Kate Dunley wrote: <Does anyone know the dates for Pipe Major William Ross? (If there has been more than one, I mean the one with the collection who composed a bunch of tunes.) Is it correct to say he was 19th-century, or did he overlap with another century?>
Hi Kate: The following is copied from notes in the 1885 collection [William] "Ross's Collection of Pipe Music"; " Ross was born in 1823 and joined the Black Watch at the age of sixteen, eventually reaching the rank of Pipe Major. He entered the service of Queen Victoria in 1884..........." A further note states " Although Angus MacKay had developed an acceeptable system of staff notation for pipe music, there had been no comprensive collection of tunes for the pipes published until Ross brought out his collection in 1869". The 1885 edition expanded the 1869 edition from 243 to 478 tunes. In a foreword in the 1976 reprint of the 1885 collection Seamus MacNeill says Ross died in 1891. Alexander Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
