Articulation on diverse pipes

The preceding two posts examine instruction manuals for woodwind instruments and compilations of popular dance tunes published in the 17th and 18th centuries, looking for evidence of continuity between the way such music was ornamented in earlier periods and present-day practice. The collections include tunes that originated in Ireland and remain part of the traditional repertoire there, providing a useful basis for tracing the development of the battery of ornaments associated with that genre. The investigation continues in the present post but considers an expressive technique not covered by the title of the previous installments (Turns and Rolls — Part 1 and Part 2).

In a demonstration of Sligo-style flute playing here, Seamus Tansey says of ornamentation that “it all came from the pipes.” Players of other instruments have made similar statements. Such claims are as likely to trigger debate as avert it but uilleann pipes do have a particularly rich repertoire of ornaments, including pretty much all those used on other traditional Irish instruments.

The emulation of piping technique can plausibly explain why articulation in traditional performance on the flute and tin whistle relies heavily on finger movement, with many players using otherwise easily executed interruptions of the air flow into the instrument more sparingly. This is a significant departure from the intricate breath-controlled articulation that was a documented mainstay of woodwind technique by the mid-16th century. The technique employed an elaborate system of syllables that combine a number of consonants and vowels (detailed here).

Syllables with a “g” or “k” onset are glottal, “h” is a pulse of air, and other consonants shape the tongue to produce a range of harder or softer effects, all reinforced by the nucleus vowel and a possible final consonant. Hard and soft syllables were regularly paired, making what is now referred to as double tonguing the norm. Pairs with alternating rhythmic properties meshed with the similarly commonplace inequality in the playing of sequences of same-value notes — equivalent to the swing in traditional Irish dance tunes.

This system grew less complex during the 18th century (with an example from its middle providing this post’s banner image). Here is a passage from a French treatise published in 1700 about shared performance practice on the oboe, recorder, and flageolet (notated with the “French violin clef” placing the G on the first rather than second line).

Another example integrates tonguing with fingered ornaments.

Tonguing syllables would not be expected in a text devoted to a bellows-blown bagpipe but they appear in the preface to the Traité de la Musette (“Treatise on the Musette”) by Borjon de Scellery, published in 1672. This is primarily about a form of the instrument also seen in earlier illustrations, that he calls the musette des bergers (“shepherds’ musette”; cf. pastoral bagpipe).

The chanter has eight open toleholes and a single closed key, seen more clearly in a detailed drawing with two additional keys. The initial key is numbered 0, the thumbhole 1, the fingerholes 2–8, and the lower opening of the bore 9.

There is a similarly detailed drawing of a further extension to this design, by Martin Hotteterre, who added a small closed chanter with six keys. It only sounds when one of those keys is open, adding a second voice to that of the large chanter and extending its range upward. This form is called a musette de cour (“court musette”).

Multiple chanters commonly appear in far earlier depictions of European bagpipes. Keyed chanters also predate the musette but the closed keys-only chanter does appear to have been Hotteterre’s own innovation. Scellery expresses scepticism about its value, feeling it incapable of delineating a melody as crisply as the large chanter can, and uses tonguing syllables to describe the imbalance.

…the tones of the ordinary chanter are articulated as clearly as possible but those of the small chanter are only aspirated; that is to say, the former sound Ta, Ta, Ta, and the latter Ha, Ha, Ha.

The second part of his book is a collection of dance tunes and airs headed Livre de Tabulature (“Book of Tablature”) for the single-chanter instrument. The toneholes are identified both by their position in the tablature and the numbering scheme, with sharp signs indicating the added keys. (There is a summary explanation of woodwind tablature here.)

The open fingering systems seen in tablature for other instruments uncover a varying number of holes for a given note. The musette tablature shows closed fingering. The hole designated by number is the only one that is uncovered when the corresponding note is played.

Scellery provides detailed instructions for this technique, noting general exceptions to the one-hole-at-a-time rule at the ends of the chanter’s range. The 0 key and 1 hole are both operated by the left thumb, making it necessary to leave the thumbhole uncovered when using the key. The lowest fingerhole is also normally left uncovered: “You must keep everything closed with both hands, except for the last hole which is number 8, and raise only one finger at a time.” The corresponding low F is included in the explanation of the tablature, which is also presented in that key, but does not appear in any of the pieces in the collection.

There is a further overriding exception to the one-hole rule. The lower end of the bore — hole 9 — is open for all notes and Scellery says nothing about it ever being closed. Nonetheless, doing so was to become a fundamental technique on the uilleann pipes and was built into the Northumbrian smallpipe (“NSP”). In the first case, the end of the chanter is closed actively against the seated player’s leg; in the second, the lower end of the bore is permanently sealed.

This device makes it possible to interrupt the flow of air through the reed by covering all fingerholes at the same time. An equivalent to this interruption is effected on a musette by closing all holes on the large chanter except 8 and 9. The resulting pitch blends in with the drones and is perceived as separating two other notes when inserted rapidly between them. It is demonstrated here in a piece composed during the 1740s for the musette de cour.

The performer, Jean-Pierre Van Hees, explains the detailed workings of the instrument, including the shuttle drones, in another video here. He holds his right little finger mostly behind the chanter and closes its lower end against his leg to change dynamics. Eighth notes are played in unequal pairs throughout.

During the 1690s, James Talbot, a professor at Trinity College Cambridge, compiled detailed descriptions of musical instruments provided by professional musicians in London. An account of a bellows-blown “BAGPIPE. SCOTCH. Mr Robinson” states that it has:

…3 Drones; g” Treble, d” s[econd]d, g’ Bass; the least a unison, the next a 4th, the biggest an 8th to [the] lowest note of the chanter.

A fingering chart for that chanter shows a closed system.

As with Scellery’s large musette chanter, closing all holes through 7 gives a G, However, there is no F below it despite the presence of hole 8. Since Talbot tells us the lowest note is g”, it seems likely that no sound is produced when all fingerholes are closed and that the lower end of the chanter is sealed.

Talbot describes another bellows-blown Scotch Bagpipe that has a chanter with a double bore. The internal dimensions of both are identical. The left bore has the customary eight holes but the right bore only has the lowest four, giving an effect similar to the two chanters of the musette de cour. A double-bored uilleann pipe chanter (presumably with eight holes in each and different musical capability) is seen in a photo of Richard O’Mealy (1873–1947; about whom further detail is found in Volume 3 of the Seán Reid Society Journal).

Eight-hole NSP chanters with capped lower ends are attested near the end of the 18th century. Their design is credited to John Dunn, as is a subsequent extension of the chanter’s length and the addition of keys to it. Here is an instrument attributed to him, with a drone array also congruent with Talbot’s description.

Unlike the simulated muting on the musette, a chanter with a capped end sustains true silenced articulation. This is fully analogous to tonguing and has become the primary expressive device on the NSP, demonstrated by Tom Clough in a recording from 1929. Closing the end of the chanter on uilleann pipes provides the same capability but rather than being the predominant decorative effect, it adds staccato articulation to the instrument’s broader array of expressive techniques. Richard O’Meally demonstrates this in a recording from 1943.

The concluding point is that it can be difficult, if not futile, even attempting to clarify the origin of an ornamentation practice on one instrument allegedly derived from that of another. A path can be traced from a prevalent 16th-century woodwind technique that used an extensive range of articulation syllables, through their appearance in a 17th-century treatise on a type of bagpipe that, in turn, contributed elements to pipes near the Anglo-Scottish border at about the time the same elements were finding their way toward what were to become the present-day uilleann pipes.

If ornamentation currently regarded as idiomatic on the flute or tin whistle indeed has its roots in the uilleann bagpipe, those roots can also be traced further back on the same path. At one or another point along the way, the period performance of Irish dance tunes would quite likely involve flageolet, flute, and recorder players tonguing away in the best mainstream fashion.

Scellery’s Ha-Ha-Ha and Ta-Ta-Ta are echoed literally and musically by Mary Bergin in Volume 2 of her Irish Tin Whistle Tutorial (available here with Vol. 1 and the recently released Vol. 3). From the section headed “Tonguing Pattern in Jigs”:

The basic pattern I use is to tongue the two ‘short notes’…by saying the words ‘HAH-TA-TAH.’ The ‘HAH’ is the first note and is not tongued and the shorter second and third notes — ‘TA-TAH’ — are tongued.

She integrates tonguing seamlessly into her performance style, requiring some concentration to determine just how extensively.

Returning to Sligo where this excursion started, here is the native whistle player Carmel Gunning making liberal use of varied articulation that can be mapped directly into the 16th-century framework.