--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- In [email protected], cardemaister <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > --- In [email protected], cardemaister <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > wrote: > > > > > > > > Pedal point represents the unmanifest?? > > > > > > Dunno about the pedal point; anybody know what kind > > > of music they were playing? <snip> > > > But the bagpipe may have originated in India as > > > early as 1500 B.C. Whether it was invented there > > > or not, it did originate somewhere in the Middle > > > East in ancient times, and it's been a common folk > > > instrument in India for millennia. > > Citations, please, especially for the last sentence, > and the last word in the sentence. > > I had a friend (Robin Williamson) who was rather > an authority on musical instruments, being the > master of many of them. The only non-Celtic links > he could ever find to the East for the bagpipe were > rumors (that is, never any actual instruments) that > the Sumerian bagpipes had worked their way East, > transported there by Celtic travelers. > > In other words, this rap sounds to me like yet another > of those Maharishi-inspired fantasies about all things > valuable having had their origination in India. :-)
Nope. I Googled "bagpipes" 'cause I don't know much about them. What I was mainly looking for was some indication that the drone was anything more than an artifact of the nature of the instrument, i.e., whether in Celtic music it was considered to represent the unmanifest or had some similar kind of esoteric significance, per eki's suggestion. I didn't look long enough to find anything about that, but I did, to my surprise, find quite a bit about the bagpipe's Middle Eastern origins, which I hadn't known about at all. Nobody seems to know for sure where it originated, but India is one of the guesses, as well as Sumeria and some other places. Although physical evidence of actual ancient bagpipes is very scarce--apparently because they were made primarily of animal skin and wood, and also because it was a peasant or folk instrument--there's a great deal of literary and pictorial evidence. There's a Hittite slab from 1000 B.C. that depicts a bagpipe, for instance, and one is mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures. One Web site suggested that the proto-bagpipe (more the pipes than the bag) was probably the second musical instrument to evolve after percussion instruments. Here's a few sites: http://tinyurl.com/8yl4w http://www.benalipipesdrums.org/history.html http://www.bagpipes-henderson.com/historyBagpipes.html http://www.skep.com/britton/History.htm http://users.rcn.com/ceverett.massed/Russian%20Bagpipe%20Paper.htm > As for their appearance in the "ceremonies," I still > hold to my theory that Maharishi can't tell the differ- > ence between true ancient India and the India of > the British Raj. They're all muddled up in his mind > as some pastiche fantasy of a better age in the past. Could be. In particular, using the bagpipe for a "royal" ceremony is more British Raj than native Indian; as noted, the bagpipe is a folk or peasant instrument in India. What I'm curious about is whether there's devotional music for bagpipe in India, or some form of Ghandarva- Veda music. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
