B is for...

Feeling the way I do at the moment, you nearly got Bronchitis for the B-word… but I’d have to be feeling a whole lot better than I do at the moment to make that an interesting post.

So we’re going with another B dear to my heart… Bagpipes.

Talk about your divisive instrument!

Alfred Hitchcock spoke for many when he quipped,“I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of [that] achieved by the pig."

Harsh, to be sure — but when you hear those long droning notes that the piper warms up with, you cannot deny a certain validity to the words. 

This is not music that fits neatly into our modern conception of All That Is Tuneful.

And yet, I (along with countless others,) absolutely adore bagpipe music. 

It may be because bagpipes are part of my own cultural collective unconsciousness. Droning start or not, this is indeed the song of my people. As Michael MacDonagh put it, "This old barbaric music has magic in it. It transforms the Gael. It reawakens in the depths of their being, even in this...century, impressions, moods, feelings inherited from a wild untamed ancestry for thousands of years, and thus gives them, more than strong wine, that strength of arm and that endurance of soul which makes them invincible.”

Bagpipes also feature heavily in the soundtrack of my childhood. We had Sunday evening tattoos on the record player every week (just before Lawrence Welk!) and I learned to dance the highland fling as a Father’s Day surprise for my grandpa. This is music with a rhythm that has always surged through my blood.

Despite being steeped in the traditional of the pipes, however, I am still a child of rock and roll. Which, I will admit, gives me a preference for a more modern approach to bagpipe music. Still heavy on pipes and drum, but with a kind of “rocks the house” approach that swoops up the listeners and carries them away.

Something like this…

(Nor does it hurt that, where there’s a bagpipe, there’s generally a man in a kilt nearby!)