![]() One of the uses would be to march into battle with your piper at the front making a hell of a din and cheerful noise. Then you get Scottish people joining regiments in the British army, and they would have their own pipers for the obvious reason that the lords used to have pipers so the regiments would have pipers. If you’re a Scottish lord back in 1700 you’d hire the piper who’d be with you all your life. If you were a lord of a certain area of Scotland, you would have a family piper and quite often they were family themselves - the job was inherited from father to son. That’s where most Americans would have heard them originally. The ones we hear most are the Scottish ones, and we would have heard them from the Scottish regiments of the British army. So why do we associate them with Scotland and not the other places they were developed? They didn’t originate in any one place? Was it a kind of convergent evolution, with everyone having the same idea separately? In the UK, we have Northumbrian pipes, and in Ireland, we have uilleann pipes. The second drone was added in the year 1500 the third drone, the modern bagpipes that we know today, appeared in approximately 1800. They initially just had one drone, so you’d have a bag full of air that you blow up, and you then squeeze the air into what originally would have been two pipes: one was a drone and the other one was the one with holes in it that you play the tunes on. You can’t really count how far back it goes because it just goes back too far. They go back thousands of years and all over the world. What are the historical origins of the bagpipe? You’ve got to be very careful what you do. A bagpipe was originally developed as a solo instrument. The notes on a bagpipe are different from the notes on all instruments. If you’re playing the bagpipes with an orchestra, it’s extremely difficult to keep the two things in tune. You can put trills and grace notes between the big notes you’re trying to play as the tune. So yes, they can get pretty annoying because of the sameness of the experience. All you can do is play more slowly or more quickly or lengthen the notes you’re playing or shorten them. ![]() And you can’t change the timbre, the flavor of the sound. There’s no dynamics: you can’t play loud and then quiet. The bagpipes are a very limited instrument in many ways. Is there a reason why bagpipe music can be so grating for some people? That said, bagpipe music can be quite irritating to the ear. And all these things give you a continuous sound, which is very moving if you’re hearing slow music. Because it’s a bagpipe, you can’t have breaks between the notes. You get a really full effect like a small organ. Bagpipes have drones: they have three pipes on them, which just send out one long continuous note underneath the actual tune. But instruments that have reeds in them, like bagpipes, can be played louder than that. You couldn’t fill a large church with a flute, because flutes have a limit on how loud they can be played. Wind instruments, like saxophones, clarinets, and bagpipes, make a lot of noise. If you’ve got a solo bagpipe player, it’s a very loud noise. Is there some historical reason why we have bagpipes playing sad music? Yeah, but you don’t hear slow sax music playing at funerals very often. But if you had a solo sax player playing the same thing, it would sound equally sad. So at funerals, you always play very slow music generally, and particularly with the bagpipes. Even if you play music in a minor key quite quickly, it’ll sound fairly happy, which is what a lot of Spanish music does. So if you play any instrument slowly, the music will come across as being fairly sad. The biggest flag to whether a piece of music makes you sad or happy is the speed it’s played at. Well, all instruments make people emotional. (You’re less likely to have gotten weepy over Better Call Saul’s bagpipe moment last week if you did, we’re not judging.) But why do bagpipes make us sad? And how did they become such an iconic instrument for Scotland? We turned to musicologist John Powell, author of the upcoming book Why You Love Music: From Mozart to Metallica - The Emotional Power of Beautiful Sounds for answers. Outlander is about to return for a time-tossed second season of intrigue, and although there’s likely to be less bagpipe in Bear McCreary’s score ( this season being largely set in France, not Scotland), we can count on hearing at least some bagpipe moments that will get us teary-eyed. But as anyone who watches Outlander or who’s been to a police officer’s funeral can tell you, it also has the capacity to emotionally annihilate you like few other musical devices can. On the one hand, it’s regarded as a deeply annoying instrument - we complain about its blaring, unchanging volume and grating sound.
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