Jim Gilchrist: Winds of hope blow through piping as renaissance spreads across Europe
Admittedly the address is that of the Royal Scottish Pipers' Society, an amateur pipers' club which next year celebrates its 130th birthday. On this occasion, however, the premises were hosting a gathering of the rather more recently formed (1983) Lowland and Border Piper's Society, who were launching their latest and timely publishing project, The Wind in the Bellows. However, TWITB, as its engaging acronym goes, is no river bank yarn but the first comprehensive handbook for those teaching the Scottish bellows-blown bagpipes which have experienced a major revival over the past 20-30 years.
But they aren't the only bagpipes enjoying a renaissance at the moment, as I was shortly to discover. An exotic interloper arrived in the shape of the zampogna – the formidable looking Italian bagpipe, brought by a delegation from the Associazione Piper Italiani, who had been giving seminars at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow and at Edinburgh University's school of Scottish Studies, in conjunction with the National Piping Centre.
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Hide AdThis was specifically, we were told, the zampogna Molisana, an instrument particular to a cluster of villages and piping enclave in the Molise area, and it looks for all the world like a cluster of outsize pepper grinders sprouting from a large bag. It was played here by a noted exponent, Piero Ricci, in partnership with Maurizio Marino on the ciaramella, the native folk oboe. The two instruments are traditionally played together; you'll see illustrations of shepherd pipers playing in front of shrines at Christmas – not least captured by Scotland's peregrinating portraitist, David Wilkie, in the early 19th century.
Under the suspicious stare of the hirsute and be-tartaned Victorian piping legends framed on the walls, Ricci and Marino gave us a brief recital, the ciaramella adding an additional melody strand to the zampogna's twin chanters in an exuberant torrent of reed sound that at times was almost baroque. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised – Handel, travelling in the Abruzzi in the early 18th century, noted the music of shepherd pipers, which informed some pastoral passages of his Messiah. So we luxuriated in this unlooked for breeze from warmer climes. Before they headed off in search of dinner (further zampogna music would later resound from a nearby Turkish restaurant), the Italians were shown up to the inner sanctum of the RSPS Band Room where, they were told, Alberto Massi, an Italian piper who has transferred his allegiance to the Highland instrument, won the society's Archie Kenneth Quaich for pibroch some years ago.
The visitors were intrigued by a stuffed sea eagle which, we were assured by our hosts, was not the same hapless raptor that was once the emblem of the Eagle Pipers' Society, a near-legendary Edinburgh piping institution during the 1960s and 1970s, and which used to meet in the West End Hotel – whence its own Eagle trophy was mysteriously misappropriated.
However, the good news for piping aficionados is that the Eagle Pipers' Society, defunct for the past two decades, has been resurrected and is holding regular meetings in the Scots Guards' Club.
Membership is open to "anyone with an interest in the great Highland bagpipe" and those involved include such notable competition pipers as Colin MacLellan and Iain Speirs and Euan Anderson, former pipe sergeant of Lothian and Borders Police Pipe Band, all with family connections to the former society. Whether you're piping in Scotland or Italy, revival, it seems, is in the air.
For further details of the Wind in the Bellows, visit www.lbps.net. For the Eagle Pipers' Society: visit http://eaglepipers.wordpress.com. For the Italian pipers' Association (and details of the Italian Spring Piping School at Scapoli on 7-12 April), visit www.bagpipe.it