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>>> Binary Measures
>>> Pibroch

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>> Source Readings
>> Instrument-making
>> Northern Revival

Introduction

This website aims to demystify a musical high-culture. Enjoying high status in Sardinia since the Bronze Age, the musical universe of the triplepipe is little-known and alien to musical taste today. Could it be enjoyed again?

With the aid of MP3 examples, this site aims to stimulate knowledge and appreciation of the triplepipe's cultural inheritance and musical potential. As well as appealing to the general listener and music student, it hopes to encourage patrons and composers to create new triplepipe music; to expand the professional horizons of a community of highly-skilled Sardinian performers; and to prompt scholars and players of medieval instruments to recover the craft of "high-caste" Western composer-performers: the educated instrumentalists who did not fix their creativity in writing, but were at the pinnacle of European music-making.

Triplepipe.net counterbalances two modern tendencies. Firstly, that of "World Music" artists to water down unusual or challenging traditions for the taste of a mass market — a process in which high production quality and cultural colonialism are frequently blurred. Secondly, that of classically-trained musicians to overlook the orally-transmitted heritage of Western Europe. The combined result of these tendencies is that significant Western traditions remain undiscovered. Too heavy for folk promoters. Off the radar screen of classical promoters.

By illuminating the range of triplepipe music and revealing the instrument's dignified position in British, Irish and Sardinian culture, Triplepipe.net fans flames of enthusiasm for an instrument at once ancient and modern; exotic and close to home.