Bag Dragon - Brian Zegarski

"The Devil with a Bagpipe" by Erhard Schoen

Bag Dragon

So this musician’s drinking at a bar and suddenly remembers,

“Gotta go check on my car; I left my bagpipes in the back seat.”

He gets outside and—you guessed it—the back window’s been busted open. Peering through the broken window he sees that sure enough, someone has tossed in another set of bagpipes.

Yeah, there’s something inherently comical about instruments of the bagpipe family. I have no doubt of the musicianship—or sheer wind power—required to master them, but there’s no denying the comedic appeal of a formless bag of wind, wheezingly resuscitated and animated like some ventriloquist dummy with chanters and drones akimbo.

◄ (Just look at that disgusted looking piper attempting to foist his unruly instrument off onto that guileless knave.)

I Decide to Make My Own

In medieval recreationist circles, a fair amount of time is devoted to fireside entertainment—bardic embellishments, musical performance, comic jest. It dawned on me: I could create a fake instrument that would ingratiate me to my fellow raconteurs and trouvères while requiring no actual performance skill on my part; I could simply hide any simplistic, music-making bits inside! Clearly, some sort of bag instrument was called for.

The Secret Ingredient

This was by no means a carefully researched project: I had a vague mental image of the various bagpipe instruments I had seen in medieval manuscripts and carvings, and I also had a secret weapon: a little tin kazoo. Fingering out a tune on a chanter is one thing, but humming it through a kazoo is far easier. Plus, a kazoo already has the desired, double-reeded drone sound anyway. Brilliant!

A profane rendering by Heironymous Bosch

I turned a couple of spindles on the lathe, sewed a bag of suede and stuffed it with batting, carved a wooden case to enclose the kazoo and lo! I had my instrument, but what to call it? “Bag Dragon” came immediately to mind, conjuring up the appropriate measure of fear, loathing and disgust. To further play up the disgust aspect, I developed my own particular performance style.

I present my diabolical invention: The Bag-Dragon

Performance

Before it can be played, the air bladder of any bagpipe-type instrument must be inflated. I imagine the Bag Dragon to contain a bellows within its leather air bag. All that’s needed to inflate it then is a pumping of this bellows as the bag is couched under the arm—a vigorous flapping of the elbow. This is precisely the type of motion familiar to pre-adolescent boys adept at making farting sounds from their arm pits—a sort of lop-sided funky chicken dance. How utterly charming. All this must precede the actual musical performance and must of course be accomplished with the utmost solemnity and dignity.

A Little History

In retrospect, my Bag Dragon instrument could be labeled a form of medieval French bagpipe called a cornemuse, popular in folk music since the Middle Ages. The 17^th century brought to the French royal courts an interest in bucolic imagery from antiquity including music imitative of the Arcadian shepherds’ pipe (presumably a rudimentary type of double-reeded shawm.)

van Dyck, "Portrait of Francois Langlois"

Baroque harpsichord with figures of Polyphemus & Galatea

The cornemuse conjured just such a sound but a rustic folk instrument was decidedly out of place amid the French aristocrats, so the name musette and eventually musette de cour (to distinguish it from the piccolo oboe) was applied to this instrument.

Taxonomically, the musette is characterized by the two cylindrical-bore chalumeaux (chanters) and a “shuttle drone” of several reeds within a shuttle-like structure... and unlike most bagpipes, the musette is inflated by a bellows rather than a blowpipe. Ah-ha! Here I have scholarly justification for my arm-flapping performance technique.