In the thread "I don't like fast Irish tradition music. Give me my airs." Talasiga says:
And Makar suggested it ought to be a separate thread, which makes sense, so here it is.yes, the Gaelic speaking tradition of Scotland is originally from Ireland (pre Norman takeover, if I recall history correctly).
The lament, as per pibroch, is considered by many the heart of traditional Scottish music. I conjecture that this pre-eminence is itself a reflection from a time when it was so in Ireland as if the Scottish high regard for the slow air is a time warp preservation of an ancient Irish regard.
Regarding the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, until the late 1700's they called their language "Irish."
Pibroch (the English spelling of the Gaelic piobaireachd, which is pronounced half way between PEA-brook and PEA-broch), means "what pipers do." In other words, it really just means bagpipe music. Some tunes are laments. Some are gathering tunes. Some commemorate various events, and some are just tunes with seemingly no meaning. Funny thing is that sometimes a tune has more than one title, and one title is so-and-so's lament, but the other title is a different so-and-so's salute. So there isn't enough stylistic character to differentiate a lament from a salute.
In 1200 or so, the Welsh said that they and the Scottish both got their music from the Irish. The Welsh have a lot of traditional written records that document what they thought about music. It seems clear that in 1500 or so, the three peoples had a common musical tradition. Given the differences in space, they probably didn't play exactly the same stuff, but it was probably similar. Maybe similar the way two different sub-genres of jazz or blues are similar. There was a Welsh Harp player called Robert Ap Huw who compiled a manuscript in the late 1600's. His MS contains tunes that are called by names that are present in Welsh records going back to 1500, so they seem to have had a way of transmitting tunes one to the next, and respected the authority of what had come before.
You can find Ap Huw's MS online in fascimile (a scan) and transcribe it. It's not that hard to pick out the melodies. This is a sample of a page that I transcribed from the MS. It's probably an etude. The ornamentation is speculative, but the melody is what's written. When I started looking at the Ap Huw MS I was looking for some connection between that old Welsh Harp music and pibroch. I didn't really find that, although I haven't transcribed the whole thing. There are too many similarities for coincidence though. The way the music oscillates between one tone and another, adjacent tone is a pretty clear indication that they are related, as is the theme;variation;theme 16 bar structure. In broad terms, pibroch seems to be the heir to the ancient Irish harp tradition.
When the Irish developed the harp music (1200 to 1500), Ireland was a cultural center of the world. At that time, ocean travel was pretty fast, relatively speaking, and the ocean between Ireland and the Scottish Isles was a sort of highway. There was a fair amount of travel and people were much more connected than many people today realize. The Irish played a roll kind of similar to what the Greeks had done a millennium prior. But maybe not quite as much. The first secular literature in the western world was Irish, and they seem to have had a significant part in the development of early western music. The universality of the Christian church made movement of ideas inevitable.
Anyway, getting back to pibroch.
For the balance of this post, "piper", "piping" and "bagpipes" will refer only to the Great Highland Bagpipe (GHB). Just because it will make the writing easier. So not all pipers play pibroch, but many do. Competition is a major part of modern piping culture too. The 2/4 march and pibroch are the mainstays of competition. Pibroch is an unbroken tradition. Pipers have been playing it since no one knows when. Probably the 1500's. Until the mid 1700's the piper was the 2nd most important person in a highland clan (after the chief). The piper got his rent free in exchange for his services, so he could focus on piping. There were several important centers of piping, and mostly they were on Skye, the big island between Scotland and Ireland. I'm guessing this is not a coincidence.
So the piper is said to have played during meals. Probably in the morning and evening as well. If you read about the Bards of Irish and Welsh society in the centuries prior, the piper seems to be the vestigial stump of that whole tradition. The pipers carried on with the music. I suspect that when the earliest pibrochs were composed, the pipers had systems for composition, based on the earlier Irish harp music. The music Ap Huw recorded is very formalized and systematic. Unfortunately, there are no contemporary accounts of what those cheiftains's pipers thought about music. All we can do is imagine. Unfortunately, a lot of what people imagine gets passed off as fact.
By 1800 Gaelic society was in sharp decline in Scotland. I won't go into the details as that's not really related to the musical history. Two things seem to have conspired to preserve pibroch playing. One, all of the many Scottish regiments that were raised had pipers on the officer's payroll. They weren't soldiers, but attendants. The officers maintained a bit of Gaelic high-society, and even today pipers play at meal times for officers in Highland regiments. Another thing that happened is various "Highland Societies" were formed with the alleged mission to preserve highland culture. They started offering competitions with cash prizes, a tradition we carry on today. In 1812 Donald MacDonald figured out how to write pibroch in staff notation and between then an 1900 various collections were published. Between them all there are about 400 tunes, and these tunes are today our primary catalog of tunes. Occasionally modern tunes are performed, but mostly pipers play those tunes collected in the 1800s.
Every generation of pipers has lamented the fact that pipers just don't play music the way it was played in the old days. This is part of the written record. Some of the criticism in the early 1900s was very specific, so we have a running commentary on changes in performance practice from about the mid 1800's until the present day. On the other hand we have the myth that we're playing things the way they've been handed down for generations. This seems to cause cognitive dissonance for some, who can't seem to accept that one aspect of having a living tradition is change. In fact, the competition system itself causes change: one person wins, and all the rest go home and figure out what they're going to do different next time. But that's really a different thread -- this one is long enough already!
Pibroch is technically demanding. The fingerings are intricate and mandatory. It's very repetitive and abstract, which make it hard to memorize. The repetition makes any variance in your fingering easy to pick out. The tunes are long too, and keeping a set of pipes going, and in tune for 10 minutes is a physical challenge. It's hard to keep the fingers relaxed while playing that long, so that the ending variations are fluid. It's hard to make the variations musical when they seem to take the form of technical exercises. Because the harmonic component of the notes in the melodies doesn't follow the kind of chord sequences we're used to, it can be difficult to get used to the music. Think of a tune that just goes back and forth between A and G and that's pibroch. It never resolves.
So why do we do it? It's a challenge, and things that are challenging are good for competition. I heard someone once say (as a joke) that pibroch was just an excuse to play long notes and listen to them interact with the drones, and there might be some truth to that. All that tradition is also appealing. I got my tunes from my teacher. My teacher told me who her teacher got them from. I know who he got his tunes from, and who his teacher's teacher was. And the abstract nature of the musical form has appeal, after you live in it for a while.
