Bagpipes at War: Nero's Reed Pipe, Pinkie Cleugh and the Trenches

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Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. According to Dio Chrysostom and Suetonius, the emperor played a reed pipe powered by an inflated animal bladder squeezed under his arm, an early bagpipe. This episode explains how the instrument works: an aerophone with a bag that stores air so the sound never stops for breath, a leather non-return valve in the blowpipe, a fingered chanter that cannot play a true rest, and sliding drones tuned like a trombone. It covers bags made from whole goat and sheep hides turned fur side in to soak up moisture, the fungal infections a dirty bag can cause, and the bellows-driven cold wind pipes of Ireland and Northumberland that made indoor playing possible.

The story then follows the pipes from medieval ubiquity to the battlefield. The Cantigas de Santa Maria and Chaucer's miller show how common they were, yet the oldest surviving piece is a single chanter found in Rostock, Germany. The Battle of Pinkie in 1547 marks the pipes' turn to military signaling, and Highland regiments carried them across the British Empire. Rejected by orchestras and nearly killed off by radio, the instrument returned through pop culture, a manufacturing boom in Pakistan, and synthetic bags.

• The Bulgarian gaida has a tiny flea hole lined with metal or a hollow duck feather that sharpens the pitch for trilled ornaments.
• An estimated 1,000 pipers died in World War I, many playing unarmed over the parapet into machine gun fire.
• After heavy losses at the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1943, pipers were barred from leading charges.
• By 2010, bagpipe making in Sialkot, Pakistan, was a $6.8 million industry supplying bands worldwide.
• In 2015 astronaut Kjell Lindgren played Amazing Grace on synthetic pipes aboard the International Space Station.