Brìghde Chaimbeul frees her instrument from the confines of kitsch.
The 27-year-old Scottish musician Brìghde Chaimbeul is considered one of the most skillful and interesting bagpipe players in the world. 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,” Elena Saavedra Buckley writes.
The Scottish smallpipe, which has roots that go at least as far back as the 15th century, was nearly lost to history. “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.” But, over the years, Scottish musicians 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. Chaimbeul, lauded as a “musical genius” by her peers, is part of this lineage of bagpipe players who are luring tradition into the present. “It all stems from her tacit understanding of the tradition. It’s a kind of focus on the depth in our music, in which the layers of virtuosity are stripped away,” one of her collaborators said.
Read the full story bElena Saavedra Buckley: The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde | The New Yorker
