Flailing the Water

Thursday, June 26, 2003

To understand bagpipers and their bands, it should be fairly clear that one needs to understand how a bagpipe works.

Basically, a set of bagpipes is really an air reservoir (the bag), a pipe to blow into to fill the reservoir (the blowpipe) and a tube with a reed in it (the chanter) connected to the air reservoir. The drill is (1) blow into the bag, (2) put sufficient pressure on the bag to (3) set the reed vibrating in the chanter.

This is probably how the pipes originated. Tubes with reeds in them are very old; add a bag and the player doesn't have to take as many breaths and, therefore, should be able to play longer.

The sound of the pipes comes primarily from the reed (more on reeds later); they are the focus of most of the obsessive opinions and actions in piping.

Finally, the modern bagpipe has three drones (medieval bagpipes had one drone) the tuning of which is balanced to the chanter. Drones do what you expect: drone.

Everything else on the pipes is decoration.
6:01:46 PM

I want to write about bagpiping and bagpipe bands. It is not that these have not been written about before though most of the articles I've read seem copied from the same book. Few pipers write about piping and pipe bands and when they do their writing appears in places that other pipers will read.

My audience -- if I had one -- would be the general reader who stumbled across this site and for inexplicable reasons wanted to read about piping. Indeed, there is much that is inexplicable about piping even to pipers.

For example, I have piped at funerals for police or firemen and have watched rank after rank of steely-eyed men, tear up fully when the pipes start playing. Why? It is a well-known response from the general public that when hearing the pipes the hair on the back of their necks rises. Why?

I have no answers for these questions; I've had the same responses. What I do have are observations about all aspects of piping gleaned from 20+ years of playing the bagpipes. If you find this the slightest bit interesting, stay tuned (old bagpipe joke!).
9:49:24 AM