The Highland Bagpipe: Its History, Literature, And Music, With Some Account of The Traditions, Superstitions, And Anecdotes Relating To The Instrument And Its Tunes
9781465677877
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“Wi’ a Hundred Pipers an’ a’ an’ a’” is a song that catches on with Highland people as well now as in the days when the piper was a power in the land. There is a never ending charm about the pipes, and there is a never ending swing about the song of the hundred pipers, that stirs the blood of the true-born Celt, and makes him applaud vigorously in rhythm with the swing of the chorus. But it is because the song harks back to the time when one good piper was a man to be revered, and a hundred in one place a gathering to be dreaded—if they were all there of one accord—that it continues to hold its own. It expresses something of the grandeur that was attached to the national music, when the clan piper was second only to the chief in importance, and the pibroch as much a part of the clan life as the fiery cross, so it is accepted as the one outstanding bit of song that helps to keep alive the traditional glory of the Great Highland Bagpipe. Not that there is any immediate danger of that glory fading. It is but changing in character. Scotland has become cosmopolitan, and the fastnesses of the Highlands are no longer the retreats of wild cateran clans, whose peculiar habits and primitive ideas of social life helped to bind them together with ties of family strength, and at the same time to keep them unspotted from the Lowland and outside world that knew not the Gaelic and the tartan and the pipes. The Piob Mohr is not now an agency to be reckoned with by any one who wishes to explore the hills and glens, neither are there any little wars in Lorn or elsewhere, in which it can have an opportunity of leading Mac against Mac, or clan against clan. As a Highland war spirit, its glory has departed, and he would be a bold man who would say he was sorry for it. True, the Highland regiments who fight Britain’s battles abroad still wear the tartan and march to the same old strains, but they are not now Highland clans. They are British battalions, whose empire, instead of being bounded by the horizon of a Scottish glen, is worldwide, and they march and wheel, and charge the enemy and storm the heights in strict accordance with the orders of a general who has his orders from Westminster. The only gathering of the clans we have nowadays are the gatherings in the halls of our big cities, where a thousand or two of people bearing a common name meet under the presidency of the next-of-kin of the chief of olden times, and drink, not mountain dew, but tea, and have Highland or Jacobite songs sung to them by people whose profession is singing, and applaud dancers and pipers who dance and pipe because it pays them to do so. This is very far removed from the time when the Piob Mohr was in the zenith of its power, though when one gets enthused with the atmosphere of such a meeting, and forgets the slushy streets outside, and the telegraph and the railway, and other nineteenth century things that have made the Highlands impossible, the song of the hundred pipers is quite sufficient to make the blood course quicker, and to translate one for a moment to other scenes and other times. But it is only for a moment. The prosaic present comes back with a reality that will not be denied, and one remembers with a sigh that the song is but a sentiment, and that never more will the gathering cries of the clans re-echo through the glens, the fiery cross pass from hand to hand, or the peal of the pibroch ring from clachan to clachan in a wild cry to arms.
