Tour Scotland Pibroch

A bagpiper competing today in the Pibroch competition at the Blairgowrie and Rattray Highland Games, Perthshire, Scotland.

Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping 1745-1945. Pulling together what is known of eighteenth-century West Highland piping and pipers, Gibson presents a new interpretation of the decline of Gaelic piping and a new view of Gaelic society prior to the Highland diaspora. Refuting widely accepted opinions that after Culloden pipes and pipers were effectively banned in Scotland by the Disarming Act of 1746, Gibson reveals that traditional dance bagpiping continued to at least the mid-nineteenth century. He argues that the dramatic depopulation of the Highlands in the nineteenth century was one of the main reasons for the decline of piping. Following the path of Scottish emigrants, Gibson traces the history of bagpiping in the New World and uncovers examples of late eighteenth-century traditional bagpiping and dance in Gaelic Cape Breton, arguing that these anachronistic cultural forms provide a vital link to the vanished folk music and culture of the Scottish Highlanders. Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping 1745-1945.

Old and New World Highland Bagpiping. Old and New World Highland Bagpiping is a stimulating and controversial book which also provides a comprehensive biographical and genealogical account of pipers and piping in both Highland Scotland and Gaelic Cape Breton. The result of over thirty years oral fieldwork among the last of the Gaels in Cape Breton, as well as an exhaustive synthesis of Scottish archival sources, this book shows that traditional community bagpiping in the Old and New World Gaidhealtachdan was, and for a long time remained, the same. John Gibson explores the distortions introduced by the tendency to interpret the written record from the perspective of modern, post-eighteenth-century bagpiping. Old and New World Highland Bagpiping.