Musical Myths and Facts, Volume 2 (of 2) — Themes and Context

The Bagpipe's Unruly Power

The tale of Bakâla, a shepherd who acquires an old bagpipe from a cloud-dwelling spirit, illustrates music's capacity to override human will. Engel describes how the bagpipe's sound makes everyone dance—sheep, a village Pope, and eventually the Pope's wife, who dances herself to death. The narrative is structured around escalating consequences: first the flock, then the hidden master, then the skeptical wife. Engel includes precise details, such as the Pope binding stones to his feet for stability, which ground the fantastical events in physical reality. The wife's defiance—'Fudge! I to be frightened by a bagpipe?'—is met with a fatal outcome, suggesting that music in these stories operates as an amoral, irresistible force.

The Two Hunchbacks and the Midnight Choir

Engel's version of the two hunchbacks, sourced from Rhenish Prussia, begins with a hump-backed musician returning from a wedding at midnight. The clock's boom and a strange whirring in the air signal a supernatural encounter. The narrative relies on precise temporal and spatial markers—St. Matthew's day, 1549, the Minster in Aachen—to lend credibility to the fantastic. Engel notes that variants of this tale appear in Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Spain, pointing to a widespread folk motif without claiming a single origin. The story's structure hinges on the contrast between the musician's drowsy state and the sudden intrusion of the uncanny, a pattern Engel repeats across multiple entries.

From Diabolic Music to Royal Musicians

The volume's table of contents reveals a deliberate juxtaposition of topics: 'Diabolic Music' sits alongside 'The Rat-Catcher of Hameln' and 'Royal Musicians.' Engel moves from the supernatural to the historical without transitional commentary, leaving the reader to infer connections. In 'Mattheson on Handel,' he focuses on the scarcity of biographical records, a theme that recurs in 'Composers and Practical Men' and 'Music and Medicine.' This structural choice emphasizes the fragmentary nature of musical history, where myth and fact are often intertwined. Engel's own voice is restrained, allowing the excerpts to speak for themselves, though his selection of tales—such as the bagpipe's lethal dance—betrays a fascination with music's darker, uncontrollable aspects.

Movement Between Scenes and Settings

Engel's narratives frequently shift between domestic interiors and open landscapes, creating a sense of spatial instability. Bakâla moves from a mountain cloud to a valley field to the Pope's house; the two hunchbacks travel from a village wedding to the Minster at midnight. These transitions are often marked by specific times—'late at night,' 'on St. Matthew's day'—that heighten the liminal quality of the events. Engel also includes musical notation and links to MIDI files, a feature that bridges the textual and auditory. The reader is thus invited to experience the stories not just as narratives but as performances, where the boundary between reading and hearing is deliberately blurred.

Engel's volume resists easy categorization, blending folklore, biography, and musicology into a single, idiosyncratic work. Readers should approach it as a collection of fragments rather than a unified argument, paying attention to the recurring images of dance, compulsion, and the supernatural. The absence of a concluding synthesis is itself meaningful: Engel leaves the myths and facts to stand side by side, inviting the reader to draw their own connections.

Reading about the Bakâla’s pipes, I remembered my grandmother humming old airs in the kitchen, each tune a small superstition. That same weight of story behind the notes came back reading Shakespeare and music — Story, Setting & Ideas. Both books feel like someone quietly showing me why a melody clings to a place, not explaining it, just letting the mystery breathe.