Pipers takes the reader inside the world of the performer community of Scottish piping, introducing the instrument itself and the various different repertories. It also discusses piping techniques as well as information on some of the great piping dynasties and individual pipers. Dr Willie Donaldson shows how ‘traditional music’, often assumed to be the anonymous product of a dim and distant past, is the creation of gifted individuals operating in a sophisticated and vigorously ongoing enterprise. Since pipers have often been skilled also on the fiddle, keyboards and small-pipes, or as singers or dancers, their story offers fascinating insights into the whole traditional music and song repertoire of Scotland.

Pipers is a well-informed and highly readable account by a prize-winning author who is a piper and composer of pipe music as well as an internationally recognised historian of Scottish tradition.

'From the history of the pipes themselves to their place in the modern day, this book is a comprehensive guide'

William Donaldson is a graduate of Aberdeen University and currently teaches in the literature department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His other books include Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland, The Jacobite Song and The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society, which was voted joint Research Book for the Year by the Saltire Society.