Some are playing the alluring dance music of central France, which has an unbroken tradition and lends itself perfectly to the pipes. Others are facing the challenge of trying to explore ways of playing English music. So much has been lost and needs to be rediscovered or reinvented. Although our piping tradition is broken, there has long been a strong tradition of sophisticated instrumental variations in England. With the discovery and publication of the William Dixon manuscript of 1733, we now have proof that bagpipes were part of this tradition.
Today there is a variety of different English pipes available in a range of keys.
There are pipers who play these solo or in groups, with or without other pipers, for early music, dance bands, morris dancing even the outer reaches of techno music. After a gap of 200 years without any musical development, some pipers are looking to the past whilst others are trying to create new English music for the pipes. Two English bagpipe trios use strikingly different musical approaches. The Goodacre Brothers were formed in 1986 to play traditional and our own dance music, using various combinations of both small and great pipes. The history of the trio s instrumentation reflects the increasing variety of pipes that I have developed and our musical arrangements are essentially polyphonic.