Wind instrument

In folk traditions

Wind instruments play an important role in the folk music of many cultures. Most folk music for winds imitates vocal models, such as the folk music for harmonica played by Americans, the love songs for flute played by Native American men, and the bagpipe music of eastern Europe, which usually consists of richly ornamented versions of local folk songs. (Many kinds of bagpipes are found throughout eastern and western Europe. These vary from the very simple ones found in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland to the beautifully fashioned instruments with three and four pipes [which serve as drones] found in Scotland, Ireland, and the north of England.)

A few types of folk music are idiomatic to wind instruments. In Poland, perhaps because of the proliferation of instruments, including several basic types of flutes and bagpipes, folk music is dominated by instrumental tunes, most of them for dancing. In the Basque region of northern Spain and southwestern France, dances and processions are often accompanied by a single musician who plays a three-holed flute with one hand and a six-stringed dulcimer with the other. In certain African instrumental ensembles, percussion instruments sometimes are joined by teams of flute or horn players, each of whom plays a single note whenever it occurs in the melody. The Bambuti of eastern Congo (Kinshasa) often use up to six flutes, each playing variations of a different ostinato pattern.