Bagpipes and Hurdy?gurdies

ture, thus reflecting throughout history the changes in musical as well as visual taste. They follow rules varying in strictness and persistence: stern, immutable ones, such as the laws of nature, and volatile, changeable ones, such as the fancies of fashion, and in between the semimalleable ones of the great conservative forces of civilization, habit and tradition. Thus every builder of musical instruments combines different roles: he observes, as an acoustical engineer, the invariant properties of vibrating matter, whether revealed by his own research or handed down by the tradition of his craft; he follows, wittingly or not, the vogue of his day; and, finally, he obeys his own personal taste, musical and decorative. But these are not the only factors that determine the production of musical instruments. There are, also, different social levels: we see the instruments gaining and losing caste, passing from street singer or shepherd to courtier and perhaps back again. There is, moreover, the unequal pulsation of inventive life in the different dwelling places of men: centers of creative energy, courts and cities fermenting with competition and consequently with novelties, and quiet, remote mountain valleys where a hundred years are like a single day. There are, finally, the cultural migrations such as the infiltration of oriental civilization into Europe through its main gates, the Balkans, southern Italy, and Spain. But above all, one is struck by the enormous influence that the beaten path of custom has. If the other factors form the fleeting and shifting surface pattern, the curls of foam, tradition is the regular beat of the heavy waves. Structural devices, playing techniques, even small decorative patterns such as the shape of sound holes are retained for centuries. Having seen a flute in an ancient Egyptian tomb, we recognize the same instrument in the hand of a fellah; just as we recognize in Torre Annunziata the very same wall scrawls, kitchen utensils, and children's toys that we had noticed half an hour before in Pompeii, four feet, or rather two thousand years, lower in the ground. Among the most versatile instruments-at the same time stable and protean-are the bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy. Both are of remarkable age. Though at first glance they are as different as possible, after an adventurous history their fates intertwined and they became so assimilated that they could replace each other in the same score. But before taking up their evolution, let us examine their structure. In its simplest form the bagpipe consists of (a) a bag, (b) a short blowpipe through which the player inflates the bag with air, and (c) one or more reed pipes through which the air leaves the bag, thus producing sound. The bag, which serves as a flexible wind reservoir, is made of the skin or bladder of an animal, usually a goat or a sheep; the pipes are inserted into the natural holes of the skin, where the animal's neck or feet were, by means of cylinders of wood (the so-called stocks) round which the skin is tightly fastened with a cord. The blowpipe, where it enters the bag, is fitted with a leather flap valve that prevents the air from passing back. The sounding pipes-primitive oboes or clarinets-differ in structure and