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Hugh Cheape. Bagpipes: A National Collection of a National Instrument. Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2008. v, 54 pp.: 33 color illus., 24 black-and-white illus., CD-ROM. ISBN: 978-1-905267-16-3. £15.99 (paper).
The piping collection of the National Museums Scotland (NMS), Edin - burgh, was largely assembled within three recent decades. From about twenty items in 1872, the collection by 2007 grew to more than 2,100 items, "the largest and most significant national and international collection of such material in the public domain" (pp. 19-20). Included are bagpipes, fragments, accessories, instrument-making tools, documents, sheet music, and sound recordings. Portions are also displayed in the National Piping Centre, Glasgow, and the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments. The collection is by no means limited in scope to Scotland or the United Kingdom. The CDROM describes a substantial bequest of instruments and documents from Jean Jenkins (1922-1990), an ethnomusicologist specializing in Islamic music.
The CD-ROM could easily stand on its own. It includes approximately ninety screens of prose and illustrations, forming a series of independent narratives. These are sometimes parallel to chapters of the book, but at other times introduce a new level of emphasis on selected topics. Beyond this, the disc includes a searchable catalog of more than two thousand records of the piping collection of the NMS as of 2007, as well as a discographical essay. The author, Hugh Cheape, was until recently head of the Scottish Material Culture Research Centre of NMS. His subtext is that surviving instruments-artifacts of the material culture of music-have a story to tell, and that the story may be at odds with received notions.
The subtitle of the book is doubly steeped in irony. Contrary to the pronouncements of many commentators, the Highland bagpipe- Scotland's "national" instrument-evolved relatively recently and in the shops of Lowland makers, the author argues. And despite the national celebration of this instrument, there was...