… “Eventually, these waves reach the end of the drone (the open end) and become reflected back up the bore or air column.”Ĭontinuing with our hypothesis, the process of evolution progressed to the making of holes in a tube and discovering that an open hole produced a pitch higher than the fundamental pitch of the tube when that hole was closed. What happened if the man playing middle C became ill, can best be left to the imagination! This is not so strange when one considers that not so long ago a Russian band consisted of musicians who only played one note on an instrument which could only play one note. Thus, the earliest ‘instruments’ of the woodwind family were simply lengths of tube which came to assume magical properties because they could be made to speak either singly, and if one could get the lengths right, in pairs or in groups.
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Much later, he, or his descendants, discovered a that a tube of two feet or more in length gave out a sonorous, musical droning sound, and even later the lips were replaced with the ancient free reed which is simply a length of cane split to form a tongue (as in our drone reeds), placed in the mouth and blown.Īnd so, over the centuries man experimented and noted interesting things such as the fact that short pipes or tubes had higher pitched ‘voices’ than long tubes. Them vibrates them in such a way as to make the most interesting sounds indeed. Tube a way known to most boys: compresses his lips and placing the tube end over StillĮxperimenting, he removes the cane from the water and tries all manner of waysīlow air through the tube until, quite by accident, he eventually blows the With the bubbly sounds he makes when blowing through the other end. He then places one end in the water and is entranced Idly picks up a length of reed nearby and being curious, peers up the one openĮnd and discovers that the nodes are rotted away and that he can see right Later, while sitting in contemplation, he Man has always been driven or ruled by his thirst for knowledge, and so with our primitive savage one can imagine him slaking his thirst at a nearby stream, lying on his stomach in a clump of tall reeds in order to remain hidden from potential enemies. To do this it will be necessary imagine early primitive man, shaggy and wild, as he was some thousands of years ago. However, our knowledge of woodwind instruments in general, and particularly primitive instruments still being played or available for examination, will allow us to at least put forward a theory regarding its evolution. The evolution of the Great Highland Bagpipe is a part of Highland history in the mists of time.
The purpose of this essay is therefore to attempt to explain, in non-mathematical terms and as simply as possible, how and why the bagpipe produces its uniquely beautiful sound and how that sound can best be attained and maintained. It is worth remembering perhaps, that the instrument vehicle or means of conveying or expressing our music a paraplegic transport) system conveys little while an ill-tuned bagpipe cannot and will not produce the music written for it. Generally, pipers as a music fraternity seem to be the only musicians content to play partly-tuned instruments - something unheard of in other cultured musical disciplines.
The Great Highland bagpipe is the result of the genius of our Celtic ancestors and is one of the few instruments which in fact caters for complete self-tuning without any outside aid or reference scale being necessary. Their good intentions are understood but on the other hand it only serves to emphasise the appalling lack of understanding of the instrument in the first place. Recently pipers are even trying to tune their instruments using electronic frequency generators. The majority of cases the instrument if tuned at all is only approximately so. The end result is the sight ofĬountless youths having someone else tune their instruments for them, while in Examination of score sheetsĪt most competitions will confirm this.
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System was, and is, the tendency to understate the importance of tuning andĮmphasise manual dexterity or fingering technique. Not being hunted like animals for the ‘crime’ of playing the pipes, they wereīusy preserving as best they could the traditions and music of better times. Culloden drove this all underground, and if the pipers were That implied specialisation in our greatest They played ceòl mòr or what was commonly called piobaireachd then, which meant Before that date, pipers were specialists.
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