Bladder pipe

The Platerspiel or Blaterpfeife is a simplified form of the medieval bagpipe, consisting of the blowpipe, the air bag and a chanter. The sound is produced by means of single or double reed which is at the upper end of the chanter. The chanter is inserted with a mortise and tenon joint near the reed into a corresponding socket directly to the air bag.

The Platerspiel is still an independent musical instrument for the performance of medieval music.

History

In Platerspiel to recognize the early medieval chorus, a term that was commonly used in medieval Latin for the bagpipe. In images of the earlier forms of Platerspiels, such as in an instrument from the 13th century in a manuscript by Martin Gerbert, preserved in the monastery of St. Blaise, the air bag is unusually large and the chanter has in place a cup ( horn ) the head of a grotesque animal with open mouth. First, the chanter was a straight, conical-shaped tube, which ended in a beaker. In later instruments it has a larger diameter and is more or less curved and strongly recurved as in Krummhorn. A famous illustration of this bagpipes appear in a Spanish manuscript from the 13th century, the collection of songs Cantigas de Santa Maria, where a Platerspiel with two pipes, a chanter and an adjacent drone, is presented. An early form found at the end of the 15th century Book of Hours of Sforza. Another illustration of a Platerspiel goes back to Sebastian Virdung (1511 ). Historical Platerspiel originals have not survived.

Construction

The curved chanter of Platerspiels and Krummhorn are technically almost identical. The only difference is the size and shape of the air chamber in which the reed is excited to vibrations, namely the flexible air bag when Platerspiel and the fixed windcap the Krummhorn. The musician blows through the blowpipe in the air bag or in the sublime, slit-like opening of the wind-cap. Since the air sac of Platerspiels, most probably a pig's bladder was significantly smaller than in real bagpipes, it allows the musician some advanced articulation, without interrupting the continuous flow of air.

The Platerspiel belongs to the Middle Ages to the 17th century widespread double-reed instruments with wind-cap, which go back to Curt Sachs to models in India, where a fixed capsule encloses the reed as in the pungi from a calabash.