The Scots Are Calling

Nobody knows exactly how long ago the bagpipe was invented. In one incarnation it was known in Tutankhamen's Egypt and Plato's Greece. Nero had a passion for it. Its unnerving drones and belligerent skirls have been known to stir men's blood, their brains and, according to Shakespeare, their bladders.* It has led men into battle and lulled them to sleep. Last week it was the star attraction, when the Regimental Band, Massed Pipers, Drummers and Dancers of Her Majesty's Scots Guards made their first visit to Manhattan on a nine-week North American tour.

At Madison Square Garden, the purple spotlights came on and in marched the Regimental Band in black bearskins, scarlet tunics and blue trousers. Then came the Massed Pipers of the ist and 2nd Battalions, swishing their royal Stuart tartan kilts and armed with dirks and skean dhu (daggers). The two groups formed at opposite ends of the arena and began the kind of show that Britons stage better than anybody else in the world.

The band marched back and forth, playing sometimes in quick march tempo, at others majestically slowly. By contrast, the pipers shook the crowd with their music's wild beauty. It was the fascinating difference between palace panoply and hillside rebel yells. The pipers played a few marches and accompanied eight regimental dancers in a slow fling and a rapid, triumphant reel. After some concert pieces (Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave, Arditi's // Bacio, etc.) indifferently done by the band, the dancers placed claymores in the form of a St. Andrew's cross on the floor for the warlike sword dance. By that time, brothers in the gallery had passed the limits of endurance and were shrieking their own war whoops. Then it was closing time, and the band went into the "Sunset Ceremony." At the end, the band stopped playing and a spotlight picked out a lone piper—high in the gallery, as if he were perched on a castle battlement—playing a lullabye called Highland Cradle Song. It was enough to dew the eyes of even the un-kilted. The only thing missing from the program was a dirge or two, for Scots are among the world's finest dirgers.