Not everyone in the world loves bagpipe music, but the making of bagpipes is interesting. Here’s an excellent video of one shop in Edinburgh (the capital of Scotland) that is still making bagpipes by hand. The craft, the art, of bagpipe making is amazing. [Edinburgh is pronounced Ed-in-burr-ah or more commonly Ed-in-brah.]
If you’d like to hear a bagpipe and watch one being played professionally, then the video below is excellent for a little taste of that. The piper in the video below is Brian McKenzie. He is a friend of mine. He was born and raised in Scotland, and moved to the USA not long ago. I owned the 1939-built 40-foot wooden power boat, Pied Piper, built in Ohio, USA, built by a Scotsman (Scott Matthews). When that boat turned 75 years old, I asked Brian (the bagpiper) if he would come to the boat, bring his pipes and play for the boat, the Pied Piper. He didna hesitate! (Didna means didn’t in Scotland.)
Several other friends joined me at the boat for the celebration too, but it was a special connection for this Scotsman, Brian, to be able to play for the boat, the Pied Piper. Ah, one of these days, I’ll have to share a full blog post about that day when we celebrated that boat. For now, enjoy Brian’s playing in the video below at a more recent event. He plays a tune during the second half of the video below (at about time stamp 1:50) called “Wi’ a Hundred Pipers and A’ and A'” (with a hundred pipers and all and all) … a tune I learned on the piano when I was just 9 or 10 years old and had no idea I would ever meet Brian or listen to him play this tune. Contact Brian HERE, if you might enjoy a bit of live Scottish bagpipe music by Brian at your own event. Before you start the video below, remember that bagpipes are LOUD … so you might want to turn your sound down just a wee bit. 🙂
That was great! 🙂 Ok, so maybe not everyone loves bagpipe music, but I do! A good percentage of my ancestry is Scottish.
The next video (below) takes us away from solo bagpipe music and into traditional Scottish music. Traditional music groups often have a bagpiper or two in them … bagpipes are such an integral part of Scottish music. But traditional Scottish music is played on many different instruments, and sung by many different people, of all ages.
One last video below. Kids (or young adults) in Scotland really do love their Scottish music, whether it’s old-time and long-ago written music or brand newly written traditional music. The young woman in the video below wrote a song for her mother and then played it on her violin while standing on the beach, on the Isle of Skye, where they live.
What blew me away with this last video (below) is that I simply entered into an online search the name of the first young woman from the video above to see if she had other videos, but she didn’t. What came up instead was this next young woman’s video that she had posted on her Facebook page. I thought, “yeah, right, ok, so maybe not so good.” But then I watched and listened.
Not only is she good. But she is good especially considering she lives with her mom in the town of Elgol, out on the very end of one of the peninsulas on the Isle of Skye, the end of the road, a town with a population of 173 so there aren’t likely very many professional violin instructors nearby. And yet, if you take even a short look at her Facebook page, she’s on a right good track to becoming a professional musician.
The town of Elgol is tiny. So how do I know she lives in Elgol? I recognized it in her video that you’ll see below. I’m not kidding! That’s what blew me away … as soon as her video started playing, I knew she was on the beach at Elgol, Isle of Skye, Scotland. When you stand on the beach where she was standing in her video, but you look out over the water like the person taking that video was doing, there is a concrete abutment/dock to the left (it doesn’t show in her video), then there’s a small waterway outlet that empties into the saltwater behind her (this does show in her video). Further to the right, there are two small homes/cottages near the beach (they don’t show in her video, but a tiny bit of the grass does show that’s in front of one of the homes), then the “town” (tiny! town) is further off to the right of the video. What you do see in the video is a massive very square rock outcrop in the near distance (towards the right side of the video, just past the grass), then a bay of water further out, and then the mountains of Skye. I was there. I stood right where this young woman is standing. I also looked it up on Google Earth, just to be sure. What are the chances of my seeing her Facebook page? and of my remembering the view from that very same spot. I stood there on that beach in Elgol only once in my life, but I stood there a long time since I was aware that a good number of my ancestors are from Scotland and could have lived right there at Elgol. I love Scotland.
[Just a note … you may have to stop the video in the link below as soon as you start it, and then turn its sound on (in the lower right corner of the video) and then re-start the video by moving the bottom “line”, or the white dot, back to the left … or just let it play.]
The name of the tune she wrote and that she plays on the violin is “Donna Ann’s Waltz” (I bet that’s her mom). Next time I’m in Scotland, I’d bet I will visit Elgol again. I’ll see if I can find this young woman and thank her. 🙂