Platter game
The Platter game or the Blaterpfeife is a medieval, simplified form of the bagpipe , consisting of the blowing pipe , the air bag and a chanter. The sound is generated by means of a single or double reed , which is located at the upper end of the chanter. The chanter is inserted with a tenon connection near the reed into a corresponding socket directly on the airbag.
Even today, the platter is an independent musical instrument for performing medieval music.
history
The early medieval chorus , a term that was also often used in medieval Latin for the bagpipe, can be recognized in the platter playing . On illustrations of the earlier forms of the Platerspiel, z. For example, in an instrument from the 13th century in a manuscript by Martin Gerbert , kept in the St. Blasien monastery , the airbag is unusually large and the chanter has the head of a grotesque animal with its mouth opened instead of a beaker (bell). Initially, the chanter was a straight, conical pipe that ended in a beaker. In later instruments it has a larger diameter and is more or less strongly curved and bent back like the Krummhorn . A famous illustration of these bagpipes appears in a Spanish manuscript from the 13th century, the Cantigas de Santa Maria collection of songs , which also depicts a platter game with two pipes, a chanter and an adjacent drone pipe . An early form can be found in the Sforza Book of Hours at the end of the 15th century . Another illustration of a platter game goes back to Sebastian Virdung (1511). Historical platers game originals have not been preserved.
construction
From a technical point of view, the curved chanter of the platers game and the krummhorn are practically identical. The only difference is in the size and shape of the air chamber in which the reed is excited to vibrate, namely the flexible air bag when playing the platter and the firm wind capsule in the Krummhorn. The musician blows through the blowing pipe into the airbag or into the raised, slit-shaped opening of the wind capsule. Since the air sac of the Plater game, usually a pig's bladder, was significantly smaller than that of real bagpipes, it allows the musician certain expanded articulation options without interrupting the continuous flow of air.
Playing the platter is one of the double- reed instruments with wind capsules that were widely used from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, which, according to Curt Sachs, go back to models in India, in which, like the pungi, a solid capsule from a calabash encloses the reed.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Platter game. In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 1911
- ^ Georg Kinsky: Double reed instruments with wind capsule. A contribution to the history of wind instruments in the 16th and 17th centuries. 17th century. In: Archives for Musicology . 7th year, issue 2, June 1925, pp. 253–296, here pp. 255f
Web links
- Bladder pipe . Iowa State University (pictures and sound sample)