Pipers Canntaireachd and Scottish Gaelic: Basic elements and expressive variability

Authors

  • Frans Buisman University of Amsterdam Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2218/kbbj7318

Keywords:

Scotland, Scottish, bagpipes, piping, canntaireachd, notation, orality, teaching

Abstract

Canntaireachd is an orally-devised method used by pipers to remember pibroch (pìobaireachd) compositions, the classical repertoire of the highland bagpipes, and to transmit the music to others. Canntaireachd began to be fixed in print from the early nineteenth century, but unlike tonic solfa and staff notation, the primary purpose of canntaireachd was not the recording of melody. Indeed, it was never intended as a written medium at all, but rather as a means of orally encoding a variety of stylistic features in the context of a tune, thereby providing an aural road-map for performers already familiar with the musical idiom. Based on the sounds of the language spoken by early Highland pipers – Gaelic – and thus subject to that language’s dialectal variability, canntaireachd nonetheless has its own syntax and obeys its own semantic rules. In this article, the author explores the relationship between canntaireachd and the Gaelic language, and describes how canntaireachd as an oral medium is able to distinguish, in an ad hoc manner, agogic features and other details not normally differentiated when canntaireachd is written down – highlighting, in effect, the sung method’s ‘expressive variability’.

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Published

2025-02-03

Issue

Section

Articles