Tag: Bagpipes

Pairs of harpers and pipers
Musical Instruments

Pairs of harpers and pipers

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A late-18th century production of the ballet pantomime Oscar & Malvina, at Covent Garden in London, featured a duet played on the union bagpipes and pedal harp. It is considered from the perspective of the pipes and piper in the preceding post. The present text adds further detail to this and widens the focus to include the harp and harpers. Here is a snippet from the playbill for the 20th performance of the premiere season, on 14 December 1791:

A New Grand Ballet Pantomime (taken from OSSIAN) called,
OSCAR and MALVINA:
Or, The HALL OF FINGAL
…
The Harp and Pipes to be played by Mr. C. MEYER and Mr. COURTNEY

Denis Courtney was introduced in the earlier post, as Charles Meyer will be further below. The 12 May 1792 performance of another Covent Garden production (Inkle and Yariko) included an afterpiece titled, The Irishman in London. Among the features listed in its playbill was “a Duetto on the Union Pipes and Harp by Courtney and Weippert.” John Weippert replaced, or alternated with Meyer in Oscar & Malvina, which ran for decades. A press review of the 31 May 1792 performance notes:

Oscar and Malvina, May 31, went off remarkably well, though Courtney, the piper, was not present. Weippert, with his harp, undertook the whole piece by himself, with wonderful execution and taste.

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Irish bagpipes and 18th-century tuning systems
Musical Instruments

Irish bagpipes and 18th-century tuning systems

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John Geoghegan published The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe in London in 1743 (also discussed in an earlier post). He described its chanter by comparison with the oboe, illustrating that instrument on the final page of the book.

The cited copy does not have a frontispiece but the one in another copy shows the bagpipes.

This instrument has three drones but the one described in the text has two. Additional illustrations include a fingering chart for the basic diatonic scale, and another that adds accidentals to it. The expanded chart prescribes the same fingerings for adjacent sharps and flats, except for A♯ and B♭. Geoghegan expressed the hope that this approach to tuning would “not be unacceptable to the profesers of this ancient pastoral musick or to the makers of the instrument,” thereby suggesting that it differed from the established system(s) of his day.

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Articulation on diverse pipes
Musical Instruments

Articulation on diverse pipes

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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.

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Turns and rolls — Part 2
Musical Instruments

Turns and rolls — Part 2

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The first part of this series presented a few 17th-century instruction books for the flageolet and recorder. It illustrated continuity in ornamentation practice as the first of them ceded its position in urban amateur music making to the second. The present post moves that discussion into the 18th century and brings reed instruments into it. An instruction book for the Baroque oboe — “hautboy” — comparable to those for the flageolet and recorder was published in London in 1695, titled The Sprightly Companion.

The tunes can be played comfortably on all the explicitly named instruments. (Unqualified reference to a “flute” at that date meant a Baroque recorder; in this case one in C.) Ornamentation is clarified with tablature as in the books examined last time. The Ɔ sign that indicates both a “beat” and a “shake” in them, is used in this one exclusively for a shake executed downward from the note to which it is applied. Here is the first line of the explanatory table with a concluding remark in this post’s banner image.

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Fifes and pastoral pipes in 1862
Musical Instruments

Fifes and pastoral pipes in 1862

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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.)

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