Bladder pipe: Czech Republic musical instrument

The bladder pipe is a medieval simplified bagpipe instrument that is made up of an insufflation tube. A bladder pipe and a chanter; sounded by a double reed that is fixed into a reed seat at the top of the chanter. The reed that is located inside the inflated bladder is sounded uninterruptedly and cannot be tongued. Some bladder pipes were produced with a single drone pipe and reproduction are analogous to a loud and consistent crumhorn. The chanter of the instrument has an outside tenon at the top of it, near the reed that fixes into a socket or stock that is then tied in to the bladder.

source: earlymusicshop.com

While the first production of a double reed pipe with a bladder manipulating breadth is not yet covered, it is believed that the instrument have originated in Europe in the 13^th century. As a transitional phase between almost the entire bagpipes and the renaissance crumhorn, the bladder pipe was booming from the 14^th up to 16^th centuries. Examples have been discovered from Germany, Poland, England, Italy, France, Estonia and Spain. As it dropped in popularity sand became linked with beggars and peasants.

The early bladder pipe is found in a category of the early medieval chorus musical instruments, a word that in the Medieval Latin was always used also for the bagpipe instrument. In the earliest described forms of the bladder pipe, like the popular example of the 13^th century remanufactured by Martin Gerbert from a Manuscript at Sankt Blasien Abbey in the Black Forest, the bladder is abnormally large and the chanter has the carved head of an animal, rather than a bell. The later musical instruments have a pipe of bigger caliber more or less curved and bent back to be in the shape of ‘J’ as the crumhorn, tournebout and cromorne. This curving that is coming from the shape of an animal horn proposes the early crumhorn’s development from a bladder pipe. One popular illustration of these bladder pipes shows in the 13^th century Spanish manuscript called Cantigas de santa Maria in the library of El Escorial in Madrid of Spain, along with a bladder pipe that has two pipes, a chanter and drone shoulder to shoulder.

There were no technical variations between the bent chanter of the bladder pipe and the cromorne, the only difference is the form and size of the air-chamber of the musical instruments, either the bladder or the wind-cap in that the reed was set in vibration. The player of this musical instrument blows air into the bladder via the insufflations tube or better still, through the raised, slit shaped opening of the wind cap that is placed against the lip of the player.