I haven't seen the Bowes Museum pipes either. I've never been to the museum
even though I've driven through Barnard Castle at least a hundred times, but
always on the way to or from Durham or Newcastle - no time to stop or well
outside museum opening hours. However, I think it's very well worth going
not just for those strange pipes.
There is a picture of them here
http://www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk/collections/objects/category/8/3396/
If the direct link doesn't work, go to the Bowes Museum website
http://www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk/ and use "search the collection" - "musical
instruments".
I must look out the article in the NPS journal, but has it been suggested
that the pipes are in fact a Sordellina - or at least a nineteenth century
attempt to carry on the Sordellina tradition? The turning and drone ends do
look more Irish Union-pipe or Northumbrian, rather like Reid's work in fact,
but that inlaid stock looks very continental - more French than Italian
perhaps. It looks as if there may be two chanters, plus that extraordinary
doubled-back "regulator" which is very characteristic of the Sordellina -
perhaps the ultimate in elaborate but dead-end bagpipe invention, invented
in Naples in the 16th century and developed during the 17th. Mersenne has a
famously impossible-looking picture, with the note that he hasn't seen one,
but includes a drawing so that French instrument makers could attempt to
build it.
The theory was that compositions in four-parts
All you need to know about it in this article - plus pictures right at the
end.
http://www.seanreidsociety.org/SRSJ2/the%20sordellina.pdf
Philip
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