While Cheape, until recently head of the museums' Scottish Material Culture Research Centre, does use the term "invention", what he is saying in this illuminating and broad-ranging discourse is that the great Highland bagpipe was developed and sta
ndardised in terms of sound and style into the instrument of today to satisfy new demands placed on it – by the pipe bands of the British Army's new Highland regiments, by emerging Highland societies and the piping competitions they sponsored, and by London-centric clan chiefs and others besotted with a Celtic romanticism spun by MacPherson's Ossian and Sir Walter Scott. And he pinpoints two leading Edinburgh pipemakers at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, Donald MacDonald and Hugh Robertson, as foremost architects of this change.
The new bagpipe kept pace with the new craze for Caledonian martial splendour (and never mind that sorry business at Culloden). "Marching in step with the emergence of national stereotype," says Cheape, "was a hitherto invisible 'Great Highland Bagpipe', created in fact in the last quarter of the 18th century and adopted as archetype in the first quarter of the 19th."
However, he also delves much further back, into the broader history of the bagpipe, describing how it came to the Highlands relatively late, during the early-16th century, at a time when it was already long established in Europe, to be "grafted" on to a vigorous, pre-existing Scots-Irish Gaelic culture with an established social order of bards, musicians and patronage.
While relishing the thrust of his book (which comes with a CD-ROM based on the NMS collections), I was faintly surprised that Cheape, who was involved at an early stage of the current revival of Scotland's bellows-blown Lowland and small pipes, doesn't devote more space to the Lowland instrument's place in the burghs and rural society. What he does make much of, however, in revelatory detail, is the development of the pastoral and union pipes, precursors of the uilleann pipes now associated with the Irish folk revival, which were once hugely popular in Scotland and England as a "gentlemen's bagpipe", finding their way into drawing rooms, theatres and even operatic stages. Eventually usurped by the burgeoning ubiquity of the Highland pipe, these pastoral and union pipes are placed by Cheape within a Baroque and Neo-Baroque context, evoking the "ancient and pastoral" for which there was such an appetite in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Cheape writes with the rigour of a curator and Gaelic scholar who is also a seasoned piper. He dispels much Celtic mist and demolishes more than a few tartan shibboleths, declaring: "The bagpipe in Scotland has suffered a malaise of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, of misappropriation and manipulation of a lively and vital musical culture," going on to suggest that "its treatment might even serve as a metaphor for Scottish history and cultures since the 18th century." Today, he concludes, on a more positive note, "the constraining fences erected and policed by a patrician élite or social oligarchy now appear to be down and the pastures open for all to roam."
His forensic examination of material and written evidence ultimately pays tribute to the instrument, its makers and its music, and usefully clears the air for the currently-flourishing Scottish piping scene to venture into the 21st century, less encumbered by entrenched views or faux Celticism.
The full article contains 591 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
