WE may not have invented the bagpipes, or tartan, but in our “here’s tae us” grandiloquence we’ve claimed them as our own. The twinning of the two will be inescapable in Glasgow this week as dozens of events are packed into the week-long Piping Live celebration, with 8,000 competitors, and even more tourists – many also in kilts – which all ends in the annual ceilidh at the World Piping Championships at Glasgow Green next weekend.
More than 200 pipe bands will be taking part, 15 of whom will be fighting for the supreme title. Not forgetting the Highland dancers, also competing for their top world award.
One of the other nations competing to claim the origin of the pipes is Ireland. The reigning world champions – The Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band – hail from Lisburn in the northern part of the island. They aren’t just defending their title but can lay claim to being the most successful band of all time, with 12 Worlds and innumerable other titles. But before the main course, there’s the entrée, the dozens of events organised by the National Piping Centre, the city overlaid with the skirl of the pipes.
How the pipes came to Scotland is a bit of a puzzle. Some historians believe they originated in Egypt, before coming over with invading Roman Legions. Others claim they came across the Irish Sea with colonising Scots tribes.
As early as 400 BC, the “pipes of Thebes” were played in Ancient Egypt. These seemed to involve some blowing into hollow pipes made of dog skin with chanters of bone. A few centuries later, Emperor Nero is also believed to be a keen piper, so he was probably blowing, rather than fiddling, as Rome burned. Whoever invented them, we owned them. The original Highland pipes probably had a single drone, with a second drone added in the mid-1500s and the third, the great drone (it looks as it sounds) came into use some time in the early 1700s.
At the time Lowland pipers were travelling minstrels, performing at feasts and fairs throughout the Borders. Highland pipers, on the other hand, held a loftier and more austere position within the clan system. By the late 1700s, the pipes had replaced the harp, as the guitar would do later to just about every instrument.
The first recorded entrance of the pipes as an instrument of war was in the last full-scale battle against the English which, closer to home, also involved religion. It was the Battle of Pinkie, which took place outside Musselburgh in 1547, when the Scots army was defeated, aided by the guns of 30 English warships anchored in the Forth which decimated their ranks.
It was a crucial turn in what was to became known the War of Rough Wooing. After breaking from Rome and Catholic Europe, an isolated King Henry VIII had wanted his son, Prince Edward, to marry the young Scottish Queen Mary and united two kingdoms. When Henry died and the boy became King Edward VI, his uncle, the Duke of Somerset, became Lord Protector of England and pursued the idea of an alliance – wanted or not – with the Scots, who still clung to the papacy. When the Scots battlelines crumbled there was no mercy and it is estimated that around 6,000 Scottish soldiers perished. Mary was smuggled out of Scotland and, 11 years later, married Francis, Dauphin of France.
Due to their inspirational influence the pipes were classified as an instrument of war and banned for a time after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. There has barely been a war, a battle or skirmish since that hasn’t involved a band, or piper, particularly as the British Empire expanded and Scottish soldiers, and pipers led regiments into battles in foreign fields.
One of the most famous and oldest pipe tunes, the Green Hills of Tyrol, dates to the Crimean War when a pipe major with the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders heard a Sardinian band playing what was a refrain from Rossini’s William Tell. He adapted it for the pipes.
Many years later Andy Stewart, never seen without a kilt, would put the words to what became A Scottish Soldier. The song, recorded at Abbey Road, was one of two US chart entries by Stewart (the other was Donald Where’s Your Troosers?), reached number one in Canada, spent 36 weeks in the UK singles chart and over a year in the US chart. It was also huge in countries with a Scottish expatriate population, like Australia and New Zealand.
This week’s Piping Live! events have the National Piping Centre as their hub. In Edinburgh, there’s a Fringe event tonight at St Cecilia’s Hall with The Piobaireachd Society putting on a concert of classical pipe music.
Tomorrow at the Glasgow centre it’s the solo piping competition and at lunchtime, and throughout the week, bands will be on the steps of the Royal Concert Hall, Fiveways at TGI Fridays and at St Enoch Square. There’s also heat on of Pipe Idol, the under-21 solo competition.
All the grade on bands will compete twice each day, performing three traditional types of tune – a march, a Strathspey and a reel – and a medley. The bands have to perform in a circle, facing inwards, assessed by four judges, two piping, one for drummers and a fourth for overall performance. There’s also a drum major competition, the massed march past The Worlds’ Chieftain, culminating in every piper on the Green thousands playing in unison, a sound which should certainly reach the parts of Glasgow that the previous week has not touched.
For a full breakdown of what’s on go to www.pipinglive.co.uk
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