The pibroch is not a mere voluntary, played as the taste of the performer may dictate, though it seems so to those unacquainted with the nature of the music, especially when the player is inexperienced. All, however, are not so ignorant or confused as the listener of a story told by the late Duke of Gordon. A piper in a North of England town had played a pibroch which wonderfully excited the attention of his hearers, who seemed equally astonished at its length and the wildness and apparent disconnection of its parts. Unable to understand it, one of the spectators at the conclusion anxiously asked the piper to “play it in English.”
The pibroch is properly a “pipe tune,” and its most legitimate form is the “gathering.” The gathering is a long piece of music composed on the occasion of some victory or other fortunate circumstance in the history of a clan, which, when played, is a warning to the troops to turn out. The lament and salute originated in a similar way, but should be used on specific occasions only. The three classes are now, however, treated as one, propriety being frequently so much discarded that the pieces are called marches, an entirely unwarranted change, considering the nature of the music. The bagpipe has its military music mostly composed for itself, and generally employed by regimental pipers for marching purposes, and there is no necessity either for using pibrochs as marches or for adapting for regimental purposes the music of other instruments as has been done to far too large an extent.
Bagpipe music has also suffered greatly in popular estimation through the efforts of well-meaning but mistaken people to lift it out of its proper place and graft it on to city life and inside entertainments. It is not pleasant chamber music even to Highland ears unless played on chamber pipes. There are times and circumstances for everything, and there are few pleasures that will admit of being transplanted out of their own sphere. The “Haughs o’ Cromdale” was a grand thing at Dargai, and a sonata by Paderewski is all right before a fashionable audience in a big city, but to exchange them would only make both ridiculous. The old pipers could indeed so regulate their instruments as to make the music almost as sweet as that of the violin, but sweetness is not the outstanding feature of the bagpipe, and it is not fitted for private houses or any but the biggest of public halls. The hills themselves are its appropriate concert room, and among them it pervades the whole atmosphere, and becomes part of the air until one can hardly tell whence it comes. It makes rhythm with the breeze and chimes in with the rush of the torrent, and becomes part of the world in which it is produced. It suits the bare heath, the solitary cairn, the dark pass, the silent glen, and the mountain shrouded in mists as no music ever did or can do, and it is at its best floating across the silent loch or over the mountain stream, or round the rugged hillsides. It is a military and an outdoor instrument, and there is no justification for comparing pipe music with classical productions. It is like comparing taties and herring with wine jellies, or hoddin’ grey with broad cloth.
Playing within doors is a Lowland and English custom. In the Highlands the piper was always in the open air, and when people wished to dance to his music, it was on the green they danced. The pipe was no more intended for inside than are firearms. A broadside from a man-of-war has a fine effect when heard at a proper distance, but one would not care to be sitting by the muzzles when the guns went off. That the large pipes are still used in halls for entertainment purposes is accounted for by the strength of association, as much as by their appropriateness. Highlanders would not consider a gathering at all complete unless they had their pipers present—a feeling which is easily understood, and which no one wishes to see die out. But that does not alter the fact that, in a small apartment at any rate, they are entirely out of place. The writer is not likely soon to forget one experience of his own, which helped to confirm him in this opinion. It was in one of the big Glasgow halls at a Highland gathering, where I was, in a professional capacity, doing a “special” of several columns for a Highland paper. To catch that week’s issue, my “copy” had to be posted before I slept, so, as soon as the chairman had finished his speech, I adjourned to one of the very small rooms behind the platform to “write up” while the musical part of the programme proceeded, expecting to be pretty well through before the turn of the next speaker came. But the “association pipers” were there before me, and what must they do but shut all the doors to keep the sound from reaching the platform, and start practising the marches and reels they were to play later on, marching from end to end of the little apartment. In five minutes the big drone seemed to be vibrating all through my anatomy, while the melody danced to its own time among the crevices of my brain. It was impossible for me to take my fingers out of my ears—a position which did not lend itself to rapid writing or careful composition. But the pipers did not think anything about it (they had in fact stopped conversation and started playing because they “did not wish to disturb me”), and I soon made an excuse to go out. I tried the artistes’ room, but the soprano was doing up her hair, the comic man was arranging his somewhat scanty habilaments, the old violinist was telling funny stories, and I seemed so obviously out of place that I could not possibly start working. Next I tried the stair, but the draught was too much for me. Then I tried the concert hall itself, but the applause was so frequent that the desks were always rattling. So I came back to the pipers, and braved it out for half an hour, after which I went back to the concert hall and did it on my knee. Anything more indescribably disagreeable than that half-hour in the ante-room it is difficult to imagine, and there seems, when I think of it now, to have been no relation whatever between that “music” and the harmonies which used to float across the bay in the days long ago, when the piper at the big house tuned his pipes and played to the gentry as they sat at dinner, the while we boys lay prone on the grass and drank in all the twirling of his notes. But in the one case there was a mile of sea between and rocks and fields around, and a blue sky above. In the other, I seemed to be caged in with some mad thing that hammered at every panel for freedom.
It was the Chevalier Neukomm, a very distinguished musician, who said, when asked for his opinion, “I don’t despise your pibrochs; they have in them the stirrings of rude, but strong, nature. When you traverse a Highland glen, you must not expect the breath of roses. You must be contented with the smell of heath. In like manner Highland music has its rude, wild charms.”
And our own Professor Blackie puts it even better when he says:—
“The gay ribboned bagpipes moaning away in melancholy coronachs, or rattling like hailstones to the clash of claymores on the backs of the fleeing Sassenachs. In this case at least—
‘’Tis distance lends enchantment to the sound.’
On this point no Highlander of good taste will disagree with you. The bagpipes belong to the open air as naturally as heather belongs to the hills and salmon to the sea-lochs. Men do not mend pens with Lochaber axes, or employ scene painters to decorate the lids of snuff-boxes.”
As to the man who practises the ordinary pipes in an ordinary city apartment, with but the thickness of a brick dividing him from neighbours on either side, he is the worst enemy of his craft and worthy of all execration. The wise enthusiast will get a smaller set made for home use, having the lower part of each drone and the top of the chanter turned large enough to fit the stocks of the full-size pipes, so that one bag and the stocks in it does for both sets. These will not sound so loud as to disturb neighbours, and the performer can enjoy himself as well as with pipes of full size. It must have been of neighbours of a player on the large pipes that the Chicago jury was composed which tried an action for damages in 1899. A Scottish society was parading the streets to the martial skirl of the pipes, when they met a horseman, whose horse took fright and bolted, throwing the rider through a shop window. The subsequent action turned on the question of whether or not the pipes were musical instruments, and the jury decided that they were not. After which it may be well to conclude with the following verses by Mr. Patrick Mac Pherson, New York, contributed to the Celtic Monthly, always remembering the open air and giving allowance for the poet’s license:—