Our knowledge of piobaireachd has come to us in two separate ways. The first through a few dedicated teachers who taught succeeding generations without any written form of the music, giving us a very good idea of how piobaireachd was played over 200 years ago. The second by a number of manuscripts in canntaireachd and staff notation containing over 300 tunes. The tunes that were passed to us "orally", by each pupil memorising them in turn from his teacher, are to be found in these manuscripts showing us how these early scribes wrote down what was played. This relationship can then be used to allow us, with some confidence, to play the other tunes in the manuscripts that may not have been played or heard for over a hundred years.

 I have been re-reading the descriptions of piobaireachd or ceol mor by different well known authorities over the ages and find none of them satisfactory. What is not put into words is what most piobaireachd players come to do instinctively and that, very simply, is to have pauses between phrases. All the good teachers I have had experience of directly or indirectly emphasise this characteristic most strongly. One cannot separate the music from the instrument and it is indeed the continuous nature of the sound that makes such pauses, not just acceptable, but necessary to give full expression to the music. One of these authorities makes positive reference to this presence of pauses when he comes to discuss the writing of the music.

 One can understand classically trained musicians and their cousins, the musicologists, striving to capture and classify piobaireachd within their rules. An early one of these was Joseph MacDonald (Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe) who appears to have completely missed this vital characteristic referred to above. It was not as if he was unaware of it since he upbraids "one of the Compleatist Masters of this instrument having a considerable excrescence of the time in one of his Adagios". The piper in question, he goes on to say, was not convinced of the mistake in not keeping the bars "or fingers" of equal length as he was doing what he had been taught by example, that is by "ear and fingers" from his forefathers.

　However keen his perception for cuttings and gracenotes and his undoubted ability as a musician, Joseph did not appear to be a piobaireachd player. The good thing about this story is that the piper was not to be moved from his pause or slow down phrase and that Joseph MacDonald gave such a good account of it. It would have been even better if he had noted the tune in question.


　Archibald Campbell of Kilberry certainly was a piobaireachd player and had made a very deep study of the subject, but his description of piobaireachd is fairly simple. A slow theme, or groundwork with variations - distinctly artificial with the groundwork being manipulated to admit embellishments or groups of gracenotes of a conventionally stereotyped character. He makes no mention of pauses.

 Seumas MacNeill was another experienced player and we know he was a stickler for observing pauses between phrases both when teaching and playing. He repeats Kilberry's definition, but obviously had the pauses and phrases very much in his mind in his discussion on representing the music in staff notation. One of his curious, partly defeatist conclusions, was that it may well be that the more incorrectly a piobaireachd is written the better for piobaireachd, because the learner is then forced to seek assistance from a piper who has been taught in the traditional manner. He does however draw attention to Roderick Ross's Binneas is Boreraig in which bar lines are dispensed with to allow the music to be written with pauses or "slow downs" at the end of phrases. Anyone looking to "sight read" a tune would be strongly advised to use Binneas is Boreraig. Only Volume 1 is still in print but we plan to reprint the complete set of six volumes. In his introduction to his collection Roderick Ross does not define piobaireachd, but gives some valuable comments about the beats in gathering tunes.

　In his Tutor for Piobaireachd Seumas also dispenses with bar lines and writes the tune in phrases.

　Roderick Cannon in a well thought out and researched book, entitled The Highland Bagpipe and its Music, does not add much to Kilberry's definition except to explain cadences a little and how they sometimes may be outwith the time quota per bar. He uses an example of the ground or urlar of the piobaireachd I Gave a Kiss to the King's Hand and writes into the bars the introductory E as follows: