Leicestershire Piper in Italy

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chanter using a different bore and reed and this has greatly increased my respect for Jon’s design. I’m not attempting to copy it: but if all makers of English pipes develop their chanters from scratch then the English pipe isn’t going to evolve in the way that, for example, the Highland chanter and reed have. Today’s Highland chanter and reed have evolved through several hundred years of development and improvement. I am interested to hear other pipe-makers’ views about this.

There are many other kinds of pipes that I look forward to making eventually or copying; but I want my pipes to be useful and used. For me the most satisfying part of making is hearing my pipes being played by other people. I always like to get feedback from players to see if I can improve and modify my design in the light of their experience. In this way the pipes can evolve and improve.

I shall end with a piece of advice on social etiquette if you should ever meet an instrument-maker. Instrument-makers tend to make instruments and not a living. Thus it is not polite to say ‘Is this how you make a living?’. The tactful enquiry is ‘Do you do this full-time?’

Julian Goodacre

Leicestershire Piper in Italy

I want to account for the generous reception of my piping at a festival in northern Italy last June, the first Folkermesse at Casale Monferrato. The revival of the Leicestershire small-pipes which my brother Julian makes (cylindrical chanter, with open end but closed fingering, and one drone), has only been going on for a couple of years and I had played no other pipes before.

We were both impressed by the recordings of the Italian revival group ‘La Ciapa Rusa’ (The Red Patch) and when they visited England in May 1984 I went down to Cecil Sharp House to hear them play at a Friday dance. The group includes Beppe Greppi on the organetto (melodeon), Gerardo Cardinale on the piffero, the folk shawm which is a surviving tradition in the region, and Maurizio Martinotti, who researches and arranges many of their tunes, songs and dances (all local material), and plays the ghironda (hurdy-gurdy). They have so far failed to revive the musa, the bagpipe to play with the piffero, and so they were intrigued to hear our pipe, especially when I demonstrated it by playing several of their tunes I had learnt from their record.

The result was an invitation to perform at the three-day festival they were putting on in mid-June 1985 in their own city of Casale Monferrato, which is between Milan and Turin. Their aim was to bring together all the best Italian revival groups using drone instruments. Italy retains a surprisingly diverse culture. Italian folk musicians known abroad were often hurdy-gurdy playing beggars from Savoy. As might be expected the revival of the ghironda is well under way. Apart from ‘La Ciapa Rusa’ three other Italian groups included a ghironda player, one of whom was exhibiting as a maker as well.

The surviving or recently extinct piping traditions vary enormously. Most mysterious and isolated is the launeddas of Sardinia (two unequal cylindrical chanters and a drone, all inserted directly into the mouth). The exciting and progressive music of ‘Ritmia’ (Rhythms) takes its inspiration partly from the launeddas, without actually using the instrument. The southern bagpipe, the zampogna (two unequal conical chanters with drones), is still played in more than one region, with or without its shawm the ciaramella. One group, ‘Re Niliu’ (King Niliu), make good use of two zampogne in their progressive music; but it would have been a great expense to bring them all the way up from Catanzaro if they had been free. A group from the Friuli area, ‘La Sedon Salvadie’ (The Savage Spoon) did include a zampogna, but with only one chanter playing. In the north-east towards Trieste the bagpipe is a priva of a Balkan type (unequal double cylindrical chanter with no drone).

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Massimo Fumagalli played one in the group ‘Calicanto’ from the Veneto area.

Across the rest of the north of Italy there were several varieties of a more orthodox bagpipe, the piva (pipe), typically with conical chanter, no thumb hole, one drone an octave below and sometimes another an octave below that. The enthusiast for the revival of the piva del carner (pipe with bag) from Emilia is Bruno Grulli, who issues a magazine with that title. Besides his Balkan-type pipes, Massimo Fumagalli also played and exhibited his handsome re-creation of a piva from the Veneto, the baga (bag). The group Calicanto has made a couple of very cheerful recordings. Another maker exhibiting his different sizes of piva from the Alpine region was Walter Biella from Bergamo. The pipe in the western mountain region was the musa. ‘Prinsi Raimund’ from Turin, another group unable to attend, have used a bagpipe in their recordings, but a French cornemuse and not a musa. Maurizio Martinotti is determined to revive the musa for playing with ‘La Ciapa Rusa’. Several reconstructions have so far failed. On my first meeting with him he immediately asked if Julian would make one for him.

In pioneering this festival Maurizio Martinotti and Beppe Greppi hoped to encourage Italian revival groups to take inspiration from their own regional folk music. For, as so often happens, much of the craze for folk music recently has been for foreign music, either American Old Time, Country and Bluegrass or so-called ‘Celtic’, Scottish, Breton and ‘The Chieftains’/‘Bothy Band’ style of Irish music.

So some of the most skilled young Italian groups are singing in American and serving up their own selection of Irish tunes. One from the Milan area, ‘Celtag’, included a piper using both union pipes and Breton biniou. It struck me that to free himself from the Irish tradition what Lorenzo Galantini needs is something simpler - a Leicestershire small-pipe perhaps? Or why not some sort of piva? Another group, from La Spezia on the west coast, with the ‘Celtic’ name of ‘Lancelot’, included a piper using a fully elaborated set of Northumbrian small-pipes. Mauro Mancardi realised he could make things simpler for himself and ordered a Leicestershire small-pipe for a start.

The encouragement offered was to invite representative groups from elsewhere in Western Europe. So we heard ‘The House Band’ from Edinburgh, with Jimmy Young using his Northumbrian small-pipes forcefully, more like a folk bagpipe than highly developed parlour pipes; and the tactful union pipe playing of Dave Munro merging into the friendly sound of ‘Setanta’, the Irish/Scottish group from Glasgow. Did I dare to think that they both might use simpler instruments to advantage? ‘Cabestan’ (Capstan), a group from Brittany, specialising not in biniou and bombarde dance music but in sea shanties and fishermen’s songs, include a piper using their regional pipe, the veuze. I found Bernard Subert mastering the double chanter complexities of a facsimile Baroque musette de cour, which he cannot play with the group as it is in Baroque pitch. I showed him that what he needed was a simple musette and he ordered a Leicestershire small-pipe. To represent the vigorous piping traditions of central France, the chabrette, cornemuse, etc., there were ‘Cafe Charbons’ from the Auvergne with Dominique Paris and ‘Lo Jai’ (The Jay) from Limousin with the incomparable Eric Montbel. One of only two solo performances was by John Molineux, the English singer and magic player of dulcimers. He betrayed the drone theme of the festival as he has developed his playing so far to liberate his dulcimer from being a drone instrument.

On the Saturday evening, straight after the home group ‘La Ciapa Rusa’, there steps onto the stage a lone piper from the British tradition, with the simplest of small-pipes (not to mention his double chanter pipes, which are another story) and plays not Celtic music for once but his own personal English tunes. John Molineux has suggested that the good reception of my limited playing was due to my image as a typical Englishman - certainly the report in the Italian magazine Hi Folks! says I seemed to have stepped straight from the pages of a vintage Wodehouse novel - and that if concentrate on the image it will not matter what I play. But I promise I wore no deerstalker hat or bowler and rolled brolly. And my busking in the vast open market during the week went down well too. I earned enough for my breakfast, an Italian straw hat, and a real leather belt for my bellows. When I discovered it has a buckle of solid brass I went on playing to buy another as a spare.

International contacts, influences and even borrowings are often the stimulus for progress. In England ‘Blowzabella’ have looked abroad to France and taken on something of the live tradition of bal folk and its music. This way they may be better able to tackle the conscious revival of similar English traditions. I hope that revivalists like Maurizio Martinotti will succeed in encouraging their compatriots to draw parallels between what is being achieved abroad and what they can do with their own various traditions and instruments. Of course they will fail to secure a return to some hypothetical ‘purity’ of national or regional tradition; piping, even of Italian music, may never be quite the same again for Italians who have heard and played cornemuse, biniou, union pipes, Northumbrian small-pipes or even Leicestershire small-pipes. Meanwhile Julian continues to play and make English bagpipes in Scotland. Now he is developing an Italian musa suitable for its revival in Monferrato. Here he has one advantage; the most complete example to survive has been preserved in an Edinburgh museum.

John Goodacre

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