A pair of musical instruments consisting usually of a three-hole Duct flute and a snared drum played together by one person chiefly to provide music for dancing (see fig.1).
The pipe (Fr. flute à trois trous; Provençal galoubet; Ger. Schwegel, Tamerlinpfeife, Tämmerinpfeife, etc.) is a duct flute with three (occasionally four) holes, played with one hand. In England it is about 30 cm long, pitched in D, usually with a range of an 11th or 12th (in some instruments up to two octaves or more). The three holes allow for fingering four notes. The fundamental tones of the instrument can be sounded by blowing gently, but are not required; hence the first four degrees of the scale are produced as 2nd partial tones an octave above the fundamentals. Overblowing causes a rise of a 5th, making available the upper tetrachord of the scale (the eighth note can also be sounded as a fourth partial) and so on to complete the compass, using whichever partials speak best. The pipe is played with the left hand (the right hand holds the drumstick). The highest hole (at the rear of the instrument) is for the thumb; the other two are for the first and second fingers. The last two fingers grip the pipe at its lower extremity; the little finger can in most cases be extended to half cover the bell and thus supply the lower leading note. (Fingering charts are given in Mersenne, and Gehot.)
The bore of most modern pipes is narrow (in English pipes about 8·5 mm) to facilitate overblowing, and is usually cylindrical, though sometimes tapered to the bottom end. One example, possibly 17th-century in date, has a sophisticated bore shape of inverse conical design (17mm to 5·7mm; see Waterhouse). The scale varies in tuning but usually includes a ‘neutral’ 3rd (intermediate between a major and minor 3rd) and often a ‘neutral’ 4th that can be lowered to a perfect 4th by cross-fingering. Emission of the high notes is often improved by making the lip of the instrument of metal, and damaged or worn wooden lips are frequently replaced with metal. Larger and deeper pipes have existed. Vidal (1864) mentioned several sizes. Spanish tabor pipes generally have a wider bore and a more powerful tone than English and French pipes. The common Basque txistu (Sp. chistu), in G, is about 42 cm long with a 13 mm bore; its lip is a long metal plate let into the wood.
English tabor pipes, when not home-made or supplied by regular instrument makers in London, were often imported from France, the English size matching a common size for the Galoubet of Provence. Boxwood was the usual material, but some 18th-century English-made pipes were of ivory. The manufacture of tabor pipes continues in such centres as Marseilles and San Sebastián; it was revived in England before World War II by Dolmetsch and by Louis Musical Instrument Co. Ltd (London). (Other types of three-holed pipe include Zuffolo and the Picco pipe.)
The tabor (Fr. tambourin) is usually a small side drum with a gut snare (see Drum, §II, 3, but also Tambourin de Béarn). The snare crosses the head that is struck, or snares may be provided on both heads. The tabor varies in shape; it may be shallow (like the English tabor in fig.2), or about as deep as it is wide (e.g. the Basque atabal), or very deep, with the shell twice as long as the heads are wide (the Provençal model; for illustration see Tambourin (ii)). The first two types have existed since the Middle Ages, the last from the 15th century. The tabor is slung from the wrist or shoulder of the player’s left arm and is beaten by a stick held in the right hand. In Provence it is regarded as important to strike the snare itself, to produce a continuous droning sound underlying the beaten rhythm.
A reference in the Ars musica of Egidius de Zamora (c1270), added to a discussion of the tympanum, may be an early mention of the pipe and tabor: ‘If a pipe [fistula] is joined thereto, it renders the melody sweeter’. Iconography of this period shows a short, fat pipe, in contrast to its later elongated form. It has been postulated that this resembled the later flabiol of Catalonia (Montagu). A poem by Colin Muset (13th century) mentions the ‘flaihutel’ played ‘avec le tabor’, while the 13th-century Roman de Cléomadés mentions ‘flauteors a Il dois’, presumably referring to the two fingers used in playing. The term ‘flageol’ was also used from the 13th to 15th centuries; at the wedding of Charles the Bold in 1468, one of the musicians took up ‘un tabourin et un flagol’ in the course of a comic pantomime. The English expression ‘taborer’ may have frequently denoted a player of the pipe and tabor, as it later did in, for example, William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600), an account of how the famous actor morris-danced to Norwich accompanied by his ‘taborer’ Thomas Slye, who is shown in a woodcut (fig.3) with a long tabor pipe (a type also illustrated in Arbeau, 1588).
Dance music was always the pipe and tabor’s principal function, as is shown by many old miniatures. Two particularly good medieval scenes of people dancing to it are reproduced by Gérold (Histoire de la musique, Paris, 1936, pp.288, 328). It is also shown being used to provide music for jugglers and performing animals, and being played in the military bands of noblemen at tournaments and other occasions; the tabor is often clearly shown being beaten on the snare. In the 16th and 17th centuries the pipe and tabor remained popular and widespread, economically providing a one-man band for dances. Arbeau gave some tunes with their correct tabor beatings. Both the main sources of information about instruments at that time – Praetorius and Mersenne – suggest that the pipe and tabor was then specially well handled in England. Three examples of tabor pipes were found in the excavations of Henry VIII’s battleship, the Mary Rose (Palmer). Praetorius described the three-hole pipe and said that it is played in conjunction with a tabor ‘by some Englishmen’; it seems that in Germany the pipe and tabor had by that time been replaced by fifes and drums at weddings and other occasions. Mersenne declared that he had heard John Price get a range of three octaves out of the pipe.
The pipe did not escape the 16th-century habit of making treble-to-bass sets for every instrument, as recorded in several German court inventories of the time. In 1596, for example, the Archduke Ferdinand possessed at Schloss Ambras (Innsbruck) ‘Flauti mit clainen drümblen zu gebrauchen. 1 pasz. 3 tenor. 1 discant’. Praetorius listed a descant (47 cm long, range d' to e'''), tenor (61 cm, g to a'') and bass (70 cm, with a brass crook as in a bass recorder, range not shown), and included scale drawings of the descant and bass, and of a shallow tabor. A bass pipe in the museum of the Brussels Conservatory is about 75 cm long with a 17·5 mm bore and pitched in C, a 9th below the usual pipe. Mersenne said that consorts of three-hole flutes were not much used, and after his time they seem to have vanished altogether.
For the rest of its history the pipe and tabor was relegated to the rural environment where it may still occasionally be heard. In Oxfordshire, where it was known as ‘whittle and dubb’, it was the normal accompaniment to the Whitsuntide morris dancing until superseded by the violin or the concertina at the end of the 19th century. The Oxfordshire instruments resembled the set in fig.2. When George Butterworth combed the area for morris dances in 1912 he found only one pipe and tabor, in the possession of an elderly man of Bicester who was able to play The Maid of the Mill and Shepherd’s Hey on it. In the second half of the 20th century, as a result of a renewal of interest in morris dancing and the resumption of the manufacture of the metal three-hole pipe, the pipe and tabor also saw a revival.
In France the pipe and tabor is still used in Provence and in Gascogne. In the Basses-Pyrénées a local substitute for the tabor is the tambourin de Béarn, also called tambourin à cordes, an oblong wooden box with six gut strings which are beaten with a stick as if they were a drumhead. The strings are said to be tuned alternately to the tonic and the dominant of the key of the pipe. In Basque cities, dances such as the aurresku are often accompanied by a band of pipe (txistu) and tabor (tamboril – small drum, or atabal – bass drum) players supported by a side-drum player. In some arrangements the txistu harmonizes tunes in 3rds and a bass line is supplied by the silbote (‘big whistle’; an instrument known only from the beginning of the 19th century), which is pitched a 5th below the txistu. The silbote player does not have a drum; the other pipers mark the main rhythm on their tabors while the independent side-drum player beats more subtle rhythms. The effect recalls that of a drum and fife band (see Basque music). The simple pipe and tabor, with a pipe about 40 cm long, is found throughout western Spain (as the pito or gaita, the latter not to be confused with a bagpipe of the same name in north-west Spain, and tambor; see Spain, fig.5), and Portugal (as the flauta) from Salamanca and Miranda do Douro as far south as Huelva and the southern border of Alentejo. The instruments are used in fiesta dances and processions to shrines. In Catalonia (as flabiol), and sometimes in the Balearic Islands, in Castile and in the Minho, the pipe is considerably shorter than a normal tabor pipe (about 20 cm long) and has four or five holes in front and two behind. It is played by shepherds and boys, often without a drum, using both hands. If a tabor is used, the left hand covers three holes in front and the upper thumb-hole, while the upper surface of the little finger covers the lower thumb-hole. The first six or seven notes of the scale are made as fundamentals with the help of cross-fingering, which is feasible since the pipe is so short. For the sardana bands (or coblas) the flabiol is provided with three keys, to assist in playing in different tonalities, and is accompanied by a small tamboret attached to the player’s arm.
Varieties of pipe and tabor are also found in Latin America. The Colombian conjunto de gaitas is an ensemble of two gaitas (duct flutes), a tambor mayor and a llamador (single-headed drums) and a maraca (see Colombia, fig.3). The player of the gaita macho, which has only two finger-holes, also shakes the maraca. The Tucano Indians of the Colombian Amazon region play an instrument in the form of a turtle-shell; the shell is grasped by the calf and thigh under the bent knee and is rubbed at the waxed end with the palm of the hand. Often one man plays both the turtle-shell and a panpipe together. Musicians in the Altiplano of Bolivia play several pipe and tabor combinations; an example is the use of a small drum with the waka-pinkillo (a pipe with two holes at the front and one at the back) played for the waka-waka, a Spanish dance miming bull-fighting. The los sonajeros Conquest dance of Mexico may also be accompanied by pipes and tabors (see Mexico, fig.6).
In eastern Europe some three-hole pipes are used in traditional music, for example in Slovakia (with the three holes in front) and in Russia (with two holes in front, one behind) where they are made as a pair tuned a 4th apart, to be played by one person. But these pipes are never combined with a drum and it is unlikely that they have any historical connection with the tabor pipe.
MersenneHU
PraetoriusSM
I. Ansorena: Txistu ots gozoa ‘nola’ (San Sebastián, n.d.) [tutor]
T. Arbeau: Orchésographie(Langres, 1588/R1965, 2/1589)
J. Gehot: Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Music (London, 1786)
F. Vidal: Lou tambourin (Avignon, 1864/R)
R. Stevenson: ‘Ancient Peruvian Instruments’, GSJ, xii (1959), 17–43
C.L. Boilès: ‘The Pipe and Tabor in Mesoamerica’, YIAMR, ii (1966), 43–74
C. Marcel-Dubois: ‘Le tambour-bourdon: son signal et sa tradition’, Arts et traditions populaires, xiv (1966), 3–16
J. Rimmer: ‘Tabor Pipes from Aardenburg and Goedereede: some Musical Implications’,Berichten van de Rijksdienst voor het oudheidkundig bodemonderzoek, xxix (1979), 527–35
F. Palmer: ‘Musical Instruments from the Mary Rose’, EMc, xi (1983), 53–60
J. Ayats, ed.: En Quirze Perich, Flabiolaire (Barcelona, 1987)
A. Jambrina Leal and J.R. Cid Cebrián: La gaita y el tamboril(Salamanca, 1989)
M. Guys and others: Le galoubet-tambourin (Aix en Provence, 1993)
R. Mitjans and T. Soler: Músics de flabiol (Barcelona,1993)
A. Vergara Miravete: Instrumentos y tañedores: música da tradición popular en Aragón (Saragossa, 1994)
H. Moeck: ‘Einhandflöte mit Trommel’, Tibia, xxi (1996), 168–75
J. Montagu: ‘Was the Tabor Pipe Always as we Know It?’, GSJ, l (1997), 16–30
W. Waterhouse: ‘A Rare English Tabor Pipe’, Sine musica nulla vita: Festschrift Herman Moeck, ed. N. Delius (Celle, 1997), 73–7
ANTHONY C. BAINES/HÉLÈNE LA RUE