It shows no sign of disappearing!Īndy Letcher is a writer and musician, and Publicity Officer for the Bagpipe Society. This ancient instrument, with its bombastic sound and wild associations has, in spite of everything, survived to the modern era. Pipers of every kind gather, put on concerts, visit schools, play on the streets or for dancing. Celebrations happen across the UK, but also in Greece, America, Kenya, and even Iran. International Bagpipe Day was inaugurated by the Bagpipe Society, and is a grassroots celebration of all the world’s bagpipes. MORE: Beginner's guide to playing the bagpipes There is, however, a vibrant English piping revival underway. The bagpipe only clung on in pockets, such as the North East of England, where Northumbrian pipes are played to this day. Falling from favour, it was gradually replaced by the more versatile fiddle. The instrument became indelibly associated with rude or lascivious behaviour, and, perhaps, the vernacular festivities of Catholicism. Henry VIII owned five sets of bagpipes, but it seems the Reformation he helped instigate put paid to English piping. There are literary references too: the solution to one 10th Century Anglo-Saxon riddle may be a bagpipe, and Chaucer’s Miller definitely played the pipes on his pilgrimage to Canterbury. The fact that there are hundreds of carvings of bagpipers in English churches, dating from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, suggests that bagpipers were once commonplace south of the border, all the way down to Cornwall. They were designed to be played on Border Bagpipes or some kind of smallpipe. Many of the forty tunes he notated are still played in the North today, but in his collection they exist as sets of extended variations, probably for dancing. Little is known about him, other than that he was Christened in Stamfordham, Northumberland, in 1678, and that he had two sons, Parsivall and John. This manuscript was written down by one William Dixon. Less commonly, the natural elasticity of animal bladders has been employed on so-called ‘bladder pipes’.ģ) The earliest manuscript of bagpipe music in Britain dates from 1733 In Eastern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, bagpipe bags are made from whole goat skins, giving the instrument a dramatic, if grisly, appearance. In Western Europe bags tend to be sewn from a piece of seasoned cow hide, though rubber and Goretex have been used. As the player takes a breath, he or she squeezes air out of the bag and so keeps the reeds of both chanter and drone speaking. The bag of the bagpipes provides a reservoir of air that allows that distinctive, continuous sound to be made.
They were the Fender Stratocaster of their day.Ģ) Bagpipe bags are sometimes made out of animal bladders They have always been associated with shepherds, and their traditional role was in providing music for dancing, especially at weddings. Although we cannot be certain, bagpipes probably originated in Antiquity in what we now call the Middle East. There are about 130 distinct ‘species’ of bagpipe in the world: France, alone, has eighteen. Nevertheless, bagpipes are found right across Europe, North Africa and as far east as India. Scotland has a proud and venerable tradition of bagpiping, and the Great Highland Bagpipe was taken round the globe by the British Empire. 1) There is nothing uniquely Scottish about the bagpipes
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