Here are the Ground and first variation of the classical piobaireachd the Cave of Gold, attributed to Donald Mor MacCrimmon, ca. 1610. You can see the sheet music here if you want to compare.

Nether Lorn Canntaireachd

Urlar

Hienodro hiemotro, hienodro dare edre, hienodro hiemotro, hiendre odrorode, (repeat)
Hiendare cherede, hienotro hihorodo, hiendare cherede, hienedre odrorode,
Hiendare cherede, hienotro hihorodo, hienodro hiemotro, hiendre odrorode.

Var. I

Hinen hoen himen hioen, hinen hoen heen cheen, hinen hoen himen hioen, hinen cheen hoen hinen, (repeat)
Hinen heen cheen cheen, hinen hioen hioen hioen, hinen heen cheen cheen, hinen cheen hoen hinen,
Hinen heen cheen cheen, hinen hioen hioen hioen, hinen hoen himen hioen, hinen cheen hoen hinen.

MacCrimmon Canntaireachd

Urlar

Heinbodrie heunbodro, heinbodrie bitri betre, heinbodrie heunbodro, heinbetre odrierarierin, (repeat)
Heinbitri hereinve, heinbodro heororo, heinbitri hereinve, heinbetre odrierarierin,
Heinbitri hereinve, heinbodro heororo, heinbodrie heunbodro, heinbetre odrierarierin.

Var. I

Hindin hiehin hundin hohin, hindin hiehin hihin hehin, hindin hiehin hundin hohin, hindin hehin hiehin hindin, (repeat)
Hindin hihin hehin hehin, hindin hohin hohin hohin, hindin hihin hehin hehin, hindin hehin hiehin hindin,
Hindin hihin hehin hehin, hindin hohin hohin hohin, hindin hiehin hundin hohin, hindin hehin hiehin hindin.

Low A preceded by low G grace note

din, e.g., hihiodin

D to low A with low G, B, low G grace notes

harodin

C to low A with low G, B, low G grace notes

horodin

B preceded by low G, D, low G, C, low G grace notes

darodo

E to D followed by C, with F, D, and E grace notes

chelalho

Short B and C to low A preceded by low G grace note, as in Cumha Chlaibhers

hiodin, odin, and hodin

On low A

hiharin

B to B

hihorodo

D to D

hiharara
Abbreviated to hihara in Angus MacKay's “Specimens of Canntaireachd”. Possibly hiharin may be also an abbreviation.

E to E

cherede

F to F

herere

High G to high G

hiriri

On low A

ban, bain

On B

tro

On C

dro

From D to D

adeda or ademda

On D

tra

On high A

dili

On E from a note lower than E

dre

On E from a note higher than E

edre

On F from a note lower than F

dare

On F from a note higher than F

vedare

On F from F itself

hedale

From E to high G

chedari or chehedari

Doubling from low G to high G

embari or himbari

Doubling from low A to high G

endari or hinbari

The cadence E is little used in the Nether Lorn MSS., but when it appears it is shown by the prefix hi, followed by the melody note as if played with a G grace note instead of D, e.g., hihodin, but hienem.

Dithis

Written in accordance with scale chart above, e.g., himen hinen, hioen, and hinen, hioeo, hoeo, etc.

Siubhal

Ditto, e.g., hinda, hindo, hiodo, himto.

Leumluath

For the Leumluath beat to E from any note other that D the symbol is bare, e.g., hiobare, hobare, etc. From D to E harode (using B grace note), or habare (using D grace note). To F (as in Cronan na Caillich) barhe. To high G bari, and to high A darI (Park Piobaireachd) or possibly barI.

Taorluath

The symbol for the Taorluath beat is darid, e.g., hodarid, hadarid. Taorluath to low G is darem, e.g., hiodarem.

Taorluath Breabach

the same with the addition of one note according to the scale chart.

Taorluath a Mach

is expressed hiotroeo (B), hodroeo (C), and hiotraea D).

Tripling

is himbabem or himbaem (low G), hindaen (A), hiotoeo (B), and hodoeo (C). Followed by melody note, e.g., hindaenda hindaendo, hiotoeodo, himbabemto. Low G tripling followed by low G is sometimes himbamembam.

Crunluath

The symbol for the Crunluath beat is bandre, e.g., habandre, chebandre, etc. Sometimes (e.g. in The Blue Ribbon) the Crunluath on D is written harobandre. Crunluath to low G is bamdre, e.g., himbamdre.

Crunluath Breabach

the same with the addition of two notes according to the scale chart.

Crunluath a Mach

is expressed hiotrodre (B), hodrodre (C), and hiotradre (D).

Crunluath Fosgailte

First two notes as per scale chart, followed by dre (which represents the throw on E), e.g., hindodre, hintodre, etc.

Canntaireachd is a method of orally describing the various movements in piobaireachd music. It probably dates back to before 1500 A.D., and has existed in many different “dialects”. The predominant dialect of today is the Nether Lorn canntaireachd, as used in the Piobaireachd Society books. This is what will be described below, taken more or less verbatim from their preface.

The example of canntaireachd below also contains a sample of the MacCrimmon canntaireachd. More about this will be added to these pages at some point.

I have been on a short vacation in Tenerife. I joined forces with Mats and Marie, who stayed there much longer. This was great, the climate in the southwest is probably the best in the world. Warm, damp, and even – same all year round.

We did a bunch of touristy stuff, you know, swimming and such – and we also got up to the top of the volcano Teide. That was really cool! Perhaps I'll write some more about this later on, but for now there are images in the gallery for your viewing pleasures.

I have now rebuilt all the pipe music in the archive. There are two reasons for this: To have all the music built with the same version of Lilypond, and to recreate all the thumbnail images to give them a somewhat bigger size better suited to the new web layout.

You can see the result of all this in the sheet music archive. Enjoy!

There! The bagpipe sheet music archive has been brought back to life. It was actually easier than I thought to port it to a Drupal module. I might do a write-up on how it works later. But for now, go here for all your music pleasures.

Perhaps it is time to write a little about how I've configured this site. And to add a W00t!11one Drupal is great! Here we go:

Theme

• Pushbutton, slightly modified header display and a few CSS changes. I looked, but couldn't find any other nice, clean, and configurable themes. I will probably customize it more as time passes.

Modules

• Sheetmusic for the sheet music archive. I coded that one myself - how about that?
• Disknode for the downloads section. I also made my own content node type for this (a clone of Story, like the example in the manual).
• Image and Image_pub for the gallery. Also applied the patch from drupal.org/node/59962 to get a better sort order in the galleries.
• Textile as primary input method. It makes it so easy to include images and links without messing with cumbersome HTML tags.
• Views of course. Brilliantly flexible and easy to use as well. I use it for the Download section and the Archive block among others.

And of course I also use many of the standard modules as you can see.

OK, ToDoList users, I've created a new download section just for you. Seriously, I noticed that I got quite a few referrers from abstractspoon, so obviously someone must still be intersted in this stuff, even though I haven't updated it in a long while. So, enjoy!

Well, there is only one really, but I do go for that one for real.

Music

I love music, any and all music! (Except for most modern popular genres, which makes me dislike what most people like – bummer.) I usually have a strong opinion on if a piece is good or bad, but this is not connected to genres, it is strictly for individual pieces. Here's a list of my current favourite genres:

• Ethnic music, especially
  • Classical Indian ragas (love the interesting scales and bends)
  • Mongolian and Tibetan larynx singing (so amazing)
  • South African mbira music (Stella Chiwese, you are a goddess)
  • Scandinavian folk music (this is a latecomer on my list) especially
    • Erik Pekkari's accordion playing
  • Celtic music of the traditional kind, not really the modern bland world music. Especially
    • Sharon Shannon's accordion playing on the early recordings
• Classical western music (a very large genre, I know) especially
  • 18th century opera seria by Handel, Hasse and others (I have a soft spot for male sopranists)
  • Medieval and renaissance music by Susato, Monteverdi and others. Performers I like are Joculatoris Upsaliensis and Convivum Musicum. Both are Swedish groups led by the same person, Sven Berger
• And last but not least, bagpipes. I, in contrast to some others in my band, like more than the Scottish Highland variety
  • Traditional Irish piping as performed by
    • Leo Rowsome (Possibly the most influential Irish piper ever)
    • Robbie Hannan, a very nice present day piper
  • But mainly solo music on the Scottish Highland bagpipes
    • And especially the classical genre Piobaireachd, a kind of raga for the bagpipes

More of this later.

My instruments

I started out on the recorder at the tender age of 7, like most people in Sweden did at the time. After one year of tuition, I was the only one left in the class, all others had quit to play football or whatever. But at this time the family moved from Enköping to Karlskrona, and I found myself in a bigger class which made it fun again. At this time my teacher wanted me to play the tenor recorder, to make it possible for us to play multi part pieces. This instrument was just too big for me – I simply couldn't reach the holes, which was very frustrating.

At the age of 10 I started on the oboe in the Kommunala Musikskolan, an (at the time) very comprehensive music education that every not too small Swedish town provided for those who lived there. My teacher worked at the military band in Karlskrona, Regionmusikkåren, and was a very nice man, although his pedagogical skills were perhaps not the best. Eventually I also got to play with that band and some other ensembles in the neighbourhood on a few occasions. At the age of 15 I also started on the bassoon, taught to me by the son of my oboe teacher. I've always been interested in trying my hands on different instruments. Early on I got myself recorders in different pitches and models, and at the age of 13 I persuaded my parents to get me a soprano crummhorn for Christmas.

At the age of 17 (i.e. in 1979) I moved to Gothenburg. In that city I was not eligible for the Kommunala Musikskolan anymore, so I dropped the oboe and bassoon. But just a few weeks after the move, there was a tattoo in the city, where the two Pipe Bands, The Murray Pipes & Drums and Gothenburg City Pipe Band, played. I immediately took contact with Mats, the Pipe Major of MPD, and the rest is history (literally).

Even though bagpipes (i.e. Scottish Highland Bagpipes) have an entire section to their own below, I still play other instruments as well. My current instrumetarium consists of:

• Recorders
  • One bass
  • One tenor
  • Three alto, one of them low pitched (A 415 Hz)
  • Three soprano, two of them renaissance type (Moeck and von Huene)
  • Two sopranino
  • One "gar klein flötelein"
• One soprano crummhorn
• One oboe (Malerne) that I recently bought second hand
• Bagpipes
  • Two sets of Swedish pipes (Leif Eriksson and Alban Faust)
  • One set of Scottish bellows blown Lowland pipes
  • One set of Scottish mouth blown smallpipes in bloodwood with buffalo horn mounts and gilt brass ferrules, custom built for me by Rolf Littorin
  • One set of Scottish highland pipes (Hardy ca. 1965 fully silver mounted and extensively refurbished by Rolf Littorin)
• One Irish flute by Des Seery of Bray, Co Wicklow
• Many Irish tin whistles in different pitches

... and some other more or less strange flute type instruments.

Bagpipes

Incidentally I had already bought a tutor and a cheap practice chanter when I was attending a language course in England a year earlier. So I knew some of the fingering and techniques of the pipes already. And of course I could already read written music. This made me a very fast learner when it came to music and fingering. Playing the bagpipes turned out to be another matter entirely, though.

Normally you don't touch the bagpipes for 6 to 12 months after you've started to learn the instrument. You stick with the practise chanter until you are fairly proficient and have at least several tunes under your belt. Since I learned to play the practise chanter really fast, I started on the pipes after about 5 months I think. But it was hard for me, probably because I already played several wind instruments. With mouth blown instruments the air flow directly affects the music, so you have to breathe in at appropriate places depending on the tune you play. Not so with the bagpipes! Here you strive to keep the bag filled at all times and this is done by blowing at regular intervals that has nothing at all to do with the music played. Anyhow, I had a hard time getting my mind to do this disconnect, and it took me about 6 months of hard work to be able to blow the bagpipes well enough to play with the band. Some people manage to do this immediately, like the first time they pick up a set of pipes. Yeah, some have it easy ...

My first public performance with the band was almost exactly one year after I first started to play. I have stuck with the band ever since i.e. soon to be 30 years. During this time the band (and myself) have gone through several phases musically. During the first few years, the band had quite a few members playing at roughly the same skill level. We competed – successfully – several times and played on numerous public events. In the mid 80:s a number of our members decided to get a life, got married, and moved out of town. This left us with just a few pipers who then decided to try some different things. We expanded our repertoire to include tunes from other countries and other genres, e.g. jazz. During these years we always made surprise performances at the Copenhagen Winter Competition, a solo and ensemble competition held in February every year. Doing this was great fun for us, and it also became hugely popular with the audience, who expected us to every year do something more outrageous than before.

Then I moved to Ireland to work for Microsoft, and thus lost contact with the band. Even though there are several pipe bands in Dublin, I did not get in touch with any of them, but instead concentrated on learning to play the whistle and Irish flute. During this time I played regularly in a few sessions and had a lot of fun.

But when I moved back to Sweden again, I naturally resumed playing with the band, which at that time was starting up again, having finally gained a few drummers. For many years we continued to struggle, having to borrow pipers and drummers from Denmark to be able to compete and to play at "real" band engagements. Finally in the late 90:s we got a few pupils who actually learned to play and also stayed with the band. We were still a small band though, and could only muster a minimal number of players for competitions. However, we still managed to do some interesting things, like competing at the Cowal Highland Gathering and playing at the Northland Festival in Caithness in the far north of Scotland. More recently we also played and competed at the Festival Euroceltes in Strasbourg.

In the fall of 2008 Mats d Hermansson, the Pipe Major of the band since it's inception, and Marie Nordström, Leading Drummer since many years, moved to Tenerife to start a new life in the sun. The remaining band members more or less expected me to take over as Pipe Major, but I could not really bring myself to do that. It does not feel like the same band anymore, and I have pulled back somewhat on my engagement. Perhaps this will change in the future and I may start to feel enthusiastic about playing in the band again. We'll see ...

I have a masters degree in computational linguistics from the university of Gothenburg. My thesis was about implementing a toolkit for performing psycholinguistic tests using personal computers.

I then started pursuing a PhD in linguistics, while at the same time working on the IKON project (Interactive Concretisation of Text), which started as a spin-off from my masters work. IKON aimed to develop multi media tools for helping persons with recognition disabilities, e.g. aphasia, to better understand a written text. Some more information about this can be found here.

Update: OK, that page is not available anymore. Here is the last known version from the Wayback Machine.

Update 2: That page seems to be gone too. Oh well, it wasn't that interesting anyways.

But I got tired of the academia balderdash and went to work.

Sven Axelsson was born in the Swedish town Uppsala in 1962 to parents Per and Maj Axelsson. He has a sister, Gunilla Bergersson, and a brother, Gunnar Axelsson, both considerably older than himself (15 and 12 years respectively), so in practise he grew up as the only child in the family. At the age of 6, the family moved to the small town Enköping, and then at the age of 8, they moved on to Karlskrona at the south east coast of Sweden.

He moved to Göteborg at the age of 17 and is still living there after brief excurses to Dublin, Ireland and Lowell MA, USA.

Below you'll find some more specific information about Sven's achievements in life.

Well folks, here it is; my all new, brilliantly shining web site!

Yes I know, I didn't keep the old site up to date. Posts were scarce and functionality was lacking. I have now reimplemented everything on the site using the very exellent CMS Drupal. I have also dumped Menalto Gallery and am instead using plain Drupal functionality for my image gallery. This means that some functions from the old site are lost, e.g. the slide show, but who cares, nobody looks at this stuff anyways, right?

Another thing to note: All registered users from my old site have been removed. At the moment the only function that requires registration is posting comments, but there may be more in the future. If you want to take full advantage of the site, you should register again. Come on, it is easy!