The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde

One night this past spring, the audience members at a bagpipe concert in Red Hook, Brooklyn, could be organized into two neat categories: people who knew little to nothing about bagpipes—the majority—and people who knew so much that the backs of their jackets were festooned with regimental patches for the uniformed pipe bands of various Northeastern cities. The latter group had mostly come to the event together in a van from Connecticut, where they lived. One of the jacket-wearers, a man with a septum piercing named Benjamin, spends his free time 3-D-printing custom bagpipe drones—the cylindrical pipes that sound the instrument’s continuous, harmonically dense vibrations. When I asked him why he did this, he seemed stunned by the question. “Um, more drone?” he said.

Everyone had come to see the twenty-seven-year-old Brìghde (pronounced “Breech-huh”) Chaimbeul, considered one of the most skillful and interesting bagpipe players in the world, who was visiting from her native Scotland. Chaimbeul walked onstage in a witchy outfit, grounded by a navy tartan skirt, her raven hair up in a half bun and her dark-browed face set calmly. Shahzad Ismaily, a celebrated experimental-jazz musician, sat next to her with a chunky Moog synthesizer on his lap.

Every bagpipe performance starts with a squawking rev-up, in which the bag fills with air, the drones perk up with inhuman attention, like rabbit ears, and the sounds coalesce in tune and begin to announce themselves. Chaimbeul often stays in the droning place for long, exploratory stretches, revelling in a mass of tones before introducing melody. Her playing has little resemblance to the predictable, nasal assaults that one usually associates with bagpipe music. Most people also instinctively imagine the Great Highland pipes, the plaid-clad instrument played at funerals, composed of a bladder the size of a large house cat and a system of tubes—one for a player to fill from their lungs, three long drones spiking over the shoulder, and a chanter pipe, on which the player’s fingers manipulate the melody. Chaimbeul plays a lesser-known variant called the Scottish smallpipes: a slighter, quieter thing with a softer timbre, fuelled by bellows pumped under the right elbow rather than by the mouth, and a tight bundle of drones draped across the chest. The instrument’s roots go at least as far back as the fifteenth century, but it was nearly lost to history, salvaged solely by a grassroots revival in the nineteen-eighties. “These bagpipes had mostly been hidden away in the backs of cupboards,” the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society journal explained in 1989, “or they had found their way, as curiosities of a former age, into museums, where they would lie dead and silent in display cases.”

Chaimbeul’s performance, with Ismaily’s occasional low, rumbling synths underneath, filled the room like a liquid. Her tunes, as she calls them, seemed old in mode but had the trippy, cerebral quality of an ambient set. Occasionally, she would speak into the mike in her slow, unbothered brogue. She introduced a song called “Pìobaireachd nan Eun,” or “The Birds,” in which she sings in Scottish Gaelic. “Swans are very sacred creatures in Scottish folklore, believed to be people from Tír na nÓg, or the land of everlasting, that are under a curse,” she explained to the crowd. “I was actually thinking the other day about how the Royal Family owns all the swans in the U.K. Very interesting. . . .” She trailed off as the audience laughed. Her final piece ended with nearly fifteen minutes of drone—four notes that emerged out of themselves, rolling around inside their own linked harmonics that made the space vibrate. Everyone else, by the sounds of their applause, could have gone on with her for much longer.

Chaimbeul grew up a native Gaelic speaker on Skye, an island in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, in a family of artists. Since pivoting, as a teen-ager, from the Great Highland pipes to focus on the smallpipes, she’s won national folk competitions and released three solo albums (the latest, “Sunwise,” in June), but also made pilgrimages to places such as Bulgaria, where other pipe traditions have flourished; collaborated with the indie singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek; and played for a Dior runway show. In doing so, she has redrawn the bounds of her instrument. It might be easy to call Chaimbeul’s melting drones futuristic, but there’s something ancient about their primacy, which reaches back beyond the conventions, mostly established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that have determined what counts as tradition. People tend to say that Chaimbeul’s music collapses any sense of what is either orthodox or experimental. “The drone is the first sound,” as the composer La Monte Young wrote, in 1964. “It lasts forever and cannot have begun, but is taken up again from time to time.”

After the Red Hook show, the pipers from Connecticut waited for Chaimbeul to sign their albums before piling back into their van. When I asked her later about them—each stop on her tour had had a similar gaggle—she spoke of them affectionately. “They stand out with their badges, but I actually really appreciate the support from Highland pipers, and people who play in pipe bands,” she said. “The music that I play isn’t exactly similar to theirs.”

The Great Highland bagpipe survived a cruel Darwinian narrowing. Before the Jacobite uprisings of the seventeen-hundreds, when the Scottish clan system was still the basis of much of society, piping was so integrated into public life that town pipers were civil servants, sometimes beginning their shifts at 4 A.M. Pipes of many kinds—the Scottish smallpipes, as well as other bellows-blown instruments such as the Northumbrian smallpipes, the Irish uilleann pipes, and the border pipes—flourished alongside different instruments and step-dance traditions in the British Isles, after having spread centuries earlier in cultures across the Middle East. But communal piping became one of many casualties of the desiccation of Scottish life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the Great Highland pipes, used as instruments of war because of their volume, were targeted by the Disarming Act, they were also assimilated into the British armed forces. Meanwhile, as the Highland Clearances violently removed tenant-farmer Scots from their crofts, the more communal, indoor instruments all but disappeared. The Great Highland pipes endured within the isolation of military culture, and current traditions of advanced-piping competitions haven’t strayed far.

The smallpipes revival is credited to a small group of people, and one of them was Hamish Moore, who, for most of his life, was a large-animal veterinarian based in Inverness. He grew up playing the Highland pipes in competitions, but, as he told me, he “felt instinctively that something was missing from piping culture.” In 1981, while travelling to West Clare, Ireland, for a vet gig, he heard the uilleann pipes—bellows pipes with long drones, and with a tradition that developed separately from Highland music. “It struck me that the music was joyous,” in contrast to the solemnity of the Highland pipes, Moore said. “And it was played in bars alongside other instruments, and it had a rhythmic quality which we seemed to have lost in Scotland.” After he got home and raved to his neighbor, a piper, about the bellows-blown set, he woke up one morning to a wooden box on his dinner table. Inside was an old set of Scottish smallpipes. Only a few years earlier, the British musicologist Francis Collington had called these instruments “extreme rarities.”

Moore had the set restored by the pipe-maker Colin Ross, and then he could play them. When he strapped them on, he said, “I knew something fundamentally in my life had changed.” He happily quit his veterinary practice to start a pipe-making business, helped by the fact that his father was a wood-turner. Over the years, Moore, Ross, and others advocated for smallpipes as a cultural corrective: something that could revive a lost, jubilant character of communal Scottish music, and that could help disrupt not only the regimented Highland piping culture but the kitschy idea of Scotland forged by English imperialism. “People were emerging from this cultural cringe that had existed through the eighties—the tartanization, the shortbread, and the downfall of Scottish culture since Walter Scott invented the noble savage,” Aidan O’Rourke, a fiddler from the coastal town of Oban, and a longtime collaborator of Chaimbeul’s, said. “There was a new momentum in presenting Scottish traditional music in more interesting ways.”

Moore eventually expanded his business with his son, Fin; soon, they were some of the world’s only smallpipe authorities. Chaimbeul, meanwhile, was trying to master the Highland pipes, after being given a set by her neighbor. “I remember the first time I took them home, and it was like wrestling with an octopus,” she told me. “I was huffing and puffing and couldn’t get any sound out, but then it turned out the reeds had fallen into the bag anyway. You don’t really know, when you start, what’s meant to happen.” She improved quickly and, like so many other young pipers in the country, entered competitions. She often won them. When she met the Moores at a concert, Hamish gave Chaimbeul her first smallpipes, sniffing out a more expansive desire in her playing. His son began giving her lessons. Moore remains the same evangelist that he was in the eighties—his latest plan to entice pipers to the older, Gaelic roots of their instrument is a competition with a nearly four-thousand-dollar barrel of whiskey as the prize—but Chaimbeul didn’t need much convincing. “She’s a musical genius,” he said plainly. “And she doesn’t say much.”

Chaimbeul focussed more of her music on the new instrument as she squirmed against the competition circuit. “When I was sixteen or seventeen, and getting into the adult category, I started trying to play different repertoire,” she said. “I’d get instantly shut down, or at least comments like ‘Oh, you might get a prize if you play better tunes.’ ” As she experimented with the new instrument, carried by its revival spirit, she began finding the seeds of her own compositions in archives. At the School of Scottish Studies, in Edinburgh, she would listen to old recordings of Gaelic singing in search of “less predictable” melodies—ones that could work with drones. She travelled, too, to the small mountain village of Shiroka Laka, Bulgaria, to learn regional tunes by ear. There she made contact with a teacher she’d heard about, who spoke no English, by taking a bus into town in the snow and using the only Bulgarian word she knew, gaida: bagpipe.

At seventeen, Chaimbeul won the prestigious BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award. At twenty, she released her first album, “The Reeling.” Recorded in a church in a small town in the Highlands, it features melodic reels and jigs and displays Chaimbeul’s unusual affinity for maximizing chant-like flow; it was also the album that introduced Polachek to Chaimbeul, after the singer Shazamed an alternative-folk song she heard wafting out of a convertible in London. “From the first few seconds of hearing it, I thought, Oh, God. I struck gold here,” Polachek told me. “It was the most modern compositional approach I’d seen in a really long time with folk music.” Soon afterward, she asked Chaimbeul to record a solo for her single “Blood and Butter.”