"English" Renaissance Bagpipes

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in pressure means that transitions can be made more smoothly. As far as response is concerned, I would expect a chanter to be able to cope cleanly with wide and fast interval leaps within the basic octave; this would be especially important for leaps which end with the six-finger note, since this movement is such a basic component in the vocabulary of articulation. For wide and fast interval leaps to be achieved in tune, the basic octave must be tuned for constant bag pressure, so here, tuning, stability and response are inter-related. If all these considerations can be optimised and at the same time the bag pressure be made moderate, then the pipe will feel easy to play.

‘English’ Renaissance Bagpipes

When I made the first set of Flemish pipes in 1980 I had no thought that making pipes would occupy so much of my time in the years to come. The pipes created their own demand, and making them stimulated my interest in bagpipes in general. After a year or two the desire arose to make a set of English pipes in G, and this happened to coincide with Blowzabella’s requirement for G pipes. Paul James and Cliff Stapleton had just joined the band, and Cliff’s hurdy-gurdy was pitched in G/C.

Rod Cannon’s articles opened my eyes to bagpipes in England, and I began to look around for pictures of them. As far as I know there are not many pictures of pipes in southern England. There is in fact no pictorial evidence of a distinct regional or national style of instrument, and those that do appear are not particularly dissimilar to contemporary north-west European types. Probably the best known are: — an engraving on the bard of silvered armour belonging to King Henry VIII (1509-1547) — ‘Southwark Fair’ (1773) by William Hogarth (1698-1764) — ‘The Election Party’ by William Hogarth — A sculpture in the antechapel of Magdalen College, Oxford. There are of course any number of church sculptures showing various sorts of bagpipes. They are not of much use to me as a maker for three main reasons. Firstly, for obvious reasons they are not particularly realistic; secondly, most of them date from before the mid-15th century; thirdly, because I understand that as much stone-carving was carried out by itinerant artisans from all over Europe, the pipes cannot necessarily be regarded as having local attachments. The same argument can be applied to the pictures, but at least some of the artists are known to be English, even if they were depicting European models. The reason I was after pictures from the 16th century is that it was then that a second drone seems to have appeared, and I wanted a second drone for the extra body that it gives to the sound. My impressions of the pictorial evidence boiled down to two main stylistic features, namely, rather large bells on chanter and drones, and quite plain tuning. So much for stylistic objectives.

Musically speaking, I wanted to make a pipe that had very much a character of its own. The second half of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th saw a general refinement in the tone quality of wind instruments, and this was reflected in the exterior shape. Bagpipes also followed this trend, witness the development of the pastoral pipes, the small pipes and apparently the Half-long and Border pipes during this period. The present-day pipes of central France with their exquisite sonority, probably developed at this time. My idea was to make an instrument which represented the visual and aural aesthetics of the pre-baroque era: at the same time the sound should not be so overpowering as to be useless in a band context.

Not long before, I had been fortunate enough to obtain an original early 19th century zampogna from the Abruzzi region of Italy, very similar to those depicted in Baines. It was fitted with reeds, two of which were still in working order. These instruments come in two types; the solo version, in which the chanters are pitched a fourth apart, and the version designed to accompany a separate mouth-blown shawm (ciaramella) in which the chanters are one octave apart. Mine was of the second type, the absolute pitch being centred around A. The style and technology of these instruments bear the hallmark of renaissance wind instruments, even down to the keywork. The sound is robust rather than subtle, quite loud but not raucous, and well-focused. In trying to make a renaissance bagpipe it suddenly struck me that the shorter chanter of my zampogna would be a perfect place to start.

A description of the bore will show that it is rather unusual as compared with more ‘modern’ bagpipes. The reed socket tapers from about 8 mm at the top to 6.3 mm over a distance of about 15 mm; there follows a parallel section of about 45 mm after which the bore expands to 10.5 mm over a distance of 75 mm; then there is a virtually parallel section for 85 mm, when the bore expands again for about 90 mm by a further 4.5 mm, but rather irregularly; thereafter the bore expands more steeply to form a rather flat (i.e. cone-shaped) bell about 90 mm long with a terminal diameter of about 65 mm. Although the taper of the two expanding sections is quite steep (about 18:1 for the first and 20:1 for the second) because of the two parallel sections, the overall taper to the start of the bell is relatively gentle — about 35:1. At the same time the diameter of the throat is large at 6.3 mm. There are two vent holes at 133 mm from the bell, and a third one at 185 mm. The fingerholes (five in all, giving a leading note and the first five notes of the major scale) are quite small and highly placed. Apart from some lightly incised rings, the exterior is devoid of decoration and nearly parallel down to the start of the bell. The reed is as described in Baines, with a short flat staple, and a long parallel blade. The top of the chanter, instead of having a narrower diameter tenon bound with lapping thread, carries a taper which fits into a corresponding female taper in the stock. My modifications consisted chiefly of some regularisation of the bore, finding the position of further fingerholes to complete the octave, and lowering the pitch by about a tone. The bore, after modification, started at 6 mm, then without a parallel section expanded over 150 mm to 11 mm: after a parallel section of 95 mm, there followed a further expansion of 3 mm over a distance of 90 mm, before the start of the bell.

I found that the acoustic parameters of the chanter (large reed, small holes?) gave good cross-fingering, so that I was able to get F natural, E flat, C sharp and B

                              Chanter  17

English’ Renaissance Bagpipes

flat, in addition to the normal major scale. With a good reed I could also get a top J A by increasing the bag pressure and pinching the thumbhole. By replacing the thumb and increasing the pressure still further I could even get to top B and C, but these notes were of limited musical use because of the excessive pressure required to get them. As for drones, I decided they should be divergent, in a common stock. There was no particular reason for this except that I liked the idea of divergent drones, but felt that they might be physically difficult to manage in separate stocks. The stock itself is circular in section but reducing in diameter from the drone end to the point where it ties into the bag. I applied very simple decoration in the form of plain beads at the top of the chanter and at the start of the bell, and in similar places on the drones. Sometimes I have carried these out in black horn, and sometimes in the wood of the pipe. I used the same bag as on the Flemish pipes, as I felt it represented a good average renaissance bag. From all of the foregoing, you can see that my approach to bagpipe making is essentially pragmatic. I prefer being in my workshop making instruments, or playing them, to spending time on painstaking research, which in any case I could not afford. I feel that my ‘English’ pipes, despite their somewhat debatable claims to Englishness, stand at least as good a chance as any other of showing what a renaissance bagpipe might have sounded like. But perhaps what I like about them most is that they have a distinctive character all of their own which I have not heard elsewhere.

Jonathan Swayne

Notes

R. D. Cannon, ‘The Bagpipe in Northern England’, Folk Music Journal II, No. 2 (1971), p. 127; ‘English Bagpipe Music’, Folk Music Journal II, No. 3 (1972), p. 176.
Hubert Boone, La Cornemuse (Brussels: Editions La Renaissance du Livre).
Anthony Baines, Bagpipes (Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 1960).