Good to see we've something in common, Rich; maybe someday we'll be fortunate enough to listen to such music together -- exerpts from our CD collections, maybe. Better yet, play some. The Highland pipes sound well with saxophone, accordion, fiddle, and even the pipe organ -- one can achieve some striking hymn arrangements this way.
Bagpipes vary in their number of drones. The modern Highland bagpipe has two tenors and a bass; anciently it had only one tenor. I'm told the Irish still play such a pipe in addition to the the more widely known elbow-pipes -- you can set the drones on that instrument to achieve different effects, song to song, with lever-operated valves. There are varieties of Mediterranean bagpipe nobody knows how to play any more, preserved in fragments.
The Welsh aren't going to be forgotten as long as somebody keeps singing their hymns -- or playing them on the pipes for that matter, as most of them fit that instrument. Exempli gratia: Ton-y-Botel, Hyfrydol, Cwm Rhondda. Gwy^r Harlech would suit as a hymn tune, but I don't think anyone's come up with a good, rousing, popular text. Lledrod I don't think quite fits, and Pantyfedwen I'd have to experiment with, but a surprising percentage of them fall into "key of bagpipe," à la Slane and Saint Patrick's Breastplate, from the Irish side.
St. Pat's BP is one of the three tunes I know
Jabberwocky may be sung to, with a little repeat at the end of each verse. Another, though you have to chop up a lot of notes to fit it, is
O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing. You do this sort of thing to a choir director to make him blow either his cool or his lunch.
Wanna really freak out a bunch of country fans? And make one doozy of a technical fingering exercise of all the doublings, lemluaths, taorluaths, G/D/E gracenotes, birls and bubbly-notes for the pipers (you need two, it's a duet) that piping has and you could likely get into piobaireachd figures as well? Dueling Banjos fits on the bagpipes.
