Chapter VII: The Pipe and Tabor

An Address to a Society Of Morris Dancers, Oxford, February 12, 1914

In the following pages I have brought together some scattered information on the instruments, especially connected with Folk-Dancing, which give the title to my address. The coming to life of a mass of beautiful tunes and dances, in response to the patient search of Mr. Cecil Sharp and a few others, is one of the most magical occurrences of which I have any memory. In a less degree I have experienced the same sense of the unexpected, in learning that in a Kentish village, so near London as often to be darkened by the skirts of town fogs, the ancient superstition still existed of telling the bees that their master is dead. Such an unsuspected lurking of primitive belief in our midst may well give a shock of surprise. But in the resurrection of the mass of hidden music, and of the dying traditions of dances, a web of extraordinary beauty is suddenly revealed--a matter of real importance.

If tunes have souls they are shut out by death from ever again vibrating in a human tenement. They are like the _gabel-rachels_, the souls of unbaptised infants whom men in Yorkshire used to hear crying round the church as though begging to be let in. But the traditional tunes of England are no longer homeless; they have a safe refuge in the printed page. They have become immortal, or as near immortality as modern paper can insure.

Mr. Sharp has done wonderful things; he is like a naturalist who should discover that we are unconsciously surrounded by whole races of beautiful things as unknown to us as elves and fairies. In the Commemoration Service we speak gratefully of all those who "found out musical tunes." If ever a man deserved remembrance for literally finding out tunes it is Mr. Sharp.

But to return to the musical instruments of the Morris dancers--the Pipe and Tabor. I am told that the little drum on which the piper accompanies his tune should be pronounced 'tabber.' I have no doubt this is right. The Oxfordshire name Dub suggests it, and the old French word Tabour is something of an argument in the same direction. In Wright's _Dialect Dictionary_ it is said that the lesser spotted woodpecker is called the "tabberer" from its habit of drumming on tree trunks. I should like to call my pipe a "tabberer's" pipe if only out of affection for the little black and white bird and his drum, but the modern pronunciation, with a long _a_, has a strong hold and can hardly be ousted. We nowadays put the pipe before the tabor, but in Shakespearian days this was not so. In _The Tempest_ Ariel plays the tune "Flout 'em and scout 'em" on a tabor and pipe--and the artist was called a taborer {98} not a piper. In the same way the Provencal performer on the two instruments was (according to Daudet), and I hope still is, known as the tabourinaire.

Morris dancing, for which the tabor and pipe once supplied the music, is now an everyday accomplishment. At Cambridge one may see Fellows of Colleges dancing, waving handkerchiefs and knocking sticks in the old manner, and I hope the same is true of Oxford.

But piping is not so common. Some of us have heard Mr. Sharp at a lecture, or Mr. Haydn Coffin on the stage. But it is not an art likely to spread rapidly, because the old English is pipe rare and hard to come by, and copies are not common either.

I began to learn the taborer's art on a French or Basque galoubet obtained in Oxford from that kind friend of many musicians, the late Mr. Taphouse. But it was only quite recently, when Mr. Manning lent me an old Oxfordshire instrument and allowed me to have it copied, that I made any kind of progress.

I do not know when playing the "whittle and dub" (as they were called) became extinct as a village art. It certainly existed thirty years ago, and for all I know there are still some living who could hand on the grand manner of taboring. Mr. Taphouse remembered very well the days when the pipe and drum were heard all round Oxford at fairs and village festivals. I remember his showing me a whittle with a crack in it where it had been broken over the head of a reveller by a drunken taborer.

The two instruments have been generally associated with dancing. Tans'ur, {100a} writing in 1772, speaks of this. "The Tabor and Pipe are two musical Instruments that always accompany each other, and are mostly used at Wakes by Country People, and at their Dancings and innocent Diversions, and often with Morris Dancers." He speaks of the pipe as played with the left hand, "on which Wrist hangs a small drum, braced in Tune to the Pipe, and beat by the Right Hand as a Bass in Time to it: both of which being well managed make pretty Harmony."

In the Wallace Collection there is a picture by N. Lancret (1690-1743) of a celebrated dancer, Mme. Camargo, who is accompanied by a small orchestra of two recorders, a bassoon and one or more viols; these are partly hidden at the back of the scene, while a boy with pipe and tabor {100b} stands close to the dancer, giving the impression that she depends on him rather than on the more formal musicians in the background. It may remind us of the Duke of Plaza Toro, who sings a song accompanied and supported by his own particular private drum as well as by the orchestra. The same quasi independence of the tabor and pipe is still to be found in the folk music of the Catalans, the inhabitants of the north-east of Spain. The dance which Mr. Casals--himself a Catalan--described to me, is a round dance of some complexity. It is held in high esteem as a national affair, and is danced by gentle and simple together. The band consists of a tabor and pipe, four large rustic oboes, some cornets and a double-bass. The interesting point is that the taborer always leads off with a solo, a spirited flourish which Mr. Casals was so good as to play on the piano. It is curious that there is only one such traditional flourish, and this is used whatever the dance-music may be. Mr. Casals described the effect of the whole band as moving and exciting in a high degree.

I have an old newspaper cutting of the Queen Victoria and Prince Albert watching the British sailor dance a hornpipe on the deck of a man-of-war, accompanied by a couple of marines with a drum and fife. Shakespeare evidently considered these two instruments as the military equivalent of the tabor and pipe. He makes Benedick laugh at Claudio, in love, for throwing over the drum and fife for the taborer's music.

In the middle ages the tabor and pipe were a good deal associated with the performances of strollers and mountebanks. On the other hand, they did not always take this role. There is a beautiful carved figure playing the pipe and tabor in the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral, dating from 1270. In Strutt's _Sports and Pastimes_ (Ed. 2, Plate XXIV), a horse is shown, dancing to a tabor and pipe, from a MS. of about 1300; on Plate XXIII is a drawing of a taboring hare (without a pipe) of about the end of the 13th century. I am not aware that these instruments are known to have existed in England earlier than the 13th century.

Fra Angelico puts these instruments into the hands of an angelic lady. Her tabor is beautifully given, the pipe is but slightly indicated. In Florence, among the singing boys of Luca della Robbia (reproduced in fig. 5), is to be found the best representation of a pipe player that I have seen. There is a comparatively modern picture of Will Kemp, {102a} the Shakespearian actor, performing his dance to Norwich. He started, apparently in 1599, on the "first Monday in cleane Lent," and succeeded in his object, though not without difficulty. His attendants' names are pleasant: Taborer, Tom Slye, Servant, Wm. Bee, Overseer, Geo. Sprat.

I am glad to say that a tabor and pipe appear in one very honourable secular affair, {102b} namely, a tournament, more correctly a joust or single combat. One of the combatants is supported by a bagpipe, the other by a tabor and pipe. It must be confessed, however, that the taborer was not well treated in mediaeval times, badly paid, and not received with the honour given to minstrels.

[Picture: Fig. 5.--Pipe and Tabor]

I like the rustic character of the pipe, and its association with cheerful mediaeval vagabonds, and, still more, its memories of centuries of village dances. I wish it had found a place in that "dancing in the chequered shade," in which Milton has immortalised the jocund rebecks. But Milton was a player of the bass viol, and does not show any especial feeling for wind instruments, so at least I gather from Welch's interesting book. {103a}

The taborer's pipe is a whistle; it happens to be made of wood, but its musical structure is precisely that of the penny whistle, except in one important particular, that it has but three holes in place of six. The pipe is therefore a poor relation of that beautiful but extinct instrument the _recorder_ {103b} which is only a wooden whistle. The recorder has a low, hollow, but most effective tone, and I shall never forget the ravishing effect of a quartet of recorders as played at a concert given by Mr. Galpin, the well-known authority on old English instruments. The taborer's pipe has none of the sweetness of the recorder; it is essentially a shrill instrument; indeed, I am told by a philologist that its old German name _Schwegel_ contains a root implying shrillness. Another old German name is _Stamentien Pfeiffe_, which my philological friend tells me does not occur in the best German dictionary, and is of unknown origin.

As I have said, the pipe has but three holes (stopped by the index, middle finger and thumb); these give four fundamental tones, which however do not occur in the working scale of the instrument. In the penny whistle, and most wood-wind instruments, the octave or first harmonic gives the means of extending the scale. But in the taborer's pipe the whole of the workable scale consists of harmonics; what corresponds to the lower octave in the penny whistle--the non-harmonic or fundamental part of the register--can only be faintly sounded. It is the first harmonic or octave of the lowest of these faint notes that forms the bottom note of the scale of the three-holed pipe. {104a} This note is approximately D of the modern flat pitch. By successively raising the middle and index fingers and then the thumb, E, F, and G are sounded. Then all the finger holes are again closed, and by a little extra impulse given to the breath A is sounded, being the harmonic 5th of the lower D. Then follow B and C as harmonic 5ths of E and F, and the final D as the octave of the lowest tone. Above this a variable number of notes--about four--are producible by cross-fingerings. The ordinary work-a-day scale of the taborer's pipe corresponds to the 12 or 13 uppermost notes of a seven octave P-F., or to the upper notes of a piccolo. The galoubet's scale begins on a B flat one-third below the taborer's pipe. There was also a bass galoubet. This instrument is known from the figures in Praetorius {104b} (1618), and also from one solitary pipe which has escaped destruction. Mr. Galpin has a copy of it in his wonderful collection, and has allowed me to play on it. {105a}

Mersenne, {105b} in speaking of the performance of an Englishman, John Price, may give to some unwary reader the impression that the said John could play a continuous scale of three octaves. But it is quite clear that Mersenne included the faint D an octave below the lowest harmonic note, so that Price could produce an _interval_ of three octaves but a continuous _scale_ of only two octaves. This is not impossible. I can play two out-of-tune shrieking notes above my high A, or 12th note, so that I can, after a fashion, get within one note of John Price, and I live in hopes of acquiring yet another and tying with him. The uppermost sounds are made by what was technically known as _pinching_, _i.e._ crooking the thumb and forcing the nail into the top hole, so that only a minute stream of air escapes. An old pipe of mine shows the mark of the pinching thumb nail. Mr. Forsyth speaks of "an instrument with only a few notes" as being "much restricted in the way of compass": {105c} this is not quite just to the taborer's pipe.

In relation to Mr. Forsyth's discussion on the _diauloi_, it should be remembered that the double pipe still exists in Russia. It is described by Mahillon {106} under the name of the Gelaika. The fundamental tones of the two instruments are the lower F sharp in the treble stave, and the B natural above it. Mahillon adds: "tantot elles se partagent la melodie, d'autres fois elles font entendre des intonations doubles."

With regard to the Greek double-pipe, I am sure that Mr. Forsyth is right, and that the bandage (_phorbeia_), which is commonly said to have served to compress the cheeks, must have had some other use. I have no doubt that he is justified in assuming that the bandage served to support the instrument. In a pipe with three holes on the upper surface a certain amount of grip on the instrument is given by pressure of the little finger above and the thumb below, and with practice it would be quite possible to manage the instrument. Still, the bandage would give freedom to the fingers, and for the four-holed pipe this form of support would be absolutely necessary. My conclusions are based on experiments on the penny whistle temporarily converted into an instrument for one hand.

In speculating on the evolution of the taborer's pipe, it must be remembered that its harmonics (on which, as I have said, its scale depends) are those of a cylindrical pipe, and a pipe that is long in relation to its bore. I like to think that it had its origin in some of the many natural hollow cylinders found among plants, for instance, the reed grass that grows in fens and dykes, or the elder which supplies a pipe when its pith is bored out, and is perhaps more familiar as the parent of pop-guns than of musical instruments. Then again, there are the hollow stalks of umbelliferous plants, such as angelica and hemlock. The late Mr. Welch, in his interesting book on Recorders, pointed out {107} that _sambucus_ the elder, _calamus_ the reed, and _cicuta_ the hemlock all occur in classic verse in relation to rustic music. Indeed the word calamus still lives, though corrupted to the French chalumeau and still further altered to the German Schalmei and the English shawm.

Welch doubts whether hemlock or similar stems would be strong enough for the suggested purpose. They certainly would not stand rough usage, but it is possible to make a taborer's pipe out of an _Angelica_ stem, for I have one. It is husky and out of tune, but it shows the thing to be possible.

This connexion between music and the form of plants is not without interest from a wider point of view. We ask ourselves why hollow cylinders occur so commonly in vegetable architecture. That rough teacher, the struggle for life, has taught plants that a tube is, mechanically speaking, the best way of arranging a limited amount of formative or building material. The hemlock or the reed can thus make stalks of ample strength and at comparatively slight cost. There is romance in the fact that plants made tubular stems to their own private profit for unnumbered ages before the coming of man: the hollow reeds waiting all these aeons till Pan should come and make them musical.

The pipe and tabor have probably come down to us less changed than any other wood-wind instrument, with the possible exception of the panpipes; both flutes and flageolets have become covered with keys, while the pipe still has no more than three aboriginal holes, one for the thumb behind and two for the fingers in front. I have wasted some time in trying to make out how the early taborers held their pipes, but musical instruments are generally drawn with hopeless inaccuracy. I have been rewarded by finding that a boy in Luca della Robbia's bas-relief (Fig. 5) at Florence holds the pipe just as I do, {108a} between the ring and little fingers, which keep the instrument steady even when all three holes are uncovered. There is an interesting point connected with the true or French flageolet. This instrument has six holes arranged in two triads, a thumb and two fingers of the right hand, and the same for the left, so that if all holes are open there would seem to be nothing to steady the pipe. But in Mr. Welch's book (p. 50) is a figure from Greeting's _Pleasant Companion _{108b} showing how the flageolet should be held, and this, curiously enough, is one of the best views of what I hold to be the proper grip for the taborer's pipe.

The tabor is still much as it was in Fra Angelico's day (judging from the angel above referred to), and indeed in earlier times, as shown in the piping angel in Lincoln Cathedral. We can see what a drum-maker calls the ropes and braces {109a} for tightening the parchment; the snares are also shown in many early drawings of tabors. These are pieces of gut or of horse-hair, stretched across the drum-head, which add a spirited rattle to its tone. Why the first edition of the _Dictionary of Music_ went out of its way to say that the tabor had no snares I cannot guess.

In many of the mediaeval drawings the artist is shown beating his drum on the snare side. I had fancied that this was only one more instance of the bad drawing of musical instruments, but when I saw the careful work of Luca della Robbia, in which the tabors are all beaten on the snare side, I could no longer doubt. I was, however, glad to find in a French account {109b} of the Provencal 3-holed pipe or galoubet, that this custom survives. In Luca della Robbia's work a single snare-cord is shown instead of four to six catgut lines as in modern drums and this is also true of the Provencal instrument. So that both the characteristics that seemed strange to me in Luca's tabor survive in Provence.

It may not be generally known that the French for the snare of a drum is _timbre_; this is the original meaning of the word, and its familiar use to mean the characteristic tone of a musical sound is later. According to Darmstetter the word 'timbre' is own brother to 'tambour,' both being derived from a low Latin form of tympanum.

The tabor-stick has changed since the early centuries. In some of the old drawings the taborer is striking his instrument with a bludgeon, instead of the light and elegant sticks such as are to be seen in Mr. Manning's collection at Oxford. Such implements were doubtless treasured by the taborer. Valmajour, the tabourinaire in Daudet's _Numa Roumestan_, possessed a drum-stick which had been in the family for 200 years.

The way of holding the drum has not always been the same. Nowadays we are told to hang it from the thumb or wrist. But in many early drawings it is apparently firmly strapped or tied to the forearm, or even above the elbow. {110a} The Lincoln Angel and Luca's boy have tabors supported by a string round the neck, and this I find to be the best method.

I hope that the drum may long survive in Provence with its ancient companion the pipe. {110b} A different instrument, however, supplies an accompaniment to the galoubet in the Basque provinces. It is a rough sort of lyre with six or seven strings tuned alternately to the tonic and dominant, which beaten with a stick make a drone bass to the pipe. It has the attractively savage name of _toon-toona_, an imitative word like tom-tom; the galoubet is called the _cherula_.

From a French cyclopaedia I learn that in Provence the taborer's art was a secret passed on from father to son, a mystery they refused to teach for money. They appeared to hold the patriotic opinion that the art of playing the galoubet, or as they call it, the _flutet_, has never spread from Provence because of its extreme difficulty. This has been a comfort to me in my attempts to play the pipe and tabor.