It was a wooden, valve-less, finger-hole-less trumpet in short, it was a wooden shepherd’s trumpet.
It was made by taking a branch or the trunk of a small tree, splitting it, hollowing it out, putting the two halves back together secured with sap and birch-bark or osier (willow) rings.
If you examine marginalized societies today where there are still shepherds working in relative isolation in the Carpathians (Russia/Ukraine), Poland, the Balkans, Estonia, Romania, Sweden, Norway, etc., you will still see them carrying an instrumental tool. What instruments that did exist were those that assisted in the accomplishment of work. I have attempted to answer this question by looking at the material culture available at that time. If the terms used by musicologists to describe folk music don’t seem to be successful, could it be that the folk music scale is based on a non-diatonic scale? If so, how can we conjure up a solution from the undocumented musical tradition of more than a millennium ago to solve the problem? All of these terms and approaches originate from the frame of reference of the diatonic scale, which demonstrates the characteristic of octave equivalency that is, there are an equal number of notes per octave. Musicologists also applied the ecclesiastical modal naming scheme, which is a bit odd since that modal naming convention requires seven notes per octave, and the modes are defined by the precise placement of two half-steps yet, European folk music is missing one (hexatonic) or both (tetratonic and pentatonic) half steps. The result was that folk music was described as tetratonic (four notes per octave), pentatonic (five notes per octave), or hexatonic (six notes per octave) because the music seemed to be “gapped” in some way. They tried to analyse the music based upon the vast musical knowledge that they believed they had. Over a century ago, musicians noticed that European folk music seemed to exhibit certain uniform traits.
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