The Pikeman's March & The Battle of Waterloo (bagpipes tutorial)

[@johng.sprague4524]

The Pikeman, or the Pikeman's March or the Halting March, is an old tune and not a bagpipe tune from around 1798. Pikeman, published in, among others, Burt Mitchell’s Irish Airs and Quicksteps - 68 Traditional Irish Warpipe Tunes, and Terry Tully’s Collection of Traditional & Contemporary Irish Music - Book 3, consists of an eight-bar first part which is repeated, for a total of sixteen measures, and a twelve-bar second part with no repeat. The City of Washington pipe band, in an effort to fill a recording, cut out the repeat of the first part and measures 5-8 of the second part so it would fit the structure of the massed bands drum beatings and give them an easy time filler. I suppose other bands took that as license to do the same and truncate the tune. A common 20th century convention for pipe music is for tunes which are in 4/4 time to have 8 bar parts without repeats as you played it. There are other, older settings which have quite a bit of charm which is left unrealized by truncating the tune.

[@JennaBagpipes]

Interesting! Thanks for sharing. If you have any links to versions without the truncation, I'd love to hear what it sounds like

[@JennaBagpipes]

@@johng.sprague4524 You can email me at [e-mail] Thanks!

[@d.b.gillespie6425]

Jenna this is great!

[@MarKirGab]

Thank you Jenna for guiding me thru the Pikeman's March.

[@johng.sprague4524]

Small world. Ending music is Pacolet, composed by Don Bradford and arranged/recorded by Jenna Dennison Don Bradford met his wife Alicia through piping. She went to Scotland to study art and was playing with all the grade one bands over there at the time. I taught her to play.