For the PT Kitty Bagpipe Quartet, a story about your bagpipes.....
Edinburgh Castle is an iconic and essential part of many people's New Year, as a backdrop to the famous Princes Street party, and is famous also as the setting for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo every August. Any traditional Scottish celebration would not seem authentic without Scottish bagpipes.
The bagpipe, it must be said, is an instrument that provokes mixed reactions; film director Alfred Hitchcock, for example, proposed that the inventor of the instrument was inspired by seeing a noisy, indignant pig being carried under a man's arm. Unfortunately, the manmade object never equalled the purity of sound achieved by the pig.
Most of us assume that the bagpipe is an essentially Scottish instrument, but its long history reveals that there are similar instruments in about 30 countries worldwide. The Romans may have been the first people to introduce the pipes to the Highlands; Emperor Nero, though famous for "fiddling whilst Rome burned", performed on the bagpipes to encourage his troops before battle.
Love them or hate them, you certainly cannot ignore the stirring sound of the bagpipes!
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