Someone wrote:
Which gets me back to the main point I wanted to raise-about pre-keyed chanters of the 18th Century, open or closed- because it could be imagined that this repertoire with all the arpeggios ( Peacock and earlier, like the Dixon manuscript) which must have been played on open-ended chanters, ...

Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997
From: Dick Hensold <dick@mn.uswest.net>
There is somewhat of a contradiction in the historical record here. There are lots of tiny old open chanters in collections, but the contemporary documentation seems to indicate that they were stopped. John Goodacre has an interesting and very plausible interpretation of the Talbot MS (1695-1700?), indicating that this 8" smallpipe chanter was stopped. The measurements of the smallpipe are accompanied by a fingering chart showing an 8-note scale, g'-g", with the pinkie down on all but the lowest note. Exactly the same as Peacock's chart for the smallpipes 100 years later! John doesn't think that there's any reason a player would keep their little finger down like that unless the chanter were stopped. John also points out that while bore measurements are given for most other instruments in the MS, they are not given for the small-pipe, implying that Talbot couldn't see the bore to measure it.

Talbot specifies a g' keynote, Peacock notates g', the musette is also notated in g, the Dixon Ms is in g. I doubt the actual pitch of the chanters was nearly as consistent! I think g was just the traditional nominal pitch for smallpipes. Talbot was obviously interviewing a player, and measuring his instrument (rather then working with an instrument in a collection). Also, Talbot's and Peacock's charts do corroborate each other.

The MS consists mainly of descriptions and measurements of instruments. There are several articles about it in the Galpin Soc. Journal, the one about the bagpipe entries (by William Cocks) is found in Vol V, Mar 1952, pg. 44.

On 14^th April, Barry Say wrote:
Can I make a suggestion ?
The open-ended smallpipe of the 17th and 18th century was in fact a failure. This was a delicate instrument being promoted by the gentry of the day, possibly under the influence of the musette, if not directly derived from it.
The pedigree of the Border/Lowland bagpipe is beyond question, although we may not be fully informed about the playing styles of the day. Perhaps the gentry gave the toys they were promoting to pipers of the day (- Jimmy Allan for instance), who made a show of playing them but went home to play their more accustomed and boisterous instruments.
It was only with the stopping of the end that the smallpipes gained an articulation which allowed them to compete with the conical bored chanters for acceptance by being able to play staccato.
There is also a danger that many of the pipes in museums have survived largely because they were not played because they did not work (too well)
I would suggest that the resurgence of previously rejected instruments(such as, presumably) the SSP is due to a much larger world population of potential musicians looking for something to play, as well as increasing quality of the instruments.

From: Dick Hensold <dick@mn.uswest.net>
I take it that you disagree with K Proud/R Butler's comment concerning the smallpipes: "In the 18th century it was played and loved; in the 19th entury's early years the instrument and its musical range were vastlyimproved and yet, paradoxically, it suffered a severe decline before the century was half over." Declined from its status as a failure and a toy? I wouldn't say it had far to go in that case!
Just to be even-handed, not to mention wishy-washy, I'll start with a couple of quotes that could be interpreted as supporting your position...

From Robert Riddell, "A Collection of Scotch, Galwegian and Border tunes." 1794 "This is a Border air, and from the spirit of the tune, seems to have been composed for the Northumberland, or small Bagpipe; very capital performers upon this instrument are to be found upon the English Border chiefly owing to the partiality shewn to it, by the Duke of Northumberland..." This seems to support your view of gentry patronage as well as anything.

From the 1778 Encyclopedia Britannica: "...(The Small Pipe) hath no speciesof music peculiar to itself; and can play nothing which cannot be much better done upon other instruments; though it is surprising with what volubility some performers on this instrument will display, and how much they will overcome the natural disadvantages of it." (I try to keep in mind that the guy who wrote this was a violinist.)

These two quotes are also interesting in that they contradict each other on the question of whether the smallpipes had their own repertoire in the 18th C. I'll guess that Riddell was the more knowledgeable of the two writers; he actually knew enough tunes to write a book of them- the E.B. article author picked up much useful information, but his experience was clearly limited.
Besides these two quotes, the view of the smallpipes as an instrument not taken seriously by the main pipers of the day does not make too much sense to me.
Most of the mentions of smallpipes in the 18th century make some comment on the virtuosity of the players. Jimmy Allen, for one, supposedly "excelled most on the sweet small pipes", (if his biography is to be believed) and this implies some sort of commitment to the instrument. Peacock had a substantial repertoire, and that shows even more commitment. And how much of this repertoire comes from Turnbull or Lamshaw? James Bell "plays exceeding fine..." The smallpipes play slow tunes very effectively. If you were only playing to please someone else, why would you bother with the high-velocity stuff?

The best argument that the smallpipes was not a toy of the gentry is the tunes themselves. The gentry's taste in music is well documented in David Johnson's book "Scottish Fiddle Music in the 18th C.", and the smallpipe repertoire, as defined broadly by Peacock or narrowly by Dixon (plus the tortured logic of my previous post) does not fit this taste at all. If the smallpipes were musically derived from the musette, and their only cultural function had been to play for the upper classes, Peacock's Tunes would be filled with minuets (it has only one, as does Dixon) and songs with basso continuo parts. The titles (such as 'Cutty Claw'd Her' and 'O'er The Dyke') would have been more bowdlerized. For example, one of the apparent smallpipe tunes in the Dixon MS - 'Lasses Bushes Brawly' was published as a fiddle setting in a 'drawing-room' publication that same decade as 'Lasses Likes Nae Brandy'. Also, the upper classes liked their music well up-to-date, and both Peacock and Dixon are full of traditional settings of old tunes with variations, whose ornamentation style reminds me a lot more of the 17th century than the 18th.

Most of the extant smallpipes from this period are made of ivory, and I think that they survived because they made pretty collectors' items after it became difficult to find reeds for them. (I think the chanter stocks are narrower than on modern nsps). More crudely made SPs of domestic hardwoods would not have been as likely to survive, but I can think of one example without going through my notes. It is oak, has a stopped chanter and a huge bore. I have closely examined only one ivory SP from this period, and it has considerable wear on the finger holes, so somebody got it to work to their satisfaction. (It has an open eighth-inch bore).

From: Dick Hensold <dick@mn.uswest.net>
I think I'll finish what I started before and quote a few other 18th century sources that have some bearing on the question of the stopping of the chanter. Please keep in mind that I'm *only* talking about cylindrically bored chanters 9" long or less. And I've actually not made up my mind over what is the most likely theory, or whether there was more than one option. (What do you suppose he *did* mean by "commonly stopped", below?)

-(1695-1700?), Talbot Ms. Already discussed.

-1729 Skene Diary. Description of piper James Bell: "...plays exceeding fine upon the small pipe closs hand..." Make of this what you will!

-1733 Dixon MS. Lots of room for musical exegesis here. This manuscript is, in part, a smallpipe collection, although it's a matter of interpretation which tunes are smallpipe tunes and which are not. One of the tunes, 'Cut and Dry Dolly', is identified as a smallpipe tune in another 18th C. source, and C&D D is grouped with a number of other tunes that are readily recognizable from later NSP collections. All these tunes use only 8 notes, have #7ths in the comparable fiddle versions, and are stylistically very consistent with much later versions. In fact, Matt Seattle says in his notes to 'My Love Comes Passing By Me',"(In comparison to the version in Peacock's Tunes) it is notable how much, including the sequence of strains, is common to both. What we see here shows the strength of an aural culture over two thirds of a century."

Now this is mere conjecture on my part, but if I were a smallpiper in the mid-18th century and someone suddenly stopped my bore (as if it happened that way) I would play these tunes *much differently*. Differently enough to show up in transcriptions, I'm sure. In other words, 'Dorrington Lads' changed a lot between Dixon and Peacock (because it was transcribed for a different instrument), and Lads of Alnwick has hardly changed at all(implying that the instrument itself had changed little). So does this make any sense?

-1743 Nsp with *closed* chanter exhibited at Jenny Surtees' house, Newcastle in 1934. Drone stock engraved 'John Hall, 1743'. (This is from the K. Proud/R. Butler book. I don't think the whereabouts of this set are known or at least publicly known. If it's extant, it would be the oldest dated smallpipe with 3 drones in a common stock. But who knows when the chanter was closed?)

-1778 Encyclopedia Britannica, BAGPIPE entry, The Small Pipe (subentry).
"...This hath only 8 notes, the lower end of the chanter being commonly stopped. The reason of this is, to prevent the slurring of all the notes, by having the lower hole closed, and also by the peculiar way in which the notes are expressed, plays all it's tunes in the way called by the Italians *staccato*, and cannot slur at all..." (This is no big deal, since there is at least one chanter with an end cap dating from the 1770's. However, the overall tenor of the article makes me think that if the stopping of the bore had been a recent innovation, the writer might have described it a little differently. He seems to describe it as if it were an established tradition. I don't know.)

-1800 Peacock's Tunes. Now *here's* a flaky arguement for you. Neither of the smallpipes pictured in the fingering chart has the kind of end-caps that we normally associate with stopped chanters, and yet we know that they *were* stopped. Were there other permanent methods of stopping a chanter that we have extant examples of, and that I'm just not aware of? Or was Bewick just a careless draftsman who didn't know what a smallpipe looked like?

From: Jim McGill <jim@sea.hp.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 1997
Just a lexagraphic note. As a calligrapher (one of my many hats in the past) I've looked at a lot of 14th - 18th century correspondence. A fairly common form of the lower case r is the "tall r" which is nearly as tall as a lower case t and looks like a slightly short lower case l with a bit of a hook to the right on top. So probably what written was "cross hand", though what they meant is anyone's guess.

From: Dick Hensold <dick@mn.uswest.net>
Actually, all the research I have done to date has been in preparation for a measuring project which would ideally involve a significant portion of the extant instruments. This project has not yet taken place, because I haven't yet mustered sufficient funds. So I've collected a lot of information, but I'm currently a little reluctant to make any conclusions. My talk last year at the Chantry (wasn't it subtitled 'A work in progress' or something?) was intended both to share what I'd pulled together so far, and to get feedback from the Northumbrian Smallpipe Mainstream

If early smallpipes were stopped, it was with a piece of cloth or beeswax or whatever. It's easily conceivable that well-intentioned collectors may have mistakenly thought that the stopping was a modern alteration and took it out. Or it may have just fallen out on it's own. But even if there were examples that were stopped, or showed evidence that they might have been stopped, there is no way to prove that the stopping was not first added at a much later date. I cannot see a reason for making an open-ended pipe which could be stopped later.

• One less manufacturing step? Tradition? Because it's easier to bore the hole all the way through and then turn the outside? :)
• If the stopping were optional would we not expect to find (decorative?) plugs made by the maker?
• I suggest that the makers made them open-ended and the players may well have stopped them later, in order to make them more amenable(?).
• Sure. The question is, when? And does the stopping apply to the Dixon smallpipe tunes?

And someone added:
When I first came across the Northumbrian Pipes I fell for the line of a inear development which started from an open ended chanter and progressed through stopping the end and then onto keys, and that there was a continuous tradition of music to match. However, I now believe that the tradition comes from the conical chanter which was widespread in the county, and played by those who were definitely outside the"cultured" classes. I suspect that the smallpipes were an invention at the behest (or to curry favour) with the cultured classes, but I suspect the open ended chanters were basically dissatisfying to the musicians of the time, because none of this tradition has survived. The stopping of the end provided some improvement, but it was only the addition of the keys which made the instrument widely acceptable.

From: Ian Lawther <ian@northernlight.demon.co.uk>
I've edited Barry's comments to bring together two points that had not occurred to me before. On one hand he refers to the 17/18th century instruments being related to the musette, and then goes on to mention the stopping of the chanter.

The musette, of course, has two chanters, one open and one stopped. Could it be that here are the origins of the stopped chanter, and indeed the regulators on uilleann pipes? Does it have to be that at sometime someone suddenly decided to stop a chanter for no particular reason, or could it have been a tangential development from the stopped half of the musette.

And Barry replied:
My original point was more to relate the smallpipes and their promotion by the nobility to the popularity of the musette with the ci-devant aristos of our neighbour across the channel. A transfer of attitude (if not actually of instruments)

Some people said bits of:
I have felt for some time that there is a danger in associating pipes with twentieth century geographic bases with their original development. I think there is enough evidence to show that uilleann/union/pastoral pipes were being experimented with by makers based in Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin and their associated rural hinterlands, and probably variants of smallpipes also, though there is no evidence in Ireland. Some worked, some didn't, and the current regionalism came a little later.

A good point! I have been considering looking into the history of UP for some days for precisely this reason. UP seem to be an adopted pipe of the Irish, whereas NSP seem to have been restricted to "the two counties" (Northumberland and Durham).