Elena Saavedra Buckley at the New Yorker:
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.
more here.
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