GREY’S NOTES
by Michael Grey.
December 26th • 2025.
Seumas MacNeill was something else: he was a massively impactful person of the last half of the 20th century. He had a hand in starting the College of Piping, The Piping Times – a monthly magazine that was to become the greatest repository of piping history ever. With colleague, Tommy Pearston, they created what surely must still be the biggest selling tutor book in history, “The Green Book”, the book that helped guide my own formative piping times. Seumas pioneered summer schools in North America, for a long time hosted a BBC radio show and was a regular presenter of piping programming on Scottish television. He was a witty feller, intelligent, erudite and armed with a tongue that could mark even the thickest of skins. He had an opinion on pretty much any subject, I’d guess. He was also a great story-teller. He was like great art: you loved him or you didn’t. I liked him – occasional tongue-lashing notwithstanding.
Seumas’ potted bio is old news for some of you and will be eye-blinking news for many others. It bears repeating but repeating should not be required. The collective memory of the piping (and drumming) world is short, it seems to me. I’ve encountered pipers who can play a crisply cracking Cameronian Rant but there’s hardly a vague awareness of that titan of greatness, Willie Ross. We’ve lost so many veritable legends over the last five years, in particular. For instance, how many in our top line bands or solos know of Iain Morrison’s singular impact on competitive light music interpretation? Should we poll every piper in, say, the world’s grade one and two bands, and asked the question, “who composed The Little Cascade?”, how many would answer correctly, if at all? I suppose it should be enough to just blithely love and play the tune, in this case, among the greatest pieces of pipe music ever made, without knowing who made the thing. And yet, in my heart of hearts, I know it is not enough. Knowing the composer of the tune and an echo of the story that saw the tune created casts an added glow.
As the nights are long and the fire is warm and mercifully long-lasting I find myself thinking of pipers now gone and, pipe music, too. The story-tellers, their stories. Our stories. Do stories matter in piping?
As is so often the case its the trivial things that trigger bigger thoughts. Like GS McLennan and his reputed inspiration for his masterwork – the rhythmical pattern of drops of water from a tap sounding as they hit a porcelain sink – my thinking this day springs from a pipe band practice. And I acknowledge the overreach in the attempt to compare a blog post connected to stories to the composition of The Little Cascade.
At one of the recent practices of a local band I regularly teach, work on their new march, strathspey and reel set was underway. The reel, Lexie MacAskill was under the microscope and I thought I would add some colour to the tune. I don’t consider myself a great – or, even, good, storyteller, but I do have a few stories. When we teach piping we are all missionaries, spreading the word. Gifted storyteller or not, its on us to share what we know. And here I give my bias away completely to the subject at hand.
I knew the composer of Lexie MacAskill a little. Dr John MacAskill was a great player – and – it should be said – a stand-out product of Seumas MacNeill’s teaching and the College of Piping’s programs. He was, we know, an excellent composer of tunes. He named his four-parted evergreen reel, Lexie MacAskill, for his mother. While he worked a successful medical practice in the Fort William area he was also an avid footballer, among many other things football he was an honorary medical officer for the Scottish Football Association for 13 years. I first met him at the Northern Meeting in 1980s. He judged the Gold Medal contest where I competed. But I did talk to him that year at The Cumming’s Hotel at Neil Angus MacDonald’s famous apres-contest ceilidh. I would meet him again in 1997, funnily enough, he again with his apparent tipple of choice, brandy and milk, at The Lorne Hotel in Glasgow. He was in town for some football work and I had landed at the Lorne for some free sarnies at the launch party for Anne Lorne Gillies’ latest recording. I wish I knew him better. He boomed good energy.
And so this – admittedly abbreviated – “story” is what I told the pipers at the chanter practice table. One piper said, “well, there’s 10 minutes we’ll never get back”. I could feel my face redden in embarrassment. The comment was made in fun, I know. But like so much humour, there is an element of truth often involved in the saying (cue the humour). The piper said to me later that as she didn’t know the person, the background I passed along fell flat. And, so, to my reflection, do stories matter? Stories about our tunes? About those who play the pipes?
Stories damned well do matter. They don’t matter to everyone. But they matter and are integral to music of the bagpipe and its survival. As one of my friends said to me the other evening while he sat chatting from the sitting room of a croft on Barra, “in piping, stories are the lifeblood and oxygen to the tunes”.
As I know I have said before, our tune tilting is so often noun-based: person, place or thing.
Even simple titles like, say, Inveran, Susan MacLeod, Farewell to Nigg, Donald MacLean’s Farewell to Oban and Donald, Willie and His Dog give us insight into the origin and inspiration of a tune, if not its lineage: I suggest that without ever having heard a composer of a pipe tune – especially a person who may have made many pieces – a sense of their technical and musical bias can be gleaned from cold scores.
In the titling of ceol mor, especially, think of the importance of titling and any associated story – however apocryphal: lament, salute, march or gathering, all these simple words are directives, guides to interpretation for any piper looking to bring to life that which was in the ear of the composer.
I wonder what Donald Mor MacCrimmon’s composition, A Flame of Wrath for Squinting Patrick, might sound like had it been associated with a story something like, “Patrick’s Kintail Lullaby” – instead of the murderously vengeful tale that comes to us through oral and various written sources. Maybe an interesting exercise for aficionados: take an existing tune, flip the title on its head, and interpret accordingly. Again, the titling and any associated storey associated with a tune goes a long way to help guide musical intent, interpretation.
On this Boxing Day I have – possibly crabbily – conflated the importance of knowing the stories of pipe tune with awareness of pipers who came before us. Both matter.
Knowing a little of both tunes and pipers gives the Great Highland Bagpipe its emotional depth, its cultural authority, and its humanity.
Without them, the music still exists – but with them, it sings.
I raise my snifter of Courvoisier and milk to you now and wish you a Happy New Year when it comes your way.