Pibroch

R odERick was a wonderful colleague, friend and mentor to me for 20 years. His monumental scholarship illuminated every aspect of our common research field, the bagpipe music of Great Britain. His good counsel, lively humour and unfailing courtesy uplifted the lives of those he worked with. He certainly inspired me and in this article, i present a tune composed in his memory and reflect on his remarkable legacy to Highland piping. I am grateful to three colleagues for adding their memories, enriching this tribute to the leading piping scholar of our times.

P EOPLE have been badgering me for years to explain 1s and Os. Let's be honest, there isn't a good jargonbuster anywhere, in print or on screen. Why not? Currently, only a handful of scholars have 'got it'. Their risky mountain-top work, mostly published in the last decade, is slow to trickle into mainstream musical thought. The inertia to overcome is significant because 1s and Os concern a way of thinking that is remote from our own. They belong to a musical system sustained through long apprenticeships with master musicians in the Middle Ages; the craft of erudite virtuosi who were well acquainted, 500 years ago, with the models of the past.

A concordance table mapping 854 transcriptions by 10 pipers to 313 pibrochs, combining and correcting the concordances by Frans Buisman and Roderick D. Cannon. I have added analytical data that allows the material to be sorted by structure and tonality. This dataset underpins the website www.altpibroch.com and the article ‘A map of the pibroch landscape, 1760–1841’ in Piping Today 70 (2014), available at https://www.academia.edu/22928936/A_map_of_the_pibroch_landscape_1760_1841. It was first released in 2014 and is now at version 7 (2016).

Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music published in July 2012 by Faber & Faber is hard to classify as a ‘novel’ tout court. How can we feel comfortable in enclosing in a definite ‘label’ a literary work which is written in the style of a piobaireachd – the ‘classical’ music of the bagpipe?
In my paper I will analyse the deep Scottishness of The Big Music by the New Zealand-born author. This highly avant-garde, hybrid book constitutes a clear milestone in contemporary literary achievements.

Material describing the current cultural parameters, meaning and value of piobaireachd (also known as pibroch/ceòl mór), either within or beyond Scotland, is limited in its contemporary and global application. This research attempts to address such limitations by investigating piobaireachd in contemporary society from a cultural and social perspective. In particular it considers whether piobaireachd in New Zealand has been localised by investigating concepts of cultural authenticity embedded within musical sound. It draws upon existing scholarship and contributes towards the discourse on music and culture. This paper suggests we re-think piobaireachd as the authentic aural embodiment of the past, and recognise it as a subculture existing within a contemporary global context, where definitions vary and concepts of the past are subject to social influence. Cultural approaches offer much to the study of musics, including considerable potential for new interpretations, insights and directions for Highland bagpiping.