compilations of Irish and Scottish dance tunes that explicitly list the fife as one of the instruments to which they are suited.
An etching from the mid-19th century presented below illustrates it in a manner that bolsters the notion of the fife having filled the musical role now commonly played by the tin whistle. (The flute is named as a separate instrument in the referenced compilations.)
A fife is also seen in a well-known painting from 1833 by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806–1870), titled Snap-Apple Night. It appears with what are now termed uilleann bagpipes, a fiddle, and a tambourine (later to shed its jingles and morph into the bodhrán), accompanying dance at a Halloween party in Blarney, Co. Cork, Ireland. The full painting is online here and the pivotal section is:
The instruments are portrayed in reasonable detail and the bagpipes are credibly close to what would be expected at this date and location. Keys can be seen on at least one regulator and the chanter ends shortly below the lowest tonehole, terminated with a brass ferrule that facilitates closing the chanter against the piper’s leg. The fiddle and fife are shown in similarly good detail. What appears to be an abstraction of the trio of melody instruments is seen in a brush drawing from 1852 by Erskine Nicol (1825–1904).
Shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Although he was Scottish, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes the following about his work:
In 1846, having resigned from his teaching post, Nicol travelled to Dublin where he remained until about 1850. He found employment there both as a teacher and as a portrait painter. However, it was Nicol’s keen observation of Irish everyday life and humour that fed his imagination and supplied the material for most of his painting for the rest of his career.
Erskine brings the fife player into focus in an undated painting that retains the detail of the instrument depicted by Maclise, but puts it in the hands of the fiddler in his own drawing.
Notwithstanding the chain of seeming adaptations, there can be little doubt that the instrument and the way it is held and blown were painted with an actual performer as the model. Nicol included properly detailed flutes in other paintings. However, one of a Man with Pipe gainsays the suggestions that he painted musical instruments with unwavering accuracy (as claimed in a contemporary narrative below) or had a personal understanding of what constitutes a plausible representation of a woodwind.
The fife player rejoins the trio in an etching made in 1862 by Adolphe Lalauze (1838–1906), based on an intervening painting by Nicol that I have been unable to locate. It adds meticulous detail to the fiddle and pipes (although the position of the fiddler’s left hand suggests that a classical violinist was the model).
This etching is the frontispiece of The Magazine of Art, vol. 4, 1881, which includes two narrative adjuncts. The first is the painter’s appraisal of the etching.
For, apropos of the etched frontispiece in our last number, “The Trio,” Mr. Erskine Nicol, A.R.A., the artist, writes: — “I like it very much — it is so clear, so full of character and of thorough artistic feeling, and it renders my touch so well.”
The second is an article about the image, written by Johnston Forbes-Robertson.
“THE TRIO.” By Erskine Nicol, A.R.A
The Scottish school of painting, like the Scottish school of philosophy, is notable for its love of concrete fact …
When we turn to figure-painting, we find the same determination on the part of the artist to stand by simple Nature, and to subordinate to her his own individual inspiration. …
As an example of thus working within one’s own scope and power, we would point our readers to Mr. Erskine Nicol’s “Trio” (see frontispiece), a piece of character-painting not easily to be surpassed. Each figure is a veritable portrait, and very little imagination would be required to furnish each with a biography. The fife-player is evidently a Connaught man; but the fiddler and the blind old man with the Union pipes — whose sweet note is very different from the wild blare of the Highland bagpipes — are probably from Ulster; but whatever differences there may be in race, politics, or religion, the three become one under the influence of music.
Mr. Erskine Nicol, when a young man, spent several years in Ireland, and ever since, her peasantry have found in him a faithful delineator of whatever is touching in their humour, or characteristic in their habits. Mr. Nicol is no caricaturist, and he never produced an Irish group towards the individual of which the English heart did not warm.
The accomplished etcher Adolphe Lalauze…has for the sake of colour, carried his art in this instance as far as he possibly could and the result is a plate of peculiar richness without any sacrifice of sharpness in general effect. J.F.R.
The position of the pipers’ heads is strikingly similar in both the etching and Snap-Apple Night but their instruments differ in fundamental detail, and the initially right-handed piper has become a left-handed one. The most telling visible distinction in the pipes themselves is otherwise the length of the chanter. The intervening brush drawing is ambivalent in that regard. If Nicol was working from this drawing when preparing the painting that cascaded into the etching, a player of the type of bagpipes depicted in it would therefore have served as his model.
As noted above, by the 1830s, what were most commonly referred to as “Irish bagpipes” were characterized by a chanter that could be opened and closed at its lower end during the course of play. The chanter on the pipes clearly illustrated by Nicol extends significantly beyond the lowest tonehole and its end is always open. It is generally assumed that this was the parent form, with the segment of the long chanter below the ferrule being removed during its subsequent development.
Here is an English-made instrument of the type depicted by Nicol, in the collections of the National Museums Scotland. What appear to be two short drones of the same length are part of a longer single drone folded through the stock. Such camouflaging is a further attribute of the variety of bagpipes this instantiates but is not apparent in The Trio.
The catalog record for this instrument reflects reasonable uncertainty about its proper label, calling it “a union or pastoral bagpipe.” The first of these designations became an increasingly common synonym for Irish bagpipes in the 19th century, finally yielding to “uilleann” during the first decades of the 20th.
The name “pastoral bagpipe” is attested in a single contemporaneous source, The Complete Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe, undated but advertised as published in 1743. Its frontispiece shows a bellows-blown instrument with a long chanter and three drones. In contrast, the written instructions for tuning the drones indicate that there were only two. Whatever the explanation for this discrepancy might be, other variation in drone configuration is encountered in what are now referred to generically as pastoral pipes.
There is no reason to expect Forbes-Robertson to have recognized the differences between union and pastoral pipes in the article cited above. However, this also means that the romantically interpolated detail about the piper probably being from Ulster is unfounded. It may also be significant that Nicol returned to Scotland and moved onward to England well before he painted The Trio.
The Maclise painting from 1833 unequivocally links the union pipes, fife, fiddle, and nascent bodhrán with the native performance of Irish dance music. The illustration of the pastoral pipes in near-photographic detail 30 years later is noteworthy but their use in Ireland had begun to wane by the time of Nicol’s birth. The possibility of his having sketched them in an Irish cottage significantly earlier than the date of The Trio can be discounted. However much “keen observation of Irish everyday life…supplied the material for most of his painting for the rest of his career” the explanation for pastoral pipes appearing in the The Trio remains to be sought elsewhere.
Further reading:
Ross Anderson, The Pastoral Repertoire, Rediscovered, Common Stock, the Journal of the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society, Vol. 20, No. 2, Dec. 2005, pp. 24–30.
Nicolas Carolan, Courtney’s ‘Union Pipes’ and the Terminology of Irish Bellows-Blown Bagpipes, Version 1.0, Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin, 2012.
Hugh Cheape, The Pastoral or New Bagpipe: Piping and the Neo-Baroque, The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 61 (April 2008), pp. 285–304, 245.