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Are bagpipes mentioned in the New Testament? Ostensibly the answer to that question is "No". There is no entry under "bagpipe", for example, in Alexander Cruden's exhaustive Concordance to the Old and New Testaments, and in normal circumstances -since Cruden was an exceptionally thorough compiler -, that would appear to settle the matter. Nonetheless, I should like to suggest that there is one place in the Gospels where a bagpipe may be involved, if we understan properly the scene that is described to us. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in Luke chapter 15, after the prodigal son has come home and the party for him is in full swing, the elder brother approaches the house from the fields, and hears (according to translations) "music and dancing". The Greek word translated as "music" here is symphonia, and Cruden, typically, gives an ample definition of what he thinks the word involves: "[The word 'symphony'] is taken for ... a concert of several instruments, or for a particular sort of instrument. St.Luke takes it in the first sense when he says that the brother of the prodigal son, returning out of the field, heard in his father's house a concert of instruments". Now undoubtedly that could possibly have been the case. But is it likely that a group of musicians, in effect a small orchestra, would have been involved on this occasion? Isn't that simply too elaborate for the intimate family occasion described? I suspect therefore that Cruden's alternative definition applies,"[symphonia] is taken for a particular sort of instrument". The question then is: which instrument is used and played to accompany the dancing? In 1650 the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher -a polymath of his time -published his book Musurgia Generalis, the first comprehensive musical encyclopaedia. And, in discussing the music and musical instruments of the Jews, Kircher describes the Hebrew bagpipe or sampunia, which he takes to be corrupted in Classical times into the Greek word symphonia. Might it be, therefore, that the prodigal son's brother, in hearing "a symphonia and dancing", in fact hears dancing to the accompaniment of a bagpipe? If Luke means us to understand in this way the scene described, we have a much more vivid picture than the simple reference to "music" of the translations. Percy Scholes, in his Oxford Companion to Music, observed that "[the bagpipe] has had little attention from those whom we call 'the great composers', but it has played a large part in the social life of court and camp and cottage". What we have described by Luke is, precisely, a social scene.
Dr.Martin Pulbrook |