Bagpipers

Pipers: A Guide to the Players and Music of the Highland Bagpipe Pipers takes the reader inside the world of the performer community, introducing what pipers do, how they do it, and why. Dr Willie Donaldson’s original approach shows how ‘traditional music’, often assumed to be the anonymous product of a dim and distant past, is the creation of gifted individuals operating in a sophisticated and vigorously ongoing enterprise. Since pipers have often been skilled also on the fiddle, keyboards and small-pipes, or as singers or dancers, their story offers fascinating insights into the whole traditional music and song repertoire of Scotland. Pipers is a well-informed and highly readable account by a prize-winning author who is a piper and composer of pipe music as well as an internationally recognised historian of Scottish tradition.

The Book of the Bagpipe The Book of the Bagpipe relates the evolution of the bagpipe from the reeded pipes of ancient civilizations to its present day position as a Scottish cultural icon, an evocative emblem of Celtic heritage, and a legitimate musical instrument. Delightfully illustrated with photographs, engravings, and color paintings of pipes and pipers through the ages, this book makes an ideal gift for anyone with an interest in Celtic music and history. Bagpipers.

The Highland Bagpipe and Its Music Roderick Cannon's classic work, a definitive and critically acclaimed history of the origins and music of Scotland's most famous instrument. The eminently readable text will be of interest not only to pipers but to all those music lovers world wide who are intrigued to know more about the character and extraordinary history of the legendary pipes. The author covers both Ccol Mor and Ccol Beag, Piobaireachd, dance music, martial music, music for competitions and music for pleasure, music for pipe bands as well as a commentary on the state of piping today. Updated from its last paperback edition, this book is the only comprehensive history of piping in print and has never been surpassed.

Old and New World Highland Bagpiping (McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History S.) Old and New World Highland Bagpiping provides a comprehensive biographical and genealogical account of pipers and piping in highland Scotland and Gaelic Cape Breton. The work is the result of over thirty years of oral fieldwork among the last Gaels in Cape Breton, for whom piping fitted unself-consciously into community life, as well as an exhaustive synthesis of Scottish archival and secondary sources. Reflecting the invaluable memories of now-deceased new world Gaelic lore-bearers, John Gibson shows that traditional community piping in both the old and new world Gaihealtachlan was, and for a long time remained, the same, exposing the distortions introduced by the tendency to interpret the written record from the perspective of modern, post-eighteenth-century bagpiping. Following up the argument in his previous book, Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping, 1745-1945, Gibson traces the shift from tradition to modernism in the old world through detailed genealogies, focusing on how the social function of the Scottish piper changed and step-dance piping progressively disappeared. Old and New World Highland Bagpiping will stir controversy and debate in the piping world while providing reminders of the value of oral history and the importance of describing cultural phenomena with great care and detail.

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