(Fr. vèze; Ger. Platerspiel).
A wind instrument in which a reed is enclosed by an animal bladder. The player blows through a mouthpiece into the bladder, which serves, like the bag of a bagpipe, as a wind reservoir. Thus the performer does not directly control the reed with the lips; the instrument probably cannot be overblown, but has a compass limited by the number of finger-holes. The bladder pipe is depicted in a number of late medieval and Renaissance sources, but no specimens survive from that period. It is related to the Wind-cap instruments of the Renaissance, on which the reed was also enclosed, but in a rigid wooden cap. Bladder pipes occurred in both straight and curved forms, the latter being more common and bearing a superficial resemblance to the Crumhorn. The bore was mostly conical, though cylindrical bores are also depicted; some instruments had two parallel pipes, with the second pipe apparently serving as a drone or for accompaniments. In most iconographic sources both of the player’s hands cover the finger-holes; thus neither would be free to apply pressure to the bladder, which may have been elastic enough to expand and contract by itself. Pictures do not, of course, make clear whether the instrument had a single or a double reed, and the practice may have varied with the locality.
Aristophanes in Lysistrata (411 bc) mentioned a wind instrument called a phusallis (a word derived from ‘bladder’), so the bladder pipe may have originated in the ancient world. The 9th-century epistle to Dardanus by Pseudo-Jerome defines the chorus in terms that suggest a bladder pipe. One of the earliest clear references to the instrument was made by Seifried Helbling about 1290, and two bladder pipes (see illustration) figure among the instruments illustrating one of the late 13th-century Spanish manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa María, a collection of sacred songs written for the court of Alfonso el Sabio (reigned 1252–84). Gerbert (De cantu et musica sacra, ii, 1774) reproduced a bladder pipe labelled ‘Chorus’ after a 13th-century manuscript once in St Blasien, now lost, and the Loenberg family coat of arms (St Gallen, c1340) consisted of a curved bladder pipe with conical bore and six finger-holes (illustrated in Becker). Numerous later examples have been cited by Kinsky and Becker.
While many medieval depictions suggest a courtly context, by the later 15th century the bladder pipe had become predominantly a folk instrument. It appears quite often in drawings, woodcuts and other pictures by Dürer and other early 16th-century German artists, usually played by itinerant musicians or shepherds. Virdung included a woodcut of a bladder pipe in his Musica getutscht (1511), but had nothing to say about it, and Praetorius did not mention the instrument at all. It seems to have made its last appearance in western European art in an engraving by Wolfgang Kilian of the Muse Euterpe, dated 1612, but Kilian in all probability was merely copying Virdung.
The bladder pipe survives today as a toy or folk instrument in various parts of the world, for example in Brittany and Sicily where an ordinary rubber balloon replaces the animal bladder, in Albania where it is played by children, and in Poland where it is sometimes played by shepherds.
G. Kinsky: ‘Doppelrohrblatt-Instrumente mit Windkapsel’, AMw, vii (1925), 253–96
A. Baines: Woodwind Instruments and their History (London, 1957, 3/1967/R)
H. Becker: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der antiken und mittelalterlichen Rohrblattinstrumente (Hamburg, 1966)
R. Weber: ‘Tournebout–Pifia–Bladderpipe (Platerspiel)’, GSJ, xxx (1977), 64–9
K.T. Meyer: The Crumhorn: its History, Design, Repertory, and Technique (Ann Arbor, 1983)
HOWARD MAYER BROWN/BARRA R. BOYDELL