At its heart, the book is a familiar story: an immigrant group leaves the old country and preserves conservative cultural practices that flourish in isolation in the countryside of the new world; urbanization and homogenization damage those practices; renewed contact with the homeland further marginalizes those traditions, which locals come to see as less authentic because of cultural prestige from the old country; and eventually these older forms are replaced by newer ones from the homeland.
The dynamics in this volume will come as no surprise, but Barry Shears’s careful work documents the sheer scale of the older Gaelic piping tradition in Nova Scotia and how it differed from later Scottish forms. His story starts during the Clearances, which drove Highlanders from their farms to make room for sheep. Prior to the Jacobite Rebellions (1688–1746), the clan system held the region together in a network of mutually recognized bonds between classes. One of the symbols of the system was the hereditary position of piper for clan leaders. During the Clearances, many pipers—including leading professional figures who had served clan leaders and even run their own piping schools—emigrated to Nova Scotia, where they continued their musical activities as community musicians, usually alongside other vocations. They played music for dances and other social gatherings, where Highland music and dance flourished.
Shears reports on this vibrant oral musical culture. Few pipers could read music, but instead learned tunes from older players. From the examples he provides, it seems that a typical skilled piper might have known between 600 and 1200 tunes. These pipers—who often handed their skills down through families—brought and maintained heterogeneous regional playing styles with them that subsequently disappeared in Scotland. They repaired or made instruments to suit local needs, adapting them to available materials and tools. For example, it was apparently common to make chanter reeds from birch bark rather than cane, and at least one maker reamed chanter pipes with a war trophy French bayonette.
Through the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this piping tradition thrived with relatively little interaction with piping in Scotland. It was during this time that “tartanization”—the romanticization of a largely invented Highland culture in the Victorian-era United Kingdom—took place. As part of this process, piping in Scotland was standardized and moved from its community roots to an art music that often bears only a tenuous relationship to the dances and songs it arose in. In Scotland the image of the bekilted large-scale military pipe band took hold and regional playing styles were suppressed. No longer were pipers playing dance music for local communities, but instead they served Queen and country in wars of Empire and represented the martial spirit of Highland masculinity. To the extent that Nova Scotia pipers did interact with those in Scotland, they saw Scottish piping as missing “the Gaelic” in its character, and enough older players remained in Scotland to recognize that the New World tradition was authentic and, in some ways, perhaps even superior.
Starting in the early-twentieth century, however, Gaelic culture in Nova Scotia was in decline, and was in full retreat between 1930 and the 1960s. Urbanization, standardized education, and economic opportunities all worked against Gaelic language and culture. Increased contact with “authorities” from Scotland—who no longer saw anything of value in the local piping and who came over to teach the New World Gaels about the “proper” form of their own culture—further eroded the older music and dance forms. Part of this was deliberate policy: Nova Scotia had become a tourist magnet based on the image of rugged Highlanders who conformed to modern stereotypes, and anything that could emphasize what tourists expected to see was an economic advantage. While Cape Breton fiddling, which faced a similar decline, was revived before it died out, the cultural hegemony of imported Scottish pipers and playing styles ensured that local piping traditions dwindled with little interest or record.
Shears’s contribution in this environment is an impressive effort to document information about individual pipers and their contributions before memories and records fade. The book is full of short biographical sketches of known pipers that help personalize the history he tells. Unfortunately, we have little direct knowledge of the specific playing styles and repertoire of the Nova Scotia pipers. An accompanying CD of historical recordings, many of them amateur recordings of poor quality, gives some idea of what the differences in playing styles, but we really have far too little from a tradition that disappeared long after folklorists were active. The fact that nobody took interest in Nova Scotia piping until it was too late shows just how in thrall even folklorists can be to what they perceive as normative culture: no one was interested in what they saw as “backwards” and “unsophisticated” piping.
Although Shears’s book is primarily of interest to scholars interested in bagpiping, the story he tells adds to the rich body of literature on diaspora traditions, traditionalization, and cultural and power dynamics. As such, it is worth consideration beyond the narrow window of ethnomusicological studies about bagpipes. It is also a useful antidote to romantic claptrap about “ancient” Scottish traditions: by showing what was lost and how the supposedly ancient traditions of Scotland differ from what we know about those of Nova Scotia, he adds to the richness of what can be recovered about pre-Victorian Scottish culture.
--------
[Review length: 992 words • Review posted on October 4, 2016]