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Norden Sackpipa Association of the Americas (NSAA) Jerry Revelle in memoriam
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MatthewVanitas Senior User
Joined: 01 Mar 2010 Posts: 108
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Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 8:38 pm Post subject: The Sami (Lapp) walpipe and sakpipe? |
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I've been working to expand Wikipedia's coverage of bagpipes (note my ongoing expansion to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bagpipes), and ran across some intriguing but ill-documented mention of two Sami (Lapplander) bagpipes: the walpipe and sakpipe.
I could find precious little on these two, and those mainly old (18th-19th C.) mentions noting that the Lapps had two different types of bagpipe.
Does this mention ring a bell with anyone? Ever heard these referenced anywhere else? Failing that, does anyone happen to be in contact with any ethnomusicologist or anthropologist covering Lapp issues who may be able to chime in? Perhaps there is more data I'm just not finding because it hasn't been scanned into GoogleBooks yet, and/or is only available in Finnish (or, God help me, Sami).
An odd puzzle, but the challenge of identifying and documenting a kind of Scandinavian bagpipe formerly unknown to me is just too exciting to pass up. |
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Bill Carr
Joined: 10 Apr 2011 Posts: 17 Location: Mysen. Norway
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Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 3:09 pm Post subject: |
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I looked into this with some web searches in Norwegian but came up blank. I have never heard of a Sami bagpipe.. Could it be myth?
Bill _________________ Ja Ja sånn kan det går! |
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MatthewVanitas Senior User
Joined: 01 Mar 2010 Posts: 108
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Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 3:36 pm Post subject: |
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I did manage to find four footnotes online about the instrument, though I can't recall off the top of my head how many of them are quoting each other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walpipe
The Volga-Finnic (as opposed to Finnish) have several kinds of bagpipes, but as Olle notes are pretty separate from their cousins way up in the northern woods in what is modern Finland. For example, the Mari people, who play the shyuvr. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyuvr )
There's another "Finn" pipe that I can't quite tell where it would fall in modern terms, since the coverage is from back when "Russia" was all over that region. I can't tell if this would have been played by people in what is now Finland, or in what is now Russia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilai |
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Yuri Senior User
Joined: 16 Dec 2006 Posts: 149 Location: New Zealand
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Posted: Thu May 12, 2011 5:08 am Post subject: |
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Matthew, Finland was part of the Russian empire until te revolution, when it alone managed to secede from the new Soviet Union, and not being re-conquered. So any reference to pre-20th c. culture is a moot point. Even if it might have been Russia, politically, it was still Finland, culturally.
There was anoter very limited tradition, that apparently died out only between the two wars. It was a type (probably similar to the Volga Finns' types) played by a tiny Finno-Ugric people, living on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, somewhere between St Petersburg and the Estonian border. The people still are there (the few villages that they are), but the piping tradition is gone. It was recorded that they had among other, a very peculiar playing technique, where the player let go with the lower hand, using only the upper one for fingering, and with the lower hand beat the rhytm on the bag, using it as a kind of drum. I don't remember the name of the people, but can find it. All this info was supplied by someone involved in the said people's starting to assert themselves at long last, and posted on a Russian-language pipe forum. (Now, sadly very much dormant.) |
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MatthewVanitas Senior User
Joined: 01 Mar 2010 Posts: 108
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Posted: Thu May 12, 2011 6:56 pm Post subject: |
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Yuri, if you happen to find the name of that pipe, I'd be very excited to add a Wikipedia article on it if I can track down any references covering the topic.
So far as the technique you mention: there are a few clips online of Latvian bagpipers applying a very similar method, though I think by arm-squeezing, to "pulse" their tone in rhythm with the tune. |
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Yuri Senior User
Joined: 16 Dec 2006 Posts: 149 Location: New Zealand
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:14 am Post subject: |
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Well, I looked it up.
The people in question are two, not one, both Finno-Ugric, and both tiny. They are called Vod' and Izhora. (водь. ижора). The bagpipe was called Rakkopilli (similar to Estonian Torupill), rakko meaning bladder, pilli- pipe. The description mentions a pig's bladder, a blowpipe and a playin pipe, with 4 fingerholes and one thumbhole.
First mentioned by F.R. Trefurt "Von den Tschude", Riga 1783. Close Second is F. Tumanskiy. 1789
More recent mentions:
И.Тынурист « «Torupill Lääne-ingeris»,Etnograafia muzeumi aastaraamat, XXX, Tallinn, 1977 (that's I. Tynurist)
Т.Лейсио and Й.Тайнио «Pistit pillit säkkihinsä» , Размышления о волынке на берегах финского залива», articles and reprints 13// Tamperen yliopiston kansanperintaan, 1988 (thoughts about the bagpipe on the Bay of Finland's shores, T. Leisio and J. Tainio.) (the transliteration of the names is back from the Russian, so might be faulty.)
The most recent one is an article in the vod' paper "Maaväci", spring 2008, called "the vod' bagpipe". (in Russian)
All this doesn't change the fact that unfortunately there just hasn't survived a single instrument, so it all is descriptions. Apart from the bladder, cane and willow are mentioned as used for the pipes, so if true, it would be hardly surprising that nothing remains. (I'm dubious about willow, but, that's what is mentioned.) |
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MatthewVanitas Senior User
Joined: 01 Mar 2010 Posts: 108
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:23 am Post subject: |
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This is uncanny, I just ran across http://elf.org.ru/index.php?i=bagpipes earlier this evening and added rakkopilli to my to-do list for Wikpedia.
According to the site, it's from Ингерманланд; took me a bit to figure out that's this place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria . My Russian is pretty poor these days, but I can pick through these, and GoogleTranslate isn't bad (though it can't get the technical piping terms, but I can deduce those).
I'm in the middle of a few things now, but if you have those resources on hand I'll have to shoot you a line later to get some stuff together for an article.
The more I dig, the more kind of pipes I find out there. I was pretty sure I had Wikipedia articles for all but a scattering of sub-sub-variants a few years back... that was about 20-some pipes ago, and I added three distinctly different bagpipes in India just last month. |
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Yuri Senior User
Joined: 16 Dec 2006 Posts: 149 Location: New Zealand
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:33 am Post subject: |
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Matthew, Ingermanland is just a Germanicised version of "ungerman's land", meaning some sort of Ugric peoples. They don't call themselves that.
I do not have the texts mentioned in the bibliography, unfortunately. And much as I tried, I couldn't get the article mentioned on the Net, it probably just isn't available. I will try and contact the lady that wrote it, and wrote the entry in that Russian-language forum that I know all this from.
And the drawing is very suspiciously like the Volga Finns' kind of bagpipe. It still might be the same as the Bay of Finland's variety, but in this case where is it from? I mean not where in the Net, but what book or journal? |
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MatthewVanitas Senior User
Joined: 01 Mar 2010 Posts: 108
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:37 am Post subject: |
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Yuri wrote: |
And the drawing is very suspiciously like the Volga Finns' kind of bagpipe. It still might be the same as the Bay of Finland's variety, but in this case where is it from? I mean not where in the Net, but what book or journal? |
Took it from the abovementioned Russian page, so it's nothing particularly authoritative, and they may have taken it from somewhere else and got the captions wrong. |
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