THE BAGPIPES OF POLAND
♦_ CONTRASTS WITH SCOTLAND A Polish friend said: “Up in the mountains above Zakopane_ you will find a musical instrument in use like none I, for one, have ever seen or heard elsewhere. I believe it is a speciality of our Polish mountaineers, says a writer in the ‘ Daily Telegraph. But music, and folk-music in particular, was not my friend’s subject. The peculiar instrument of the highlanders of the Tatry turned out to be a bagpipe, and it occurred to me as highly possible that foreign tourists in Scotland may often have been assured that the bagpipe was and always had been Scotland’s own and peculiar pos86There was no difficulty in coming across a Tatra piper. As in Switzerland one finds executants on the Alpine horn stationed on fine days on frequented passes, so in a pretty dale leading to a favourite waterfall, not an hour out of Zakopane, was to be found a Polish minstrel, pleasing to the stranger as much by reason of his pic-' turesque dress as by his pastoral music. To Polish holidaymakers from the plains both the dress and the music of the Carpathian mountaineers (“igorale ”) is as unfamiliar as to the foreigner. The dress at first looks too good to be unaffected. But no; it is no more so than the kilt in the Scottish Highlands. My bagpiper was a picture. He was tall and handsome, and .had the most beautiful manners. Did he give me to understand that he was 80 or only nearly 80? His name, anyhow, was Stanislaw Mroz; he _ wrote it for me in a quavering hand in memory of our encounter. . His instrument had two drones (tonic find dominant) and a chanter with six finger holes. .It was thus a less elaborate instrument than the Scottish bagpipe; it was also less domineering and fierce in effect. Mazurkas were not to be expected in this part of the world. The mazurka (which is more properly “ mazurek ”) belongs to' Masovia, in the central Polish plain. The krakowiak is the dance proper to Western Galicia, and krakowiaks were what Stanislaw Mroz played to the passers-by—only, in the absence ;pf dancers, rhythmically altered, the tautness of the krakowiak’s two-four time being much relaxed as he ambled up and down his simple scale. In Polish the bagpipes are “ dudy,” and in Czech the word is almost the same. The player is “ dudziarz.” The root is a general Slavonic root, meaning “to blow.” When we remember that the Germans call the bagpipe “ Dndelsack,” it suggests that they may originally have regarded it as a Slavonic instrument, especially since “ dudeln ” to play the bagpipe, also in German means to make very inferior music; and the Germans have always been supercilious towards their Slavonic neighbours. But this is to venture on uncertain f round. ■ Did not the late Dr Grattan lood write a book to persuade the w^rld—including not only Scotland, but also Galicia in Spain and .Calabria in Italy, where also the bagpipe' is the national instrument —that the instrument was* really the invention of the Irish, and only spread to the rest of Europe through the Roman Army, who took a fancy to it at the conquest of Britain?
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Evening Star, Issue 22145, 27 September 1935, Page 13
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537THE BAGPIPES OF POLAND Evening Star, Issue 22145, 27 September 1935, Page 13
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