The Bagpipes

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Music

Music is a word conspicuously absent from any tale I have read or written about any of my ancestors.  Shame, since I love all kinds of music.  To make amends, I thought I would focus on the instrument that has for some centuries been associated with the land of the MacNies. Surely some of them must have thrilled to the sound of the bagpipes skirling through the glens, or rousing the blood of men in battle - so much so that the English later defined bagpipes as an instrument of war. 

According to Wikipedia people have played bagpipes for centuries throughout large parts of Europe, Anatolia, the Caucasus, Northern Africa, Western Asia, and around the Persian Gulf.  It is a woodwind instrument in which a bag feeds wind to the embedded reeds.  Modern bagpipes are made of four sections: the blowpipe, the bag, 2-3 drones, and the chanter, or fingerboard.  

The piper blows air through the blowpipe into the bag and squeezes it continually to drive the air through the drones.  Each drone has a reed tuned to a specific key.  As the air escapes the bag it produces a constant low “droning” noise, the distinctive sound of the bagpipe.  Volume and pitch of the drone are determined by the amount of pressure exerted on the bag by the piper, as well as on the finger positions on the chanter, which is played much like a flute or clarinet.

The original Highland pipes probably comprised a single drone with the second drone being added in the mid to late 1500’s. The third, or the great drone, came into use sometime in the early 1700s.  The Great Highland Bagpipe has three drones – two tenor and one bass.  It produces a high-pitched and very high decibel shrill which can be heard for miles.

While pipers were well known In the Scottish Lowlands, playing song and dance music at weddings, feasts and fairs throughout the Border country, it is in the Highlands that my ancestors would have heard them.  Here they were strongly influenced by the Celtic background and occupied a high and honored position. By the 1700s, apparently, the piper had started to replace the harpist as the prime Celtic musician of choice within the Clan system. Now one is greeted by pipers at any special occasion.

In April 2017 we were met at the entrance to the Scottish Association of Family History Societies annual conference in Fife by a piper.