School music

Folks, I got distracted again tonight – beguiled by bamboo pipes, in fact. Let me explain!

Have you heard of Margaret James (1891-1978)? I wouldn’t be surprised if not, but believe me, she really started something in the 1920s. Someone gave the Gloucestershire school teacher a bamboo pipe from Sicily, and she realised this was something that kids could make at school.  They weren’t expensive to make, either.  (I read an observation that they were made from materials readily available in many homes.)**  It apparently took off! Kids liked actually making an instrument then learning to play it.  It was certainly another means of practical music-making. Crafting bamboo pipes briefly became the latest thing in classroom music, or so the literature would have us believe.  Although unmentioned in the Board of Education’s Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers in 1927, either in the music or the handcrafts sections, by 1933 the idea was being recommended in Board of Education literature and by HMIs (His Majesty’s Inspectors).  I do tend to wonder how many pipes were actually being made across the country – did the numbers match the rhetoric? Anyway, Margaret organised courses, wrote books and made at least one recording.  Judging by the number of publications, there surely must have been sufficient interest. This is a quick, but not exhaustive, list of works Margaret had a hand in:-

• The adjusted treble pipe : the rhyme & reason of it, how to make it (Pipers’ Guild, 1933)
• Directions for making the bass pipe, with diagrams by N. Gibbs (1936)
• Directions for making the extended treble and alto pipes (Cramer, 1942)
• Exercises and airs for pipes (Curwen, 1941)
• Folk dance tunes : for bamboo pipes / transposed by Margaret James (Novello, 1934)
• How to make a bamboo pipe [Diagram] (Published for the Pipers’ Guild, ca.1933)
• The Pipers’ Guild handbook / Margaret James; with drawings and a chapter on decoration / by Nora Gibbs. Cramer, [1932]
• Supplement 1 to the above, [1932-5]

Indeed, Vaughan Williams even wrote a Suite for Pipes (Oxford University Press, 1947), a quartet which was certainly more difficult than the average school pupil could attempt. Here it is, albeit played by a recorder quartet:-

The bamboo pipes do sound sweet, pastoral, traditional – very ‘English’. (I say that in inverted commas, because the question of what sounds ‘English’ is a whole dissertation in itself. I’m not going there.) Which makes it all the more ironic that her original gifted pipe was Sicilian! Anyway, we can agree that their folksy sound is part of their appeal.

Margaret herself started the Pipers’ Guild, which lasts to this day.  I did wonder if her bamboo pipe-making movement made it as far as Scotland  – was it something Scottish teachers were also doing? Judging by newspaper evidence, the Guild did have a small presence up here, but perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as in England. I won’t hunt further. 

Since my research interests are currently in a Scottish publisher producing educational music materials for a widespread market, then I thought maybe I should see if, or how often pipe-making got a passing mention – because their music editor/advisor was nothing if not on the ball. However, by 1939/40, it appears the humble (and ready-made!) recorder had gained supremacy. See this observation by one of Thomas Nelson’s authors:-

[…], who has done a lot of work on pipe playing in schools, composed pieces for them, and might be asked to write a first book on recorder playing, since they’re attracting more interest than pipes now. […] My own opinion is that there is already sufficient pipe music but not sufficient first stage recorder music.’

Similarly, Thomas Nelson’s four classroom books of My Music Guide (1953) mention recorders, but are silent on the question of pipes or pipe-making. Bamboo pipes evidently remained a minority interest, albeit for a long time.

** Glancing at my own garden canes, I doubt they’re wide enough to do anything with.  I don’t know if our toolbox is equipped for such a project, anyway.

Picture of Pipers’ Guild Handbook sourced from eBay. (I didn’t buy it.)