Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875Evans, Arthur, Sir
History
Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875
Evans, Arthur, Sir
Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Description and travel; Bosnia and Herzegovina -- History -- Rebellion of 1875
But how strangely classic are the musical instruments of the Croats!
What visions of bucolic shepherds, of fauns and dancing satyrs; what
memories of idyllic strains do they call up! Can it be merely that we
are overlooking the same Arcadian kind of life that the Greek poet might
have surveyed when he strolled forth beyond the walls of Syracuse? Is
‘the oaten stop and pastoral song’ the same, simply because the Croat
shepherd of the Save-lands is in the same stage of civilization as
was the rural Greek? Or are the pipes and lutes before us actually
heirlooms from the very shepherds of whom Theocritus piped on the thymy
pastures of Hybla?—the same with which Thyrsis and Corydon contended
on the green banks of the Mincius? It really almost seemed so. I asked
a countryman the name of his pipe, and to my amazement his reply was
_Fistjela_. The man did not understand a word of Latin, but this seemed
a very good attempt at _Fistula_, the pastoral pipe of the Romans, the
very instrument which Thyrsis vowed to hang on the sacred pine. The
old Pan’s pipe,[149] however, was a series of reeds waxed on to a stem
in decreasing order, while this was a single reed, though more often a
wooden pipe. It was also known as _Fuškola_.[150] Then there are the
double pipes, the Roman _Tibiæ_. A slight development has indeed taken
place. Instead of being held separate in the mouth, their ends are joined
by a mouth-piece. The V has become a Y, that is all. They are also
like the double pipes of classic times in being, as the ancients have
it, ‘male and female,’ for the number of holes being uneven in the two
branches—four in one and three in the other—one barrel is shriller than
the other, and their blended notes may still be called, as they were by
the Greeks, ‘married piping.’[151] Their name is _Svirala_, but in parts
of Serbia _Diplé_, which is evidently Greek; and yet if their origin can
be traced back to Hellenic times, it can be traced further back still to
the double pipes of the Theban monument, on which the Egyptian ladies of
Moses’ time are seen playing to their God Ptah.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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