Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

5

6 5 28 20101217 28 WICKLOW PIPES R egarding the prehistoric Irish pipes featured in the February issue of An Píobaire, I was as bemused by this discovery in 2004 as everyone else until it occurred to me to compare the objects with a Turkish kaval in my possession, which has a very similar bevelled end to those on the Wicklow pipes. They could, in fact, be a set of oblique end-blown overtone flutes in different keys, sounded with the embouchure used to play the kaval or ney, which is actually a very old and widespread technique and not con- fined to the middle East. Like the Wicklow pipes, the Norwegian selje- floyte has no sound holes; the player opens or stops the end of the instrument with his fin- ger, producing the notes of the harmonic series. Could the the Wicklow pipes have been played in the same way? The excavators' contention that the pipes were 'originally attached to some [contraption] that has unfor- tunately not survived' is spurious. Why was the attachment not in the trench also? Perhaps it was a set of panpipes then. Panpipes have existed all over the word since the most ancient times and there is no reason to suppose that they were not present in Ireland at some time. However, panpipes do not require bevelled ends, and are not open at both ends. Bone and stone are generally the only materi- als that survive the millennia to prove that our remote ancestors had musical or artistic skills, and the Wicklow pipes provide one of the few exceptions. It is certainly true, and is proved by the discovery in Schwabia of 36,000-year- old bird-bone flutes, that our species, Cro- Magnon man, has always been musical. To assume that people who lived before our his- torical era had no technology except flint axes is a rather elementary mistake. Bone flutes, reindeer horn implements and carved stone objects have survived from almost the begin- ning of the Cro-Magnon era – why should anyone assume these people did not make quite advanced things out of perishable materials too? The Wicklow pipes have proved that wooden pipe-making goes back a long way further than we thought. Dirk Campbell ~ Correspondence ~

6

28

[Periodical]

2011-02-24T00:00:00

anonymous,guest,friend,member