A single-reed Aerophone incorporating animal horn, either around the reed, or forming a bell, or both; some are played with a bag. The word appears in Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose as ‘hornpipes of Cornewaile’ (see Estive), and in two 15th-century vocabularies and an inventory of an Oxford scholar (see Langwill). As a rustic instrument it is cited both by Spenser in Shepheards Calender and by Ben Jonson in The Sad Shepherd. A ‘Lancashire hornpipe’ is mentioned with other wind instruments in the report of a lady’s concert in The Tatler of 11 April 1710. Hawkins wrote that ‘we have no such instrument as the hornpipe’ but referred to its common use in Wales, where it was called Pibgorn (or pibcorn). He cited Daines Barrington’s paper of 1779 (in Archaeologia) where this and other wind instruments of Welsh shepherds are described. Subsequent references to ‘hornpipe’ as an instrument are antiquarian, as in Stainer and Barrett’s Dictionary of Musical Terms (London, 1876), until in 1890 when Henry Balfour revived the word as a generic term for numerous folk instruments resembling the Welsh pibgorn still to be found in Europe and north Africa.
The general characteristics of these are a simple pipe of elder, cane or bone, sounded by a beating reed of cane or elder; in the majority of species two such pipes are joined parallel together (double pipe). Over the distal end of the pipes is fixed a bell of cowhorn or in certain instances two bells. Instruments of this description are depicted in medieval art from the 10th century, and in English art and sculpture of the 14th and 15th centuries, and to such as these the contemporary name ‘hornpipe’ is reasonably presumed to refer. Examples are in the Beauchamp Psalter (in which it is held by a shepherd) and in the stained glass of St Mary’s, Warwick (fig.1). In these as in the pibgorn (of which 18th-century specimens are preserved) the reed(s) are covered by a second cowhorn forming a cup which is held to the player’s mouth – an arrangement which is retained in the Basque hornpipe, the alboka. In some Russian and Albanian species the reeds are taken directly in the mouth, as they were in older Scottish forms of the instrument (‘stock-and-horn’) of which late 18th-century accounts are by Alexander Pennecuik and Robert Burns (see Langwill): these were single pipes of sheep’s thigh-bone or bower-tree with cowhorn bell and oaten reed, made by shepherds. Later Scottish examples have a turned wooden reed-cap like that of a bagpipe practice-chanter. The majority of hornpipes are, however, double pipes played with an inflated bag of goatskin, cow’s stomach, etc. Such ‘bag-hornpipes’ occur iconographically in the west from the 14th century and today exist as folk instruments from the Caucasus and the Volga regions in Russia to the Greek islands and north Africa (see Bagpipe, §8). A summary of the astonishing variety of musical techniques accruing from different arrangements of finger-holes on these and on bagless hornpipes also has been attempted by Baines. The melodic compass, however, reaches a 9th at very most. Fig.2 shows a Moroccan bagless hornpipe.
The earliest reed instrument carrying a horn bell is that which became known in Rome as the Phrygian Aulos, described briefly by Pollux and others. The two pipes, one longer than the other, were held one in each hand and the longer ended with a cowhorn bell, as first depicted on a Minoan sarcophagus of c1400 bce in the Iraklion Museum (Crete). A likeness to the mouth-blown double hornpipe as now known occurs in a figurine of the 8th century bce from Asia Minor (see Rimmer). Several pairs of bird-bone pipes found in Avar graves of the 5th and 6th centuries ce are considered to be parts of hornpipes, and likewise some wooden pipes of the 9th century or earlier in the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (see Crane).
HawkinsH
H. Balfour: ‘The Old British “Pibcorn” or “Hornpipe” and its Affinities’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, xx (1890–91), 142–54
L.G. Langwill: ‘The Stock-and-Horn’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, lxxxiv (1949–50), 173–80
A. Baines: Bagpipes (Oxford, 1960, 3/1995)
J. Rimmer: Ancient Musical Instruments of Western Asia in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, the British Museum (London, 1969), pl.viii
F. Crane: Extant Medieval Musical Instruments: a Provisional Catalogue by Types (Iowa City, 1972), 46
ANTHONY C. BAINES