I heard (I think on Travelling Folk) a snippet of Aly Bain and Ale
Moller playing together last week. At one point, Aly played one
of my favourite tunes, Da Day Dawn, with Ale introducing it on
what he described as a cow horn. If I remember right he only played
the first half (plagal A dorian, staying within the octave), perhaps
because the second half was beyond the range of the instrument.
What kind of instrument was that? It didn't sound like it was playing
in harmonics like most trumpet-family horn instruments. There is also
a cow-horn instrument which is acoustically an ocarina (a variant of
the gemshorn, which is traditionally made from ibex horn), and it's
easy enough to play that part of the tune on an ocarina (I just tried),
but the timbre of Ale's axe wasn't anything like that.
Another option might be something related to the cornetto, i.e. a
brass-family instrument with fingerholes, and the timbre suggested
that. But I didn't think it was even possible to make fingerholes
work on a horn with such a wide bore, and Ale's playing had virtually
none of the sliding-onto-the-note that cornetto players usually have
to do.
There is another musical cow horn I've heard Robin Huw Bowen play,
the Welsh pibgorn, which is like a pipe chanter with an open windcap -
double reed, but it's at the bottom of a funnel of horn, your lips
don't touch it directly (and the other horn is used as a bell at the
far end, making the instrument symmetric). I didn't hear a double
reed sound in Ale's thing.
Anybody seen him do this live? What sort of instrument is it?
-
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