Innovative solo bagpipes in 1928! D R MacLennan & the Seaforths
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- This is a recording of what is likely among the earliest recordings of the Great Highland Bagpipe played alongside other (non-bagpipe or percussion) instruments. This 78 RPM shellac (pre-vinyl) recording from 1928 stars a luminary from one of the great piping families of the last 200 years in Donald Ross ("D R") MacLennan.
At the time of this project D R was 27 years old and had been a Pipe Major in the Seaforth Highlanders for four years. Between 1928 and 1932 the Seaforths made a series of bagpipe and military band recordings so there must have been a market - and, so, money to be made by someone.
This recording would have been ultra-acoustic, recorded off-the-floor with no multi-tracking or click tracks. That's fairly evident in listening in on this digitsed version and the, er, notable increase in tempo in the rollicking reel, "De'il Amang the Tailors".
I can easily imagine some hot sound stage with all musicians packed in doing their best to hang their parts together. In fact, by the final parts of the reel I can easily envisage the band leader capitulating; standing in the studio in a pool of sweat, arms at his side with hair resembling Christopher Lloyd's Dr Doc Brown in the Back to the Future movies.
This is a strange juxtaposition of tunes: The Highland Cradle Song, a syrupy sort of waltz composed, apparently, in 1847 by Louis Antoine Julien, a French bandleader and composer living in London, in honour of Olga, Grand Duchess of Russia and Crown Princess of Wurtemberg. Note D R's technical flair in his sounding of a High A tripling at the 16 second mark on the recording. The zero-to-sixty transition to the famous old reel is about forty beats per minute short of subtle. The tempo builds. And builds.
I'd have to think that there were no noisy dancers in the room. Surely not. The disruption to musicians and recording equipment - such as it was in those days - would be untenable. I can only assume that hoot and holler specialists were enlisted to augment the production (now there's a job title for a business card).
Still, these productions were among those that marked their part in the evolution of the music of the Great Highland Bagpipe. The pipes with orchestral instruments would have been the height of innovation - if not audacity - a hundred years ago.
Cousin Donald can play like a Macrimmon! Thank you for sharing this.
That's almost a hundred years ago.!!! What a privilege to be able to listen to people having fun.
We're a great Clan!
Just two words: HOLY MAZZILLO!
Wow..
Would love to listen to this 'cleaned up'.
Fantastic. Tempo is Bliadhna-Ur standard
Do you have the MSR side digitized? Someone uploaded an indirect recording (HATE indirect recordings!!!!!!) of the MSR side played on their Victrola but I'd like the direct version please. I'm more a fan of direct recordings of 78's rather than Victrola-based recordings with room echos, warpy vibratos, etc.
Ein Grammophon hat eine Einstellbare Geschwindigkeit und sollte ideal bei 78rpm liegen. Die Schallplatte scheint etwas zu schnell eingestellt zu sein. Es klingt zu hoch und zu schnell.
No doubt the tempo would reduce just a tad to a playable level if the pitch was lowered to that played in 1928. Can anyone supply a figure for this? But undoubtedly, the playing is superb at whatever speed!
Donald - the tempo was reduced to reflect the projected pitch of the day. It is around 459-460 Hz on low A on this digitised version of the recording.
@@dunaber Hi again Michael, I'm not up to date with what pitch variations were common in 1928, nor what they are today. But the only real way to prove the tempo actually played would be for someone to have noted down the elapsed stopwatch time from the first bar of the reel to (say) the end of the first part of it, to calculate the tempo in number of beats per minute; that would give us a better indication of the pitch actually played on the day.
I am particularly interested in Devil among the Tailors, since this was a tune I thrilled to listen to via an old 78 record I had as a learner, as recorded by the Scots Guards, I think ? date. The pitch was high compared to bands here in Australia at that time 1958. I always marvelled at the speed of the playing; impossible I thought for a group to play.
I managed to play it well and as fast as any soloists here as per my recollection, but not as fast as "that"; hence my question.
When I was about 30 (1985)(cassette tapes had just come into popularity here in the backblocks of Australia) a friend recorded his old cylinder recording of P/M Forsyth playing Jenny's Bawbee on cassette, and again I was surprised at the speed and high pitch, so wondered about the actual tempo. Were the speed and pitch real, or only apparent ?