| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
Music from the South. 93 |
||
|
reeds, and inflated by the elbow of the player : and thus I think the bagpipe, which some will object to hear called 'the shepherd's pipe,' took the form which it has since then worn as the shepherd's companion throughout a large portion of Europe.
I confess to a small kindness for the bagpipe, harsh, crude and illicit as all its concords and discords are. The drone, otherwise ground bass, disconcerts the melody it supports; but, in its wild way, and in the open air, produces the effect of combination.
It is to sounds drawn from this bagpipe, sometimes in accompaniment to tuneless voices, by the bright-eyed, dark-skinned, dirty, shaggy, rural folk of Calabria, and of tne Roman Campagna, that may be ascribed the perpetual ion of that peculiar melody, the name of which has become a musical term. When the amiable and gracious Corelli wrote his 1 Nativity concerto,' he reproduced, with a difference,' the tunes which these primitive herdsmen have been long used to play before the street-shrines of the Madonna at Christmas time. Handel, that mcst acute and royal of appropriators, whose plagiarisms and pilferings were as shameless as his genius was glorious, laid hands on one of the most popular of these Pifferari tunes, printed in old |
||