Noting the tradition

In 2011 The National Piping Centre received support from the Heritage Lottery Fund to undertake an oral history project called Noting the Tradition. The two-year project involved volunteers conducting oral history interviews with people involved in piping at all levels and all over Scotland in the past 50 years.

At the time, The National Piping Centre’s then Director of Piping, Roddy MacLeod, wrote in Piping Today: “This project has been three years in planning and we have called on the expertise of past and present employees, Board members and have taken advice from a number of recognised academics in the process”.

An important part of the project was to provide volunteer interviewers with the skills to create meaningful historical records. Prior to the project’s launch, in October 2011, James Beaton, the project’s manager, wrote: “We see the project as an exciting opportunity for volunteers, whether or not students, pipers, people retired from active work or piping, or indeed members of the community at large to become involved in the project, learn new skills in collecting oral history and working with the process of recording and making interviews available.”

Importantly, those to be interviewed were drawn from across a wide range of experience, not simply the ‘elite’ performance class. The resulting archive, in which each interview resource comprises both an audio recording and a transcript, is rich with unique insight and knowledge. This makes Noting the Tradition a vitally important resource for scholars and students, as well as those with a keen interest in the bagpipe and culture surrounding it.