This is a detail from one of the most precious books in Glasgow University Library - the Hunterian Psalter (MS U.3.2, fol. 21v), produced in southern England c.1170. The triplepipe I recognise, but what is the other boy playing? It looks to me more like a monochord than a bellows-pipe. My curiosity led me via the 1-string Japanese ichigenkin to the 7-string Chinese guqin and I found myself reading about a pentatonic tuning system that was strikingly familiar:
The most common tuning, “zheng diao” 〈正調〉, is pentatonic: 5 6 1 2 3 5 6 (which can be also played as 1 2 4 5 6 1 2) in the traditional Chinese number system or jianpu (i.e. 1=do, 2=re, etc.). … Other tunings are achieved by adjusting the tension of the strings using the tuning pegs at the head end. Thus manjiao diao (“slackened third string”) gives 1 2 3 5 6 1 2 and ruibin diao (“raised fifth string”) gives 1 2 4 5 7 1 2 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guqin)
This adds another perspective to the scale theory published by Seumas MacNeill in 1954 in Acustica 4, in 1960 in the Piping Times, and 1968 in his BBC book, Piobaireachd. Understanding pibroch’s three pentatonic scales as subsets of a ‘normal’ diatonic scale (the scale of D major) is relevant given the Highland clarsach’s 7 strings per octave. But we may reach a deeper understanding if we contemplate a model relevant to the lyre. We now have archaeological evidence from the Isle of Skye, 5th century BC, consisting of a bridge which most probably supported seven strings on some sort of lyre. This find, only announced in 2012, has rather turned Western music history on its head. Our complex musical culture does not only emanate from Ancient Greece via the Romans.
If we adapted these Chinese qin tunings to a 7-string lyre as follows, we could play most of the surviving pibroch repertory. Non-pipers should note that F and C are sharp:
GAB-DEF-A
GABC-EF-A (slackened 3rd string)
GAB-DE-GA (raised 5th string)
In a fascinating article published last year, Peter Greenhill suggested playing pibroch on a lyre with 9 strings (‘A Technique for Ancient Solo Lyre’). Although lyres with 9-11 strings did exist in Europe, I think the evidence weighs in favour of 6 or 7 strings for lyres in the British and Irish Isles. The lyre was preeminent accompanying poetry, sacred and secular, and it is certainly out of a lyre-playing culture that pibroch eventually emerged. I first suggested that Scottish bagpipe music might carry vestiges of lyre-shaped musical thinking from the Middle Ages in this article: ‘What do 1s and Os mean?’ Piping Today 71 (2014 ), pp. 38-43. But the idea was put into my head by Peter Greenhill in about 2007, and I am most grateful to him. I think there is a great opportunity here for new insights.
So, what is that boy with his back to the triplepiper playing? I am none the wiser - it is certainly not a Chinese qin! But I am grateful to him for sending me on a journey that yielded an unrelated insight. Namely, a practical basis potentially underlying the scales we find in pibroch. Lyre tunings called “Slackened 3rd string” or “Raised 5th string” make compelling sense of pibroch’s tonal behaviour, more compelling than previous explanations which are all theoretical. Now we have something practical.
Very interesting Barnaby, these are good parallel connections.
Did you see my Modes piece at http://clarsach.scot/2015/04/modes.html
I hadn’t properly considered the lyre connection - might that be more important for the ambitus (I think that’s the right word, for where the home note is and how the melody rises above and / or falls beneath it)
Thanks for the link. I hope Alasdair Codona’s thinking comes back online, I am intrigued.
Theoretical models are all problematic - human behaviour is what I find interesting. Particularly, how musical behaviour interacts with other domains of human activity. I think a useful model for the ‘organic’ behaviour we observe in notations of early Gaelic music is the rhizome. This grows to fill empty spaces. The rhizome is much messier than an arboreal structure and can (like Japanese Knotweed) be highly successful.
To my mind, the empty spaces filled by Gaelic composers are not so much different scales, but within one and the same scale the different hierarchies and the selection of which pitch might constitute a drone (sounded or imagined, fixed or oscillating as occurs in Sardinian and Corsican vocal polyphony).
The biggest leap I’ve taken in scale/modal thinking is to discard the concept of ‘tonic’ or tonal centre, replacing it with tonal dynamism. How do open-ended tonal structures fit with the medieval Gaelic world view or other forms of artistic expression? Close observation of the data needs to drive the theoretical modelling, and the most striking behaviour to account for is ending on a pitch we don’t expect.
http://calumcille.com/ will get you to the archive of Alasdair’s website. I did not realise it was offline - I printed everything out a long time ago so I always refer to the paper copy!
About the drone, real or imagined - I am especially interested when the real drone is sounding a different pitch to the imagined drone, so they clash or fight with each other.
A tune from China already adapted to the bagpipe is ‘The Chow Man’, in The Scots Guards Collection, vol1. It uses the first scale, (G)AB DEFA and, while not a pibroch, is evidence for a surprising compatibility between the two musical cultures - an area which should be explored to find other such tunes which might also fit the scale and sound as pleasant as this one does. Nor should the marketing potential of such a combination be ignored…
Looking at the illustration of the two musicians, I seem to see a downwards-bent headstock with several keys; and the odd hand positions suggest to me that the artist was drawing from memory and got the hand positions mixed up, and reversed - so that the instrument could be a proto-type lute or guitar, rather than one from the Far East.
Is this not simply a reflection of the fact that the very first original instrument known as ‘the voice’ chanted pentatonicly? Why look to China or lyres when at the conference Music and the Body in Greek and Roman Antiquity last year someone using the name Barnaby Brown demonstrated pibroch on the circa 30000 year old Isturitz Pipe made from the left ulna of a vulture?
Mind you the nearest size bird to that in Scotland would be the Golden Eagle and I should point out in case anyone is tempted to try and make a replica of that pipe that eagles are a protected species. I feel it necessary to include that warning as after I had made the argument that the decoration which gave its name to the Queen Mary Harp was a gold coin of Mary Queen of Scots mounted on the pillar, someone has stolen two similar gold coins from the National Museum of Scotland.
So I reiterate, leave the eagle ulna’s alone. Mind you Simon, if in the search for authenticity your harp sprouts a gold coin I would be very suspicious.
Thank you everyone. Your comments have prompted me to add a paragraph at the end of the post, highlighting the insight that I think is significant and making it clear that I still don’t know what that boy is playing. I think Ronald’s ‘headstock’ is part of the background, not part of the instrument.
Keith’s point is good: the scales available on vulture bones, whether played as flutes or reed-pipes, make it plausible that such parallels could stretch back 30-40 thousand years. But to be honest, I think this may have more to do with the way our brains work than with any distant cultural connection.
My vulture bones come from post-mortem examinations of dead birds, honest! With thanks to the Centro de Recuperación de Fauna Silvestre de la Alfranca and Universidad di Valladolid. Bringing coins into this discussion is interesting, particularly these ones: