Tunes for Funerals

The composer of this slow air for bagpipes is unknown but the lyrics that accompany it speak of a deep longing to return to Islay, the ‘Queen of the Hebrides’, the most southerly island of the Inner Hebrides lying south west of Jura and around 40 kilometres north of the Irish coast.

Loch Rannoch is a slow air reflecting the action of rowing across this pcturesque loch, composed by Edinburgh-born John Wilson (1906-1979), a renowned piper and teacher who left Scotland in 1949 to settle in Ontario, Canada.

The island of Benbecula is also known in Gaelic poetry as An t-Eilean Dorcha or "the dark island". The well-known tune "The Dark Island" was written by accordionist Iain MacLachlan from Benbecula in about 1958. Words were added by Stewart Ross of Inverness some five years later and popularised through a recording released by Calum and Fiona Kennedy in 1969 and again in 2018 by Daniel O' Donnell.

The song “Amazing Grace” is an account of one person’s conversion story almost 250 years ago. John Newton (1725–1807) was a man that despicably sold other human beings in the slave trade. As he states in the hymn, he was a wretch. The story goes that, In 1748, a violent storm battered his vessel off the coast of County Donegal, Ireland, so severely that he called out to God for mercy. This moment marked his spiritual conversion but he continued slave trading until 1754 or 1755, when he ended his seafaring altogether. Newton began studying Christian theology, was ordained in the Church of England in 1764, and became an abolitionist. "Amazing Grace" was published in 1779.

The Dunblane Massacre took place at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland on March 13th, 1996, and remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history. Pipe Major Robert Mathieson is a five times grade 1 world champion with Shotts and Dykehead Caledonia Pipe Band and wrote this beautiful tune in memory of the sixteen children and a teacher who died, as well as for the fifteen others injured, all within the space of just 3-4 minutes on that fateful day. The gunman then used one of his own weapons to shoot and kill himself.

Also known as ‘The Banks o’ Doon’, this is Robert Burns' most soulful poem of loss and betrayal as a lass wanders the banks of the river Doon in Ayrshire, after discovering her love has been untrue to her. The natural world continues to be fair and carefree, the birds sing merrily, but the speaker of the poem is filled with personal sorrow.

Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary fu’ o’ care!

"Abide with Me" is a Christian hymn by Scottish Anglican Henry Francis Lyte. A prayer for God to stay with the speaker throughout life and in death, it was written by Lyte in 1847 as he was dying from tuberculosis. It is most often sung to the tune "Eventide" by William Henry Monk.

" A Man's a Man for A' That" is a 1795 song by Robert Burns, written in Scots and English, famous for its expression of egalitarian ideas of society, which may be seen as expressing the ideas of republicanism that arose in the 18th century.