Old and New World Highland Bagpiping (review)

The first time I heard Highland bagpipe music it was played by a man who was probably a descendant of one of the pipers dealt with in John Gibson's book Old and New World Highland Bagpiping. It was in the summer of 1958 in the Codroy Valley of Newfoundland and the player was Alan MacArthur, of a family renowned in the area for its adherence to the Gaelic language and the traditional culture of Gaelic Scotland. Doubtless, MacArthur's playing was in the tradition held in highest esteem by John Gibson: unadulterated community-based piping. MacArthur played for dances in the Highland-dominated culture of the region, which was about to be seriously influenced by outside forces. MacArthur's pipes - the drone and the chanter - were supposed to have played on the field at Waterloo. Today, scarcely anything is left of the Gaelic tradition in the area. Indeed, at the time of my hearing MacArthur's playing in the pristine traditional fashion, two of his grandsons were playing rock and roll music on the bagpipes to a younger generation anxious to move quickly away from the music associated with the older tradition. This personal anecdote fits in well with an underlying theme of Gibson's well-researched and well-written book: a sad decline of Gaelic culture and language in both Scotland's and Cape Breton's gaidhealtachd.

The book examines in great detail from written and oral sources the bagpiping tradition, starting with the emergence in Scotland of bagpiping as the major form of music, taking over from clarsach or harp music. The music of the harp echoes back to the origins of Scottish Gaelic culture in Ireland. Gibson's book looks at this emergence of the pipes in the varied areas of the Highlands and islands of Scotland which were under the hegemony of clans, especially the MacLeans, MacDonalds, and Campbells. From various oral and written sources, the book teases out the mythology connected with the tradition of bagpipe music - for example, the legendary pre-eminence of families such as the MacCrimmons of Skye and the 'school' of piping associated with them. What results is an interesting interplay between Gaelic genealogy and piping: who learned what from whom, and who was patronized by whom, especially in the period between the Jacobite risings of 1715 and the fatal '45. Piping families such as the MacGregors, one of whom, John MacGregor, was piper to Charles Edward Stewart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, are given fulsome treatment. The lines of descent, the question of a MacGregor 'school' of piping, and the importance of MacGregors as passers-on of traditional piping in the terrible period after 1745 are dealt with fully and with a keen scholarly scepticism about the legendary material for which there is vague or sketchy documentation.

Old and New World Bagpiping presents a rounded picture of Gaelic society in which the music of the pipe was central to the social organization of the people. The book shows that all ranks in the Scottish Gaelic world kept pipers, not just the Chiefs, and in the period after 1745 it was the tackmen - the middle class, if you will - who continued to patronize piping. Gibson makes it clear that, following the abandonment of their Gaelic heritage, including piping, by the clan chiefs after the débâcle at Culloden, it was the tackmen and ordinary Gaels who carried on the tradition. From their ranks came the emigrants to Canada, especially to Cape Breton, who carried with them the authentic pipe music tradition, as opposed to the innovators in Scotland, who literally had their music march to the martial drum in the tunes devised for the Scottish Regiments in the British Army. There is little clear personal line of descent between the pipers of Gaelic Scotland and those of Cape Breton, although there is distinct clarity about...