Thursday Piobaireachd: MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart

This week we’ll have to settle for a Thursday Piobaireachd instead of Wednesday. Sorry about that.

Again I didn’t have any tunes submitted, so I went crawling the interwebs looking for a good tune. This one came up: visual piobaireachd. Barnaby Brown is rather an expert in many aspects of piobaireachd, and in this video he performs a visual canntaireachd that was developed in the 1970s.

Canntaireachd is an oral teaching tradition that was used to teach piobaireachd before it was ever written down. Each note and embellishment have a specific sound, and by singing them one is able to convey the technical details of the tune (what would be written on the page) as well as the expression and presentation.

In this video, Barnaby Brown adds a visual aspect to the canntaireachd as he sings and signs the ground of Maol Donn, also known as MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart or The Widow’s Grief.

If you’d like to submit a recording to be featured on Piobaireachd Wednesday, please contact me!