Flemish bagpipes after Breugel

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WORKSHOP
The second article in a series in which makers describe the instruments they make and discuss their philosophies of bagpipe design and construction.

Flemish Bagpipes after Breugel

I was bitten by bagpipes in 1977 at the London College of Furniture. It was all Bill O’Toole’s fault. I thought I wanted to make baroque flutes, but then I discovered that everyone was making them. Bill lent me a tin whistle and taught me some tunes which he’d learnt from John Doonan records; then sometime during 1978 he started making his first bagpipe based on a Flemish design he’d seen. It is fair to say that there was a certain amount of outrage in the Early Woodwind Workshop, but by the end of the year he had a working instrument in G/C. We did some playing together on flute and bagpipe. Then Dave Armitage arrived at LCF with a melodeon and an enormous knowledge of folk dance. Bill made me a set of pipes like his, and in this way he was responsible for the beginnings of Blowzabella… In due course we realised that what we needed was a G/C melodeon rather than Dave’s D/G. Bill bought one, but when he returned to Australia he took it with him. Rather than buy a new melodeon, for which we had no spare cash, I decided to make a set of pipes in D/G.

The reason I made a Flemish set was that at that time no other type of pipe had really penetrated my consciousness; I had heard some French instruments but was very hazy about the different types. As for English ones, I had read Rod Cannon’s articles, but there seemed so little to go on; there was certainly nothing of the almost photographic quality of the dozens of Flemish paintings of pipes (see La Cornemuse by Hubert Boone2). I realised that my parents had had a good full size reproduction of Pieter Breugel the Elder’s ‘The Wedding Feast’ at home for as long as I could remember, so I suppose I already had an unconscious familiarity with Breugel’s instruments. I eventually chose the instrument in the ‘Peasant Dance’ as a model, as it seemed about the right size for a D/G pipe. Secondly, although I had seen one or two instruments posing as Breugel pipes, they did not look to me much like the one in the pictures. Thirdly, although I was lucky enough to have a lot of freedom in the course at LCF, the college attitude definitely favoured defunct instruments as opposed to living ones.

Obviously, the first step was to work out the chanter. The only clear idea I had of what I wanted was that it was to be a conically bored double-reed chanter, the six-finger note giving D above middle C on the piano. Besides the major scale, with a semi-tone leading note below, I wanted to be able to obtain C natural, B flat, F natural and G sharp in that order of priority. At that time I thought of a whole-tone below the main scale as being ‘Scottish’, but I have since decided that the ‘Scottishness’ or otherwise of the sound depends upon how the instrument is played as far as this note is concerned, and now generally prefer to have a whole-tone, if there is no choice. Knowing very little about conically bored wind instruments I had

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to decide on: (1) Bore taper (2) Bore length (3) Wall thickness (4) Fingerhole
positions (5) Reed type (6) Bore diameter at the throat. To start with I looked at an
early baroque oboe by Denner (whether J. C. Denner or I. Denner I cannot
remember). This had a main bore taper of 30:1, and a starting diameter of about
4.5 mm. In order to simplify matters I decided to neglect the variations from a true
truncated cone which occur in all baroque oboes, shawns, rauschpfeifen, and the
like. The taper turned out to be quite a fortunate choice. The minimal wall
thickness was fixed at 4 mm under the lowest finger hole and vent holes, gradually increasing towards the top holes. As for the reed, I started rather optimistically
with a highland chanter reed. Optimistically, since it is after all designed for a basic
pitch a major sixth higher than my intended design. Then I tried a Schalmei reed
from the Early Music shop; this seemed quite promising, but I couldn’t get them to
last very long; perhaps it was something to do with the fact that they are intended to
be played in the mouth. You can see that my ignorance about reeds at that stage
was phenomenal. The next try was an Irish chanter reed: Dave Armitage had a
practice set and gave me a couple of reeds to play about with. I cut down the staple
by about 15 mm, and have used a slightly modified Irish type reed ever since. The
fingerhole positions were arrived at by trial and error. Given eight fingerholes and
two vent holes, one set of positions for the first guess, and another set for the
second guess, and three trial reeds, that means a minimum of 60 holes for the first
prototype. Mine actually ended up with 60 holes, of which all but ten at any given
time were filled with beeswax. I was too lazy to make a new chamber for each new trial; I only aimed for one octave, which made matters easier, but looking back, I
think I was quite lucky in getting a working chanter relatively quickly. That I was
able to get a cross-fingered F natural was an unexpected bonus, due, I now realise,
to the relatively large size and internal volume of an Irish reed for a chanter of this
type. The remaining cross-fingered notes are much easier to get anyway.
At this stage I returned to the painting to study the style and relative dimensions
of the instrument. The details of the turning are so precisely observed, and what is
more, consistent from painting to painting, that it seems quite reasonable to me to
place reliance on what is depicted. The next job was to decide on the length of the
drones. Dividing the length of the bass drone by the length of the chanter (less the
hidden tenons) gave the figure 1.78. Multiplying the length of my chanter, less
tenon, by the same figure gave about 940 mm. The actual length of the bass drone relative to the chanter is probably greater than it appears because of foreshortening
due to parallax and perspective effects. I had already discovered by adding a
section onto the bass drone of my Bill O’Toole pipes that a length of somewhere between 900 mm and 1000 mm was about right. I chose a bore of 7 mm, 8 mm and 9
mm for the first, second and third joints respectively. This seemed to give adequate
loudness and good stability. I was given the measurements of a Grundic Cornemuse
Bourbonnaise a few months ago, and discovered that the bass drone has the same
bore, and within a few millimetres the same length as mine. As for the tenor
drone, the ratio between tenor and bass drones in the set of pipes is roughly 3:2 which
implies an interval of a fifth. I decided to depend on from authenticity in this respect,
since I wanted to be able to play tunes in D and G (six- and three-finger tonic)

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

without retuning or shutting off drones, so I designed the tenor drone to play one
octave above the bass; but I made it as long as I could within the requirement of
getting the right note in order to be as faithful as possible to the picture. Once the
lengths were decided, I could begin to arrive at the details of the turning, relative
diameters, lengths of sockets and tenons, size of decorations and so on. It was an
incredibly exciting and satisfying process to see the two-dimensional original
emerging in the solid reality of three dimensions.
The bag is really a story in itself, and I’m sure that many self-taught bagpipe
makers will find experiences in common. It took a lot of thinking about the shape
and internal visualisation before I even committed myself to put a shape on paper.
How to reproduce that beautifully plump and pear-shaped, but elegantly
swan-necked, bag? There is no evidence of a seam on top of the neck, so the bag
was not made from two pieces; instead the seam must continue at least up to the
drone stock position, and perhaps as far as the blowpipe. Nor does there seem to be
external stitching, so the bag must be turned inside out after stitching. But in ‘The
Wedding Feast’ there is what appears to be a fillet of leather protruding from the
seam; the answer lay in the bag of a Musette de Cour which I saw in the
Conservatoire Museum at Brussels. This was sewn in the manner of Fig. 1, Fig. 2
shows the arrangement with the bag everted. The result is a really solid seam.
However the process of sewing is somewhat laborious since there are six layers of
leather to deal with. The first bag was agony to make, and took about 8 hours of
sewing in all. It was so big that I had to sew up the neck after turning it inside out,
even after choosing a relatively large chanter stock diameter of 45 mm. Since then,
after learning from others, I have made a sewing clamp, and can finish a bag in
about 1½ hours. That first bag was much bigger than my present standard bag,
which itself, at a 10 a.m. festival bagpipe workshop the morning after, can seem
bottomless; but I think it was much nearer the size in the pictures. The line drawing
is from a photograph taken at St. Chartier in 1980. Unfortunately that instrument,
together with others, was nicked from my van a couple of years ago . . .

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Flemish Bagpipes after Breugel

pleasing is I suppose to quite a large extent fortuitous, being governed by the reed shape and chanter dimensions (including hole positions and sizes). As far as stability is concerned, one aspect of it is the extent to which the pitch of any note changes with variations in bag pressure. A pipe which is unduly sensitive to bag pressure by way of pitch changes can be tricky to play in tune, thus it is desirable for the pitch of the chanter to be relatively insensitive to variations in bag pressure for all notes. This point assumes greater importance with a chanter designed to ‘octave’. (A useful verb, this; not recognised, as far as I know in English; but the French use the verb ‘octavier’ as in ‘Cet hautbois-ci octave, mais je ne peux pas octavier sur cet hautbois-la.’ Try to say the same thing using the usual English expressions and you will find yourself using many more words.) Since extra bag pressure is needed to octave, relative insensitivity of the lower octave to variations

s for materials, the first smart chanter was made from pear, and all subsequent from plum. Of all native hardwoods, I like plum the best, both for its colour its texture (except for box, which would not really be suitable for an instrument its size). The first dozen or so sets I made with stocks and drones from Pau n, a so-called bias substitute from Brazil, which is cheap, turns well, and gives a 1 colour when acid-stained, but it’s not much good for chanters because you to get a hairy bore. Having secured a reasonable supply of plum I thereafter ed using plum throughout. nce my first tidy version of the instrument had settled down after the first hs of playing, both on my own and in Blowzabella (an invaluable testbed for ipes), I did not change the design except in one or two minor ways, and it has ed the same since. hanges have been: (1) slightly shortening the tenor drone to make it easier to (2) changing to a plastic body/metal tongue reed for the bass drone, (3) ening the chanter bell to lessen the risk of damage from accidental knocks, and hanging to a water based bag dressing as opposed to an oil based one. The new bass drone reed was a great advance because the cane version, being rather y, only fitted with difficulty in the stock: it was also a lot more stable. One us and unforeseen intermittent fault has been interaction between the two e reeds. This seems to be due to the particular internal dimensions of the c. and is exacerbated by a tenor drone reed which is relatively weak. Using a er tenor drone reed seems to cure the trouble. I have found the chanter somewhat critical as regards reed design. The reed has e rather precisely made and adjusted, whereas other types of chanter I have e since seem to be less demanding. On the other hand I have found that a good well treated will last a long time nally, it is interesting to look at the correspondences, if any, between my initial rn intentions, namely a ‘Brecgel’ pipe in D/G, the instrument shown in the sant Dance, and the finished bagpipe. It seems that the instrument which tually satisfied my requirements turned out to be remarkably like the mment in the picture without my having had, as it were, forced my design upon iture. Allowing for difficulties in precise measurement, the ratio of the visble h of the chanter to the length of the player’s right forearm from elbow to rtips is 1.13:1. The ratio of the length of my chanter to my forearm is about I. The relationship of the player’s forearm to mine is not so easy to determine. I am 6'2" tall. I am likely to be taller than the musician in the picture, but it s that the relationship of forearm length to height is not constant, and I would cessarily be longer in the forearm. Supposing his forearm to be not more than orter than mine, the pitch of his chanter could not be more than 180 cents (i.e. han one whole tone) higher in pitch than mine. The difference is likely to be n practice. r realise that I have said little about the more subtle details of chanter rmmance. such as response and tone quality. This reflects the fact that at the ning of the design process I was much more concerned about basic matters tability and inter-note tuning. That the tone quality has turned out to be quite

Chanter

Chanter 15

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. 31 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

12 Chanter 17