Tag Archives: Wind instruments

A history of early bagpipes

A bagpipe is an aerophone instrument with one or more sounding pipes, each with a single or double reed. The pipes are made to sound by air from a wind container in the form of a bag, which is pressurized by the arm of the player (usually the left one). The wind container is fed either directly from the player’s lungs via a blowpipe or indirectly via bellows. In many languages ​​the bagpipe is simply referred to as a pipe, such as the northern Italian piva (pictured above), Celtic bagpipes such as pìob mhór (large pipe), or the Estonian torupill (reed pipe).

The origins of the bagpipe are mostly unclear. Some have claimed that the instrument originates in western Asia, referencing similar instruments in Nebuchadnezzar‘s orchestra in ancient Babylon or mentioned by Aristophanes in Lysistrata (instruments with a wasp-like sound). Others have suggested that bagpipes originate in the hornpipes of North Africa and the Middle East—for instance, the Arabian instrument mizmār al-girāb, which dates to the 11th century.

A torupill player from Estonia.

European bagpipes were alluded to in texts as early as the 9th century, but certainly by beginning of the 12th century in German manuscripts. The earliest bagpipes typically consisted of a bladder made from whole sheepskin (or goatskin) cut, shaped, and sewn together. Iconographic representations of bagpipes became more common from the 13th century onward, and bagpipes were played in both court and urban areas of England, Ireland, Wales, France, and Germany.

Bagpipe Appreciation Day is on July 27, celebrate it by reading the entry on bagpipes in MGG Online.

Below are videos featuring performances by an ensemble featuring the Estonian torupill bagpipe and the Celtic pìob mhór by Ali Turner.

Related posts in Bibliolore:

https://bibliolore.org/2023/03/10/five-illustrated-bagpipes-in-musical-instruments-and-their-homes-an-insight-into-the-19th-century-instrument-collectors-world/

https://bibliolore.org/2013/06/24/the-sultans-bagpipes/

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Filed under Instruments, Popular music, World music

Museo universal, sobre sonidos mexicanos

museo universal

Museo universal, sobre sonidos mexicanos, a virtual museum of pre-Columbian Mexican tlapitzalli (aerophones), is universal because it does not include language-based information; all it requires is Internet access and the ability to use a computer mouse.

Clicking on an illustration takes the user to an enlargement of the image along with a sound file of a brief performance on the instrument and a spectrograph of the sound. Written in the standard HTML markup language, it can operate on all major platforms.

Above, a screenshot of part of the museum; below, a brief demonstration of pre-Columbian Mexican instruments.

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Filed under Antiquity, Instruments

The magrepha mystery

The magrepha of ancient Hebrew ritual has been variously described as a percussion machine, signal gong, bell, tympanum, kettle drum, or hand drum—but also as a pneumatic organ, water organ, steam organ, composite woodwind instrument, pipework, or controllable siren. For centuries, scholars were unable to reach a solution that squared with ancient texts.

In “The magrepha of the Herodian temple: A five-fold hypothesis”, Joseph Yasser settled the matter by showing that the earliest sources mention the magrepha as a shovel for removing ashes and describe the thunderous sound caused when it was thrown to the floor at a particular point in the service; this sound apparently symbolized the vengeful actions of an angry God, aligning the ritual act with passages in Ezekiel. Later sources unmistakably characterize the magrepha as a type of wind instrument with multiple openings, each producing multiple sounds; Yasser’s proposed reconstruction is shown above.

The article appeared in A musicological offering to Otto Kinkeldey upon the occasion of his 80th anniversary, a special issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 13, no. 1–3 [1960], pp. 24–42; the issue is covered in our recently-published Liber amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

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Filed under Antiquity, Curiosities, Instruments, Source studies