Shawm pictures

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A Spanish shawm - typical medieval/Tudor appearance.
A page from a book of 1618 showing shawms and bagpipes. Spot the hummelchen pipes you saw earlier! The book's called Syntagma Musicum and was written by Michael Praetorius.	Return to the Bagpipes and Shawms page

This is a Bass Curtal. If you look again at the Praetorius picture above, you'll see how big the bass shawm became. In the end it was too big to play, so they folded it in half by having two holes running side-by-side through the piece of wood, and joined at the bottom end.The picture here shows front & back views of the same instrument. The modern bassoon comes from the bass curtal.

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