W. L. Manson

“ The old pipers could indeed so regulate their instruments as to make the music almost as sweet as that of the violin, but sweetness is not the outstanding feature of the bagpipe, and it is not fitted for private houses or any but the biggest of public halls. The hills themselves are its appropriate concert room, and among them it pervades the whole atmosphere, and becomes part of the air until one can hardly tell whence it comes. It makes rhythm with the breeze and chimes in with the rush of the torrent, and becomes part of the world in which it is produced. ”

“ So a spirit of independence and jealous pride of ancestry was cultivated, and in tradition, song, and music, the exploits of their forbears were celebrated. All this went to make Celtic Scotland a nation by itself, and its people a peculiar people. There is nothing in the political history of any country so remarkable as the succession of the Highland chiefs and the long and uninterrupted sway they held over their followers. ”

“ Highland music was always different from Lowland, in that it was based largely on memories of the past, and connected by undying tradition with events that had left their impress on the country or the clan. It was always simple and unaffected, and the Highlander always preferred the simple strains of his countrywomen and the grandeur of the pipes in their native glens to the finest opera. Besides he liked variety, as the existence of marches, pibrochs, quicksteps, laments, reels, jigs, and strathspeys testify, and he was equally at home with the grave, the gay, or the melancholy. ”

“ I would speak with the same deference of the music of a country, as I would of its superstitions; but what can a man do when his very soul is twisted out of its socket.... To think that this squealing pig in a poke should be the great lever of a people’s passions. It would not let a man die quietly, but would almost wake the dead. ”

“ The simple truth about the “language” of the pipes seems to be that a Highland listener gets from the pipes what, in a more or less degree, anyone gets from the music he loves—a stimulant for his emotion and imagination, nothing more. He is an emotional being, and his imagination, aided and abetted by the sorrows and the joys of many generations—which affect his disposition though he knows it not—and by the many associations of particular tunes or styles of playing, runs riot when he hears the pipes, and to him they speak as no other instrument ever can speak. ”

“ There is no room in the world for the piper of the olden time; there is room for the piper of the olden time when he adapts himself to modern circumstances. That he has done, and the result is that the pipes are more the national instrument of Scotland than ever they were.
Foremost among the agencies which have kept alive the taste for pipe music are the Highland Society of London and the Highland Society of Scotland. ”

“ A spirit of improvement and an enthusiasm for things Highland appeared, first modestly, then boldly, and under the auspices of a renovated society, without the environments of war and romance, a new order asserted itself. Competitions stirred up the more clever of the piping fraternity, and further popularised the music, books on Highland piping, written or compiled by leading pipers, began to appear, and with the publication broadcast of histories of the many tunes, the people began to take an intelligent and patriotic interest in the music. ”

“ Many other instances of descriptive pipe music are to be found. The pibroch of Daorach Robbi contains the keenest satire ever levelled at the vice of drunkenness. The ludicrous imitation of the coarse and clumsy movements, the maudlin and staring pauses, the helpless imbecility of the drunkard as he is pilloried in the satire with the ever-recurring sneering notes, Seall a nis air (Look at him now) are enough to annihilate any person possessing the least sensibility, who, while hearing them, is conscious of having been in the position described, even for once in his life. ”

“ It is, of course, necessary that performer and listeners should be Highland themselves. No one who is not versed in the poetry and music of the Highlands can impart to others, or appreciate for himself, the spirit of romance and pathos and love and sorrow and martial sentiment which is in the music, just as no actor can play well unless he enters into the spirit of the play. ”

“ They traversed daily a country of the wildest and most diversified scenery, mountains and forests and lochs, their minds partook of the sublimity of their surroundings; they mused continually with glowing imagination on the deeds of their forefathers and their own exploits, and the music to whose rhythm they were bred was but the reflex of their character and life. “That is what makes all your Celtic music so good,” wrote Professor Blackie. “It is all so real; not tricked up for show, but growing out of a living root.” ”

“ And the whisky was never made that could hurt a piper.” This, too, passed into a proverb—“As fou as a piper”—but however true it may have been in one generation it has nowadays no more than a figurative meaning. Pipers now are as much in the public eye as ever they were, but they are matter-of-fact people, who have their livings to make and their characters to uphold. They are therefore neither over proud, over jealous, nor over jolly. They have fitted themselves into nineteenth century circumstances, and do not care how much the public eye is upon them. ”

“ It is only a gathering together of material that is common to Highland tradition and Highland literature, but if it shows what an amount of such material, even on one side phase of Highland life, really exists, it will have served a good purpose. In every hamlet in the Highlands there is surely some individual patriotic enough to take an interest in its folk-lore, and intelligent enough to see the necessity for saving still more of it, and these people can do more to preserve it, if only by giving it a place in the columns of the weekly papers, than any one collector or writer. ”

“ But it is because the song harks back to the time when one good piper was a man to be revered, and a hundred in one place a gathering to be dreaded—if they were all there of one accord—that it continues to hold its own. It expresses something of the grandeur that was attached to the national music, when the clan piper was second only to the chief in importance, and the pibroch as much a part of the clan life as the fiery cross, so it is accepted as the one outstanding bit of song that helps to keep alive the traditional glory of the Great Highland Bagpipe. ”

“ But we should not expect from one instrument the music proper to another, or blame the one because it fails to please those who are used to the other. The bagpipes have all along been subject to the criticism of the stranger, who knew neither them nor their people, but who came to criticise and went away to scoff, not remembering that a Highlander suddenly imported into a London drawing-room would have as poor an opinion of the music there as the Londoner has of his. They have suffered too from the well-meaning efforts of their friends. ”

“ The pibroch is not a mere voluntary, played as the taste of the performer may dictate, though it seems so to those unacquainted with the nature of the music, especially when the player is inexperienced. All, however, are not so ignorant or confused as the listener of a story told by the late Duke of Gordon. A piper in a North of England town had played a pibroch which wonderfully excited the attention of his hearers, who seemed equally astonished at its length and the wildness and apparent disconnection of its parts. ”

“ This system, if such it could be called, required as its very groundwork the possession on the part of the pupil of an ear for music, a natural aptitude for pipe music, a devotion to the music peculiar to the Highlands, and an intimate knowledge of and reverence for all the circumstances which entwined themselves into the histories of the various tunes. Without these qualifications no man could be a great piper, and the hereditary pipers were very chary about beginning to train anyone who did not promise to come up to their expectations. ”

“ The gentleman in green then asked if he would favour the company with a tune called ‘The Fairy Dance,’ at which they knew he excelled all other performers. Nothing pleased Jamie better than a little puffing—this, probably, the inhabitants of the knoll knew—and he replied lustily, ‘And, by my faith, I will, and I will play it as true as ever any piper played a tune.’ In a moment the vast assembly was on its feet, swinging from side to side in a long country dance. ”

“ The garb of old Gaul has ceased to be the at-home dress of the Highlander, and become the evening dress of the fashionable who would ape a Highland connection, and the mark of the Highland wanderer, who far from home stands by home customs out of patriotic love for his home land. ”

“ That spirit has lived through the many changes that have taken place since Rob Roy’s day, and it lives in a modified form now. Nothing will make a Scottish audience, especially a Scottish audience far from home, cheer as the pipes will, and no sound is so welcome at an open-air gathering, or to the wandered Scotchman, as the wild notes of the national instrument. In the preface to one collection of Highland music we are told of a well-known Edinburgh man, discreetly referred to as “W—— B——, Esq.,” who was at the time the most exquisite violinist in Scotland. ”

“ As to the question whether people of good musical taste can appreciate the music of the great Highland bagpipe, it is a fact that people who have the keenest appreciation and intense enjoyment of the music of such composers as Mozart and Handel, of the great singers and great musicians, can at the same time enjoy a pibroch or a strathspey when played by a master hand. ”

“ It is perhaps the most remarkable book that has ever been issued in connection with any musical instrument. Though to the ordinary reader it is absolute nonsense, so late as 1880, Duncan Ross, the Duke of Argyll’s piper, who learned his art orally in Ross-shire from the chanting of John Mac Kenzie, Lord Breadalbane’s piper, himself a pupil of the Mac Crimmons, could read and play from it at sight, and as he is still alive can, I suppose, do so to this day. ”

“ The only gathering of the clans we have nowadays are the gatherings in the halls of our big cities, where a thousand or two of people bearing a common name meet under the presidency of the next-of-kin of the chief of olden times, and drink, not mountain dew, but tea, and have Highland or Jacobite songs sung to them by people whose profession is singing, and applaud dancers and pipers who dance and pipe because it pays them to do so. ”

“ The young piper must not forget that it is the practice chanter that makes the piper, and he should never attempt to play a tune on the full set until he can play it thoroughly on the chanter. Quick and careless playing should always be avoided. Also, the player should endeavour to get into the spirit of the music by understanding the circumstances under which each particular tune was composed and the feelings it is meant to express. No man other than a Highlander can fully appreciate the piobaireachd or do justice to the wild, though majestic, strains. ”

“ As to the man who practises the ordinary pipes in an ordinary city apartment, with but the thickness of a brick dividing him from neighbours on either side, he is the worst enemy of his craft and worthy of all execration. The wise enthusiast will get a smaller set made for home use, having the lower part of each drone and the top of the chanter turned large enough to fit the stocks of the full-size pipes, so that one bag and the stocks in it does for both sets. These will not sound so loud as to disturb neighbours, and the performer can enjoy himself as well as with pipes of full size. ”

“ In no other land have the distinguishing marks of a nationality that, as a separate kingdom, has ceased to exist been retained in almost all their original purity. Of the three things, the kilt is perhaps the most interesting. The language and the music have been, and are, confined to the people of the Highlands, either in or out of the Highlands; but the kilt, while no longer the everyday wear of Highland people, has found its way into non-Highland circles, and the tartan has become a fashionable dress. ”

“ It is too often assumed that a tune having a direct reference to a certain historical incident, is itself of the date of that incident, while the chances are that it was composed on that incident by a piper who lived many years after. Because Shakespeare wrote Macbeth we do not conclude that he lived in Macbeth’s day. A composer, like a dramatist, has all history spread out before him, and can make his music on what he pleases. ”

“ The importation theory grew out of the ideas entertained of the rude and uncivilised state of Scotland at an early period, which was considered altogether incompatible with the delicacy of taste and feeling its poetry and music displayed. But the student of Highland history soon discovers that, with all the rudeness, there existed among the people just that delicacy of taste and feeling which found expression in the music, and he at once concludes that the music is a real growth of the home soil. ”