The Bagpipe Perceptions Of The National Instrument Phd Dissertation Hugh Cheape by Hugh Cheape instant download after payment.

A book-length paper by someone now a well-published authority on Scottish history and traditional culture.
Thesis: The great Highland bagpipe (GHB) - the 'national instrument' - which has become, particularly in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, an unquestionable part of the Scottish cultural inheritance, never existed as a pre-Baroque Highland phenomenon. The evidential base for its distinctive form and existence before the late 18th century is scant, and does not support an autonomous development in Scotland, continuity from a more or less remote past. It is an entirely assumed antiquity.

The GHB did not historically arise as an autonomous phenomenon. It was a general European instrument, assimilated into Gaelic society, whose strong and distinctive cultural traits gave it a particular sound (there being evidence elsewhere for a similar instrument for example in Ireland and Iberia). Material evidence for the GHB is readily and consistently misinterpreted, since it has hitherto never been considered in a scholarly way, and popular and longstanding views are based on misrepresentations of instruments now known to be inauthentic. The evidential base for the prevailing conventional 'grand narrative' account of the bagpipe in Scotland is very narrow, whereas the raw data of a national collection of instruments, and other abundant evidence, makes for a radically different account: i.e. of the bagpipe as a pan-European phenomenon. The dynamic that produced a 'national instrument' may be sought equally in Scotland's musicological role in the European Neo-Baroque. This instrument was not originally pastoral in Britain but promoted from London, then used in Scotland for performing music shared with Ireland. A reason for the persistence of the travestied account of the GHB as ancient and innately Highland is that the impact of the Baroque on the Scottish material record has never been considered.