PIPES AND JEW'S-HARP.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 126, 30 May 1931, Page 8

PIPES AND JEW'S-HARP.

Of interest to many a New Zealander should be a rather curious little dissertation on Scotland's national instrument of music which I lately happened upon in reading a book which is perhaps not well known, Dr. George Henry Kingsley's "Notes on Sport and Travel," published thirty years ago. Dr. Kingsley, brother of the famous Charles Kingsley, the novelist, was "The Doctor" who with "The Earl" (Pembroke) wrote "South Sea Bubbles"; the cheerful pair visited Auckland in 1869-70. This travel book I have mentioned contains a remarkable variety of gossip and adventure tales. In a chapter on the Scottish Highlands (Kingsley delighted. to play his Sassenach wit on the canny Caledonians, even to claiming the kilt as an English invention), the author declares, that "the bagpipe is no more the national instrument of Scotland than the hurdy-gurdy. Down to the seventeenth century every parish in England had a noise of bagpipes, and every miller could play upon them as certainly as every Highland smith now thinks he can."

This no doubt is rank treason to every good Scot; did not the immortal founder of the Clan McPherson play a tune on the "blether o' a sheep" in the time of the Flood or thereabouts? But the Sassenach doctor goes further and suggests that the jew's-harp, or, as it was also, and perhaps originally, called the jaws-harp, was introduced into Scotland —he is writing especially of Sutherlandshire —from Norway many centuries ago, and that it is much older than the pipes. We know, of course, that the harp is of great antiquity in Scotland, as it was in Ireland, and it may be that the little mouth-harp, which our Maoris call the "roria," was just as popular in the land of the Gael long ago as it is here.

Dr. Kingsley was quite lyrical on the subject of the jew's-harp ae he heard it in Sutherland. He wrote: "I heard a succession of old Gaelic airs played upon it with an amount of tenderness of feeling, clearness of tone, and perfection of time which electrified me. No instrument could have rendered the rapid inflections and changes of the wild old airs more perfectly. When I leant back and closed my eyes it required no very great stretch of the imagination to believe that I was listening to some strange old-world faery music, distant yet clear, ringing up from far below some green hillock. It is the oddest sound, soft but metallic, coming and going as if borne on the fitful waves of the night wind, that ever I heard."

Exactly the same thing could be written with truth about the jew's-harp music of the Maori. There is a likeness between those wild yet tender Gaelic tunes and the "ruriruri" airs of our Maori, just as there is between so much of the Highland legendry and poetry and that of old New Zealand. But the Maori can do more wLli the little harp than even the Scots village player to whom Kingsley listened with such pleasure. Experts with the roria can make it talk; they can say the words of the song, to the understanding car, just as the old-tiine Maoris could with the little flute of wood or bone. Some day, perhaps, the jaws-harp will become a popular item in every pakcha orchestra, and great artists will win world fame for their faery music. But they will have to take lessons from some of our expert Maori wahines in the fine art of making the roria talk. ! J.C.