Roddy MacLeod’s Piobaireachd Site Goes Live

This is fantastic news for us all. Check it out.

clipped from www.pipesdrums.com Roddy MacLeod’s piobaireachd website, Roddy MacLeod Piobaireachd, has gone live after four months of planning and preparation. The site complements his Roddy MacLeod MBE Piobaireachd Volume 1 CD unveiled last August during the Piping Live festival in Glasgow.

Piobaireachd Society Lauches New Website

The following text from the new Piobaireachd Society web site is a well written summation of Piobaireachd, and it’s an example of the content of their fantastic new site. Take a look. You’ll love it and learn something in the process. I did. Top marks to the Piobaireachd Society!

clipped from www.piobaireachd.co.uk When the Highlands and Islands of Scotland adopted the bagpipe, perhaps some seven or eight hundred years ago, they began to develop the instrument and its music to suit their needs and tastes. What emerged was the instrument we know today and a form of music, piobaireachd, which is unique to the instrument. It is a very stylized form of music. There is freedom in the theme or ground of the piobaireachd to express joy, sadness, or sometimes in the gathering, a peremptory warning or call to arms. Thereafter the theme is repeated and underlined in a series of variations, which usually progress to the crunluath variation where the piper’s fingers give a dazzling technical display of embellishment or gracenotes.

Piobaireachd of the Week: Silver Medal: The Glen is Mine

This piobaireachd was composed by Iain Dubh MacCrimmon, hereditary piper to the Chiefs of Macleod until about 1795. According to tradition, the piobaireachd was composed when the piper was passing through Glen Shiel in Ross-shire with the Earl of Seaforth, Chief of the Mackenzies. The words associated with the tune are ‘S leam fhein an gleann, s’leam fhein na th’ ann (The Glen is mine and all that is in it). Iain Dubh MacCrimmon was the son of Malcolm MacCrimmon, and succeeded his father as hereditary piper to MacLeod of MacLeod.