Another playlist in a series that football fans didn’t know they needed

Now that the twenty-four teams of Euro 24 have been reduced to eight, I hear you clamouring for a more focused playlist of bagpipe music to represent them (Yes, I am getting my hearing tested).

Among many sources on the history and distribution of bagpipes, the Essential Vermeer website has instructive material (here and here); and I set forth again from this list. As shown in my previous post, the distribution of instruments rarely aligns with either current or past national boundaries.

Grooving to the gaita. *

Starting with

• Spain
• Portugal,

how about gaita from Coimbra (the image by Armando Leça shows an old handmade bagpipe from Coimbra, late 1930s—who knows if such a player inspired Portugal in their 1930 victory over France?!)

—and Galicia:

“Just dig that funky tulum“

• Turkey (NB Futbol, then and now)—here’s a great sequence of Black Sea tulum bagpipes (see also under The Pontic lyra!):

For a related “tapeworm word”, see under Some German mouthfuls!

Around north Europe, with online clips dominated by medieval revivals, living folk traditions are harder to find.

• England—here’s Kathryn Tickell on Northumbrian smallpipes:

• France—Breton pipers:

As to

• Switzerland (not Italy—whence I await more “Caporetto” headlines, to follow those for the 2002 and 2018 World Cup defeats). **
• Germany
• The Netherlands (though Romania might have been more fruitful),

referring back to the Essential Vermeer site, there’s some fine material on peasant bagpipes as depicted by Peter Brueghel the Elder and Jan Steen; and we can seek further for modern vestiges under Dudelsack, Sackpfeife, Doedelzak, and so on.

There—just what you need to warm up for the quarter-finals eh…

More football posts under A sporting medley: ritual and gender.

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* Sorry to go on, but this comment in the Guardian live-feed reminded me of my own football dream:

The first time Lamine Yamal joined the Spain squad, they left his boots behind. His and everyone else’s too. When the selección touched down in Tbilisi to face Georgia in September 2023, the trunk carrying part of their kit was still sitting at Barajas, forcing them to complete the evening session at the Boris Paichadze stadium in trainers, unable to strike the ball. The following night, they scored seven. On his debut, the Barcelona winger got the last of them, aged 16 years and 57 days, and the national team got a new beginning.

** Before England’s Great Escape from Slovakia, I was composing our own version of Caporetto, inspired by that popular classic from the Minister for the 18th Century:

“the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200”. 

Magnificently 🍾🍾🍾 , the Haunted Pencil is now Toast, or Ashes—as the sun came up, he crumbled into dust…