‘Happy we’ve been a’ thegither’: new directions in piping

Hugh Cheape looks back on a quarter century of the LBPS and the Society's role within a changing piping scene.

TWENTY-FIVE years may seem a long time in the life of an organisation, but a lifespan thus far often indicates that survival and growth in the first months and years have been critical. This sort of trajectory neatly reflects the birth, early life and growth to rude good health of the Lowland and Border Pipers' Society. In terms of the lives of those involved, a quarter-century is a long time, absorbing a significant amount of career and active life. This probably also reflects the experience of those who founded and created the Society in the early 1980s. Although there is no likelihood of the Society suffering a Flodden, it is worth reflecting on the career of our king of Scots and European Renaissance prince, James IV, whose twenty-five-year reign (1488-1513) also must have done so much to consolidate the music of the bagpipe within Scottish culture.

The following words are some reminiscence and report on the topic of the bagpipe and the

Lowland and Border Pipers' Society, following genial and exploratory meetings between Gordon Mooney, Mike Rowan and myself in 1980 and

Geordie Syme: the town piper of

Dalkeith, and emblem of the LBPS

1981. These conversations rapidly expanded to include the likes of Jamie MacDonald Reid and the Whistlebinkies' Robert Wallace - both of whom were playing Lowland pipes in the mid-Seventies, Andy Hunter, Hamish Moore, Julian Goodacre and Jim Gilchrist, activists who had long been exploring the same fields. The bagpipe in its different forms is a subject of compelling interest, but it is sound and music that win hearts and minds. The good old tune, Happy we've bin a' thegither, reflects the extraordinary fellowship of the Society in its first twenty-five years and also symbolises how good music survives; this interesting melody emerges as the song, Willie was a wanton wag, at the beginning of the 18th century, a tune and song lying at the heart of the Lowland and Border piping tradition.

The vitality and steadily growing strength of the Society drew of course on the enthusiasms and interest of its members in the bagpipe and its music. In the early years there was undoubtedly a further element which might be described as the pursuit of a paradox; curiosity and conviction drove the Society to question received opinion and the hegemony of the Great Highland Bagpipe in the musical culture of Scotland. It may be that the time was ripe for change and that the culture of piping, as represented by the solo and pipe band competitions, was experiencing diminishing returns of public interest and reaching limits of evolution. The paradox, such as it was, lay in the perception of the culture of the bagpipe in Scotland as a homogeneous whole, while ignoring or downplaying other influences or a more complex pattern of evolution.

The available literature, bolstered by a conventional wisdom, offered a history of piping narrowly and disingenuously along national boundaries, with a Scottish bagpipe, an Irish bagpipe and an English bagpipe playing to respective national conceits. The deeper history of the bagpipe transcends racial and linguistic markers although it has always served different cultural influences of music and song evolving in different communities and nations. In this respect, the achievement and contribution made by the Highland bagpipe is huge. It is a powerful and successful musical instrument with rare or unique acoustic properties. Whether it descends autonomously from a native “ecotype” or precursor - much the same sort of instrument in the hands of our ancestors of, say, the sixteenth century - must be questionable. On the one hand, we have the enthusiasms of nineteenth and twentieth-century authors who have perceived the descent of the Scottish bagpipe in these very terms. The Bagpipe and its Music was composed by Rev Norman MacLeod as a foreword to the re-issue of William Ross's Collection after 1885 and in words designed to inspire and stiffen patriotism: “The Music oƒ the Highlands is the Pibroch oƒ the Great War Pipe, with its ƒluttering pennons, ƒingered by a genuine Celt, in ƒull Highland Dress, as he slowly paces a Baronial Hall, or amidst the wild scenery oƒ his native mountains ...”

Certainly the Reverend author, one of the famous Gaelic clerical family of MacLeods, believed this and, more seriously, it is still at least half-believed by many.

More seriously still for the history of the instrument, the service industries, tourism and even the national economy have a vested interest in such a servile parody. On the other hand, we have little or no material evidence for such an instrument in the form in which we have been led to expect it.

By coincidence, 1 was well placed to look for material evidence of piping. I had joined the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland at the end of 1974 and had been encouraged by the then Director, Dr Robert Stevenson, to examine critically a pitifully small collection of our national instrument. He suggested that there was a gap in the material record of Scotland's cultural past and that steps should be taken to fill this gap.

When the Lowland and Border Pipers' Society emerged in the 1980s, I saw my own role as concentrating on the material record. This role was by no means straightforward in so far as musicology was not considered to be part of the responsibilities of the National Museums and the bagpipe was rarely considered to be a subject worthy of pursuit at an academic level in Scotland. The public sector could at least offer resources with which a collection of the

national instrument might be quietly assembled for the nation without the case for such an enterprise having to be argued in a forum where there was still considerable doubt about its value.

In assembling evidence for the bagpipe, I had no real idea where this would lead us and I had no preconceptions other than the dominance in the culture of the Great Highland Bagpipe. I believe that, had my expectations been different or had I any doubt about the conventional wisdom, my research would have started with a vigorous or ferocious assault on this form of instrument. Instead, I spent over twenty-five years searching for ancient Highland bagpipe ecotypes and resisted any promptings of counter-argument. In fact the signs were there by which the form might be questioned. The National Museums had no ancient Highland bagpipes beyond fakes and reproductions. No other museum and conservatoire collections in Britain and Europe had Highland bagpipes much earlier than nineteenth-century instruments (by known makers). A lifelong student of the bagpipe, Dr A Duncan Fraser (1849-1920), could find nothing more convincing for his own collection than a “reproduction” by Messrs J and R Glen and a Hugh Robertson Highland Society of London Prize Pipe of 1802.

In describing these instruments, I am making a distinction between the Great Highland Bagpipe and bagpipes played in Scotland's Highlands and Lowlands in a period earlier than around the middle of the eighteenth century. Thanks to the researches of our scholars such as Gordon Mooney and Allan MacDonald, and the recent bravura accounts of the Lowland tradition by Pete Stewart, we know a great deal about bagpipe music from this period but the form of the instrument is elusive. The material evidence is probably there, in spite of the historical bagpipe being a complex wind instrument whose parts have readily disintegrated. A “great pipe” could be considered by the early-nineteenth century to be Scotland's indigenous national instrument, although such a perception, as voiced by the bagpipe maker Donald MacDonald, owed more to contemporary cultural politics than organology. After three or four decades of the Highland Society's piobaireachd competitions, perceptions of the “national instrument” depended on a new stereotype Great Highland Bagpipe, itself predicated on assumptions of continuity and antiquity from a distant past. A teleological view of bagpipe history was constructed by contemporary pens for contemporary circumstances. But the record was, and still is, meagre for the evolution of the bagpipe in Scotland. From the early-nineteenth century there was a lack of intellectual curiosity about the instrument and this discouraged any process of questioning the evidence. In my view, the lack also of a collection of the national instrument in the public domain had constrained the narrative.

The assembling of a “national collection of the national instrument” in the National Museums Scotland between 1978 and 2007 took place against a scholarly backdrop of the substantial re-writing of Scottish history. The history of Scotland in the seventeenth to twentieth centuries period offered interpretive tools for Scottish musicology and the repatriation of Scottish history displayed the context in which music had flourished: the struggles of church and state, the Reformation, civil wars, the Stewart dynasty, regnal and parliamentary union, the weakening of feudal ties, changing social and moral values, the growth of trade, commerce and industry, the growth of towns and cities, migration and the influence of mass media. Little of this could be detected in earlier accounts of the bagpipe in Scotland.

A “gentleman-amateur” playing the Union pipe, from the frontispiece of Geoghan’s Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe.

As a keen student of Scottish history, I was bound to begin to ask questions posed by the surviving material culture of the bagpipe. The business of the National Museums has been the gathering and study of material culture and a corresponding function of service to the general public and the world of learning through acquisition, classification and provoking ideas. After twenty- five years, salient features are the relative absence of historical “Highland” bagpipes - the instrument “invented” in its present form around 1800 - and a rich variety of “Lowland” bagpipes illustrating the influence of the European Baroque and Neo- Baroque on Scotland's music. The signs of the Neo-Baroque were also there in the intriguing evidence of the “Pastoral” and Union bagpipes and the extraordinary wealth of published Scottish fiddle music. How these can be interpreted is of course a matter of continuing debate. The proposal, possibly in terms which may not invite comparison, was made by David Johnson as long ago as 1972 in his Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century:

Most people do not realise how ƒar Scottish ƒolk-ƒiddle music was inƒluenced by classical music; it is usually thought oƒ as an indigenous growth, untouched by civilisation, transmitted by illiterate ƒarm workers and vagrant players. But in ƒact ƒolk-ƒiddle playing, as it exists in Scotland today, was almost entirely an eighteenth-century creation; and it was developed by educated musicians, most oƒ whom were at home in the classical music culture.

The continuity and stability of traditional music, at the point when it impacts most potently on us, may be fantasy, as even Alan Ramsay and Robert Burns recognised, although Scotland is more fortunate than most of Europe in the strength of its musical tradition. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” was a ringing commen

attributed to Frank Zappa (or alternatively to Elvis Costello) when urged to describe and write about his contribution to the emergence of the contemporary music scene. While our musical inheritance includes austere and whimsical characterisations, there is still writing to be done. The achievement of the Lowland and Border Pipers' Society is that it has created an energetic and imaginative forum for remembering rather than dismembering our bagpipe culture, a force for good in informing the content of the culture of piping, and a vigorous agent in the expansion and adaptation of piping into different sectors. The Society is in the driving-seat in a changing intellectual climate, in changing aesthetics and in innovation. Music is still a powerful indicator of Scottish culture and identity, and the bagpipe is still a potent ingredient of these.

Colaiste Ghaidhlig na h-Alba

Sabhal Mor Ostaig

Saint Andrew's Day 2008

Hugh Cheape's Bagpipes: A National Collection of a National Instrument, is published by National Museums Scotland, at £15.99