by Kirsty Gunn
vii
Emergence of bagpipe piobaireachd
Aristocratic Scottish Gaelic Ceol Mor harp repertoire and practices are assumed to have begun to transfer across from the harp to the bagpipes in the sixteenth century. A North Uist tradition identifies the first MacCrimmon as a harper. The MacCrimmons asserted that they received their first training in a school in Ireland. Alexander Nicholson, in his book History of Skye, originally published in 1930, recounts a tradition that the MacCrimmons were ‘skilful players of the harp, and may have been composers of its music, before they began to cultivate the other and more romantic instrument’.
There were a number of musicians across the period from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries who were noted multi-instrumentalists and potentially formed a bridge from the harp to the fiddle and bagpipe repertoire. Ronald MacDonald of Morar (1662–1741), known in Gaelic as Raghnall MacAilein Oig, was an aristocratic wire-strung clarsach harpist, fiddler, piper and composer, celebrated in the piobaireachd ‘The Lament for Ronald MacDonald of Morar’. He is the reputed composer of a number of highly regarded piobaireachds, including ‘An Tarbh BreacDearg/ The Red Speckled Bull’; ‘A Bhoalaich/An Intended Lament’, also published in Angus MacKay’s book as ‘A Bhoilich/The Vaunting’; and ‘Glas Mheur’, which MacKay translates as ‘The Finger Lock.’ This piobaireachd is entitled ‘Glass Mhoier’ in the Campbell Canntaireachd. There are three other piobaireachds in the Campbell Canntaireachd manuscripts with the related titles ‘A Glase’, ‘A Glass’ and ‘A Glas’.
‘Glas’ is also a key term found in the Irish wire-harp tradition, as noted down by Edward Bunting, who uses ‘glass’ as a variant of ‘gléis’ in relation to tuning. He also lists the term ‘glas’ as a specific fingering technique, which he translates as ‘a joining’, a simile for lock. He describes this as ‘double notes, chords etc.’ for the left treble hand and right bass hand.
viii
Cultural ascendancy of piobaireachd
The rise of the bagpipe and the corresponding shift away from the harp and its associated traditions of bardic poetry is documented with a confronting disdain in the satirical song ‘Seanchas Sloinnidh na Piob o thùs/A History of the Pipes from the Beginning’ (c.1600) by Niall Mor MacMhuirich (c.1550–1630), poet to the MacDonalds of Clanranald:
John MacArthur’s screeching bagpipes, is like a diseased heron, full of spittle, long limbed and noisy, with an infected chest like that of a grey curlew. Of the world’s music Donald’s pipe, is a broken down outfit, offensive to a multitude, sending forth its slaver through its rotten bag, it was a most disgusting filthy deluge …
This can be contrasted with the celebration of the heroic warrior associations of bagpipe piobaireachd at the expense of the harp and fiddle by later Clanranald poet Alasdair Mhaighstir (c.1695–1770) in the song ‘Moladh air Piob-Mhor Mhic Cruimein/In Praise of MacCrimmon’s Pipes’:
‘Thy chanter’s shout gives pleasure, Sighing thy bold variations. Through every lively measure; The war note intent on rending, White fingers deft are pounding, To hack both marrow and muscles, With thy shrill cry resounding … You shamed the harp, Like untuned fiddle’s tone, Dull strains for maids, And men grown old and done: Better thy shrill blast, From gamut brave and gay, Rousing up men to the destructive fray …’
Bardic verses traditionally celebrated the clarsach harp and made no mention of bagpipes. Nevertheless, the bagpipes gained popularity and prominence through a social need for a prominent national instrument – whether it be martial, in a period of increasing military engagements, or cultural as the instrument became grafted on to existing structures of aristocratic cultural patronage and aesthetic appreciation in the mid-seventeenth century and became the primary Ceol Mor instrument.
This is reflected in the patronage offered to a succession of hereditary pipers who were retained by leading clan families, including piobaireachd dynasties such as the MacCrimmons, pipers to the MacLeods of Dunvegan, and the MacArthurs, pipers to the MacDonalds of Sleat.
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Modern bagpipe piobaireachd: early 1900s–present
In the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the old Gaelic cultural order underwent a near total collapse. Piobaireachd continued to be played by bagpipers, but with diminished patronage and status, and was perceived to have gone into a decline. The modern revival of piobaireachd was initiated by the newly founded Highland Society of London. They funded annual competitions, with the first being held at the Falkirk Masonic Lodge in 1781. Over the course of the nineteenth century, with the opening up of communications within the Highlands (in particular, the railways), a competing circuit emerged, with the two most pre-eminent competitions being held at Inverness and Oban, the former descended directly from the first Falkirk competition.
The orally transmitted repertoire was collected and documented in a diverse range of manuscript transcriptions mostly dating from the early nineteenth century. As noted, the first comprehensive collections were the canntaireachd transcriptions in the Campbell Canntaireachd (1797 and 1814) and the Neil MacLeod Gesto Canntaireachd (1828), collected from John MacCrimmon prior to his death in 1822. A series of manuscripts in the early nineteenth century documented piobaireachd transcribed in staff notation.
Angus MacKay’s book A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd or Highland Pipe Music, published in 1838, documented and presented the piobaireachd repertoire in staff notation with supplementary commentary by antiquarian James Logan. MacKay simplified many of the piobaireachd compositions, editing out complex ornamentation and asymmetries that were evident in documentation of the same compositions published in earlier manuscripts such as the Campbell Canntaireachd. He also specified regular time signatures that standardised and regulated a music that was traditionally performed with expressive rubato rhythmic interpretation of the musical phrasing and dynamics. MacKay’s staff-notated edited version of piobaireachd became the authoritative reference for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival of piobaireachd, and greatly influenced subsequent modern piobaireachd performance.
In 1903, the Piobaireachd Society was founded with the aim of recording the corpus of existing tunes, collating the various versions and publishing an authoritative edition. Those normative tune settings have been the basis on which Ceol Mor competitors at the various Highland Games have been judged ever since, with the piping judges themselves being appointed by the Society.
In recent decades pipers and researchers have increasingly questioned the editing of the tunes that went in the Piobaireachd Society books, arguing that the performance style chosen favoured one piping tradition at the expense of others. Many compositions also appear to have been edited and distorted to make them conform unnecessarily to particular recognised tune structures. This standardisation of the transcribed piobaireachd tunes has made the judging of competitions easier at the expense of the ornate complexity and musicality of an art that had passed down from teacher to pupil through the oral transmission of repertoire and technique.
Independent documentation of this tradition of oral transmission can be found in canntaireachd manuscripts, chanted vocable transcriptions of the music that predate the normative musical scores authorised by the Piobaireachd Society and enforced through prescriptive competition judging citeria. In a belated but nevertheless constructive response to this debate over authority and authenticity, the Piobaireachd Society has recently made a range of these canntaireachd manuscripts available online as a comparative resource.
Appendix 13: The Highland bagpipe – history and anatomy
i
History
The bagpipe is, along with the harp and the drum, the oldest of instruments. It is not particularly Scottish, and indeed its introduction to Scotland may well have been in comparatively recent times when one sees representations of a similar-looking instrument on the papyrus scrolls of Ancient Egypt and set in stone on the engraved tablets of Mesopotamia.
It is unlikely therefore that it was ‘invente
d’ but, rather, more organically developed and changed through time. To graduate, say, from a one-note whistle to a more sophisticated many-note pipe takes not so much ingenuity as ingenuity and time – and it is highly likely that different versions of the instrument we now know as the bagpipe were coming into being at different places at different periods of history. Adding, first, to the simple pipe a bag as a reservoir for air, enabling the player to continue the melody while taking a breath, putting to that a drone, to provide a bass sound, adding other pipes to the solo instrument … And so on. After all, given an instrument able to produce first a note, then more notes around it, the invention of a bagpipe was perhaps inevitable. Shepherds and others who looked after grazing animals have long been associated with bagpipes, and no doubt the boredom of their task helped greatly in both the development of this instrument and the playing of it.
Whatever its origin, it is safe to assume that the bagpipe has been played from a very early time and is therefore as much a part of our sense of civilisation as gourds and goblets, temples, tablets and feasts.
It was brought to Scotland, a version of it, ‘that instrument of war of the Roman Infantry’ as Procopius described it (see Bibliography/Music: General – Dictionary of Music and Musicians), by those early invaders and was quickly and richly developed by the Picts and Celts as an instrument for entertainment and song – the Irish Ulleian pipe, a much lighter, ‘thinner’ version of the great Highland bagpipe, continues that tradition of play to the present day.
The development of all musical instruments was no doubt conditioned by two basic problems of how to sustain a note and how to make it loud enough to be heard by the audience. Less fundamental were the questions of scale and harmony, although once the instrument fulfilled the basic demands these became the chief problems and the main fields of improvement.
The bagpipe, then, was one solution to the difficulty of maintaining the flow of music. With no real effort of design, the loudness challenge was probably solved simultaneously.
How much the Romans, and their deployment of the instrument on occasions of battle, may have influenced its popularity we can only measure by the steady increase in piping culture in the centuries that followed. There is much evidence from the Middle Ages to show that by then the cult of the bagpipe was widespread, both geographically and socially. The instrument is mentioned in Spanish manuscripts of the thirteenth century and is referred to by Dante. Froissart and Boccaccio speak of it in the fourteenth century, and Chaucer says of his miller, ‘A baggepype wel coude he blowe and sowne’. In the sixteenth century, Rabelais, Ronsard, Cervantes, Spenser and Shakespeare all have references to bagpipes.
And these references sound across social barriers and classes. As well as being popular at country fairs and weddings, the instrument was to be found in the courts and palaces of kings and queens. Ladies of the French aristocracy played small versions of the bagpipe, the cornemuse. Henry VIII left five sets of pipes in his collection of musical instruments at Hampton Court. The bagpipe appears regularly in English illuminated manuscripts and ecclesiastical carvings, especially of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the widespread popularity of the instrument is best heard out in the fact that today, in countries as diverse as Scotland, India, Russia, Spain and elsewhere, a version of the bagpipe is being played by those who have been taught the instrument in unbroken succession since it was first introduced there. Only in the last hundred years or so have the Scandinavian countries, as well as Holland, Belgium and Germany, followed England’s example already set, for they long before gave up the playing of this unique, strange and mortal instrument that has been always too loud, so it was deemed, to be played inside. The ceilings were too low in the music rooms of the rising bourgeoisie, their cultural appetites too sated by what they thought they wanted and needed, the windows closed and the expensive carpets of their drawing rooms near glued to their floors. There was no place for the pipes in this new sealed-off world.
So, one might say, the end of the Middle Ages signalled a new way of life that was more urban than rural – social life conducted indoors and no longer on the village green. Loudness was no longer a necessary quality, sweetness and delicacy were more highly prized. Chamber music and, in time, the modern orchestra and its pleasures were to follow the new social patternings – our definition of all the aspects of what we now call Western music were thus laid down.
This way of life was exterminated with the defeat at Culloden in 1746, of course. The Disarming Act that followed proscribed the wearing of the tartan or Highland dress, the speaking of Gaelic and the carrying of arms – which was interpreted by the law to also include a ban on the playing of bagpipes. The act was not repealed until 1782 – and yet although by then it had effectively killed a way of life, it had not quietened the sound of the pipes. The colleges of piping may have been disbanded and the number of pipers diminished, but the traditional passing on of knowledge and skill continued unimpeded. Indeed, piping now received fresh vigour in the raising of the Highland regiments – and it was in this way that the music made its first real impact on the rest of the world.
So it had been rejected in earlier times as an instrument of rough irrelevance, that could not be brought indoors to be played alongside the flute and the viol; nevertheless, now it had found itself a place, this lonely, uncompromising instrument claimed by musicians who were, at heart, never entertainers but first and foremost soloists and poets. S o now it had a meaning that sounded beyond the complexity of its notes and compositions. It became an emblem of a ‘self’, a Scotland that was in the process of trying to define itself as a single entity, its sound the sound of a people trying to claim for themselves a national identity, a sense of themselves that might make them feel not as though they were defeated but as though they might rise up again and always against oppression and unjust rule.
Perhaps this is why – from this time and through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the pipes have been looked upon as the instrument of a barbaric country. For what coloniser wants to hear the music of its colony but only its own songs and tunes played? Certainly this may be why when contact was made between pipe music and the rest of music it was generally characterised by a measure of rejection on both sides, which tended further to increase the isolation of the pipers and to increase their sense of purpose.
The second reason for the Highland bagpipe’s survival was that at no time did its exponents alter the instrument to make it socially acceptable. A few players, occasionally, may have given a non-bagpipe tune to the instrument, or modified some of the fingering, perhaps, to make a piobaireachd sound more modern, but these aberrations were few and pass in the history of the instrument largely unremarked. Once out of his natural environment the piper might accept that his music was different and strange, but this did not affect his playing of it. While other pipes softened and lightened, the Highland bagpipe remained. Its shape and sound and make-up, the music for which it was created, went unchanged – the same piobaireachd played in the same way with the same sound as was played by the MacCrimmons of Skye in the fifteenth century and earlier (see Appendix 14: ‘The cultural history of bagpipe playing’).
The final reason for the survival of this lonely instrument, and for its later ‘popularity’, comparatively speaking, is the character of the music with which it is inextricably linked – the Big Music, piobaireachd – a form of communication so important to Highlanders for so long that there was little chance of it being abandoned. As MacNeill writes: ‘If all other pipe music were to fade away there would still remain a group of Highland pipers dedicated to the study and enjoyment of Ceol Mor.’ For that, as we shall see in the next Appendix, we have to thank the legacy of that family of musicians and poets and teachers that played down from generation to generation: the MacCrimmons of Skye.
ii
Anatomy
The parts of the bagpipe and its overall construction and shape are as complicated and intricate as its history. An
‘anatomical’ representation of the instrument may provide information as to how the various elements of the instrument come together.
Note: The pipe bag itself is the reservoir for the air that powers the reeds. This bag is usually made from leather, although modern bags are often made from synthetic replacement materials. The drones, which extend from the chanter, are in many ways the most important element of the bagpipe. Known as ‘the heart of the instrument’, they provide the sound with the clean, dulcet tones needed for its music. The original Highland pipes probably comprised a single drone, with the second drone being added in the mid- to late 1500s. The third, or the great drone, came into use sometime in the early 1700s.
In the Scottish Lowlands, pipers were part of the travelling minstrel class, performing at weddings, feasts and fairs throughout the Border country, playing song and dance music. Highland pipers, on the other hand, appear to have been more strongly influenced by their Celtic background and occupied a high and honoured position.
The skill of playing has to be blended with the art of posture and stance. The piper’s left arm should only squeeze the bag with enough pressure to feed the drones with air to sound the notes without disturbance or distortion. The bag is held towards the front of the piper’s body, allowing the shorter drone to rest on the shoulder.
Modern pipes, in the early twentieth century, were made of tropical hardwoods, usually black ebony and black wood from Africa or cocas wood from the Caribbean, with decorative rings or ferrules made of ivory. Sometimes silver was used for the lower ferrules. Prior to and throughout the eighteenth century, local hardwoods were used, commonly holly and laburnum, again horn and bone being added for decoration.
Pipers, particularly teachers, were adept craftsmen as creators both of music and their instruments. Many used to make their own pipes. A notable Scottish piper, John Ban MacKenzie, who died in 1864 and was thought to be the last of these makers, is said to have killed the sheep, stitched the bag, turned the drones, chanter and blowpipe on his simple foot-pedalled lathe, cut the oaten reeds, composed the tunes and played them, all with his own hands.