Brìghde Chaimbeul’s sentences are peppered with filler phrases such as “like,” “sort of” or “you know,” but she does not at all give off the impression of someone who is nervously trying to buy herself time until she has found the right words for what she actually wants to say. No, Chaimbeul is a straight thinker and careful talker; her sentences are as short as they are precise. This makes her “likes,” “sort ofs,” and “you knows” feel more like rhythmic flourishes that add an extra dynamism to the English language. This might just reflect a musical approach that is inspired by her primary language and the limits of her main instrument, the bellows-blown bagpipe called the small pipe.

“The small pipe is a unique instrument in that there’s not really articulation or dynamic inherent to them in the same way as with, you know, many other instruments,” Chaimbeul explains. “They have a very one-level sound. The main way to articulate is through ornamentation and phrasing.” She admits with a laugh that this might sound very technical in theory, “but if you hear the difference between doing it and not doing it, you will understand.” In her mostly instrumental music, she draws on and works with a wide-ranging tradition of folkloristic music to push the envelope. “If it’s a melody to a song I’ll sort of base the phrasing on the lyrics.”

Perhaps she just does the same when she uses filler phrases while speaking English, a language that can also be considered to be one-level, that can be enriched through ornamentation—and that is not her primary one.

Intergenerational Dialogues

Before Brìghde Chaimbeul gained international recognition for collaborating with Rona Lightfoot, Caroline Polachek or Colin Stetson and opened the shows for legendary fashion brands, she grew up in a Gaelic-speaking environment on the Sleat peninsula on the Scottish Isle of Skye as the daughter of sculptor Liondsaidh and writer Aonghas Phàdraig. Like her four siblings, including older sisters Steaphanaidh and Màiri, themselves acclaimed harpists, she was raised in an environment full of music. “Music played a big role in primary school, whether it was music or singing classes or just starting the day with dancing or listening to music.”

At school, Chaimbeul first took up piano and violin lessons, but also developed an affinity for the Great Highland Bagpipe. Though she doesn’t have any concrete memories of that performance anymore, seeing Rona Lightfoot live when she was four years old proved to be a pivotal moment. The Uist bagpiper and singer is trailblazer in her field in many ways, both battling structural sexism in the piping community while also modernising the art form in idiosyncratic ways.

Chaimbeul collaborated with Lightfoot on her 2019 debut album “The Reeling” on two pieces marked by Lightfoot’s canntaireachd, a traditional verbal method of instructing a piper what to play, i.e. language that forms the foundation of the development of the musical performance, its ornamentation and dynamism. This literal musical dialogue between the generations is perhaps symbolic of how the young musician came to find her own way after following a predetermined path for years.

When Chaimbeul talks about her upbringing, she points to a sense of communality. “Something that is special about growing up on the Isle of Skye is that it’s quite intergenerational, there were always older generations looking out for us as a family,” she says. Konstantin Kosmidis – to whom Chaimbeul dedicated “The Reeling” – was one of them. Originally from Greece, he had moved to Sleat with his Scottish partner and developed an interest in playing the bagpipe and passed on his passion to a younger generation. “Konstantin used to teach me, singing all the traditional tunes and playing recordings to me. He showed me the basics,”explains Chaimbeul.

Freedom, Collaboration, and Inspiration

Chaimbeul cannot quite put her finger on what it was that made her become more interested in the pipes after that first encounter with Rona Lightfoot. “I always just really enjoyed playing them, it never felt like a chore,” she shrugs. “But I think it also has to do with me having amazing teachers.” After Kosmidis, Niall Stewart was the first to give her formal lessons from age seven before she moved to Edinburgh to attend a music school and train under Iain Spiers during her early teenage years.

At that time, Chaimbeul was already taking part in piping competitions, her main instrument still being the Great Highland Bagpipe. “It’s a very specific world,” she says today. “The competitions are quite formalised and there’s expectation with what you play, the way you dress, and the way you walk. It’s all about, you know, technique and following a set repertoire.” Thanks to Hamish Moore however, she discovered another world, that of the small pipe.

The bagpipe maker Moore gifted her one of the instruments and his son Fin taught her to play it. Thanks to its wider tonal range, the small pipe offered Chaimbeul more creative freedom in a time when she was about to find her own voice. “When I started to play the small pipes, I was already starting to think about my individual style,” she says. “I continued to play competitions until I was 18, but I did start getting frustrated by the rigidity and how there wasn’t very much space to express myself. But there was a sort of certain freedom to the small pipes.”

Chaimbeul also points out that switching to the small pipe widened her horizon in other ways. “It opened the door to collaboration, which brought a lot of inspiration.” She also finds such inspiration in dialogues with other musical traditions. Being introduced to the work of Steve Reich, for example, facilitated her engagement with her own music. “I actually think there are a lot more similarities with traditional music and Gaelic songs on the one hand and some like Reich on the other,” she notes.

When Chaimbeul says this, she refers primarily to a structural approach to music-making. “In my background, a lot of the tunes are always the same tempo, very repetitive, a lot of them are in the same key, which is why you are always encouraged to move away from repetition to try and make things more harmonically interesting,” she explains. “It’s sort of about going back to embracing what makes it ‘simple’, the repetition, the drone, the fact that it harmonically doesn’t move much. Someone like Steve Reich is really indulging in that.”

These similarities, Chaimbeul says, constitute the aspects of working in a traditional field that interest her most. This also includes the engagement with other folkloristic forms such as Bulgarian piping traditions that she explored during an ethnomusicological field trip to the country as part of a scholarship. “The rhythms are completely different from Scottish music,” she explains. “I learned a lot, and it really trained my ears even more.”

Chaimbeul not only sought to expand her palette on a stylistic level, but also increasingly started finding ways to enrich her own sound further both tonally and sonically. “I started to manipulate the chanter of my small pipe with tape to get semi-tones, to play in different modes and manipulate the drones a little bit. Traditionally, you wouldn’t really do that, and compared to an instrument like the violin you’re still limited, but it gives the pipe a different tonality, different colours.”

Improvisation and Composition

Having won the BBC Radio 2 Young Music Folk Award in 2016, a major step in her career as an artist, Chaimbeul increasingly started collaborating with other artists. Besides playing live with a variety of folk musicians, this includes her work with Aidan O’Rourke, Lankum’s Radie Peat as well as Rona Lightfoot for “The Reeling” and the 2021 album “Las” with fellow smallpiper Ross Ainslie and Steven Byrnes on guitar and mandola. Also this trajectory has seen Chaimbeul’s approach become increasingly unconventional.

This also has to do with her choice of instrument and what it affords her. “I first performed more traditional bagpipes tunes and it was more harmonically based,” she explains. “I usually had accompaniment – harmonica, guitar, harp – when I first started and then slowly as the years went by, I started to move away from rhythmic backing and into embracing the drone. Now, that’s the foundation of my collaborations: the drone.”

Indeed the drone has become the centre of her work as a composer who will usually start with something basic and then slowly lets a piece evolve into the lushly orchestrated compositions that have won Chaimbeul critical acclaim and fans far outside the realm of folk music. “There are a couple of different starting points such as the tonality of a drone and the key of the chanter and then improvising around that. Another one would be a certain old melody whether it’s a tune or a song,” she explains.

Improvisation plays a crucial part in her compositional process: “While writing, a lot of times I would be improvising and I’ll put my phone on voice recording and I go back through them and pick parts and then put them together like a jigsaw puzzle,” Chaimbeul laughs. “Or I record, like, loads of takes and then choose the one that feels the best based on feeling.” Her highly specific approach as a composer-performer came to full effect on 2023’s “Carry Them With Us”, a record made in close collaboration with saxophonist Colin Stetson.

Archives and Living Things

“Carry Them With Us” is somewhat of a hybrid album, as Chaimbeul explains. Pieces such as “Crònan (i)” or“Uguviu (ii)” are based on improvisations, but others follow a more rigid structure. “I’m really happy to just improvise with someone but it’s also nice to have the time to define something and compose a beginning, middle, and end together and create some sort of story,” she says. Stetson’s avant-garde approach to playing – he has become a pioneer of the so-called circular breathing technique – quite literally harmonised perfectly with Chaimbeul’s use of her own instrument.

Despite all this, the rich tradition of piping again provided a lot of inspiration for the album, and though only a few pieces feature vocals, singing and language were once more instrumental for the compositional process. “We’re very lucky to have a digital archive of field recordings from the 1930s until today in Scotland,” says Chaimbeul. “Normally I look from the 30s until maybe the 70s or 80s, recordings of older people from the Highlands and islands, so there’s a combination of people singing and maybe someone playing the accordion or the fiddle. I just listen until I catch a melody.“

Chaimbeul’s material continues to transform in live settings, which also has to do with the special characteristics of her instrument. “The pipes are very subjective to change based on temperature and humidity, which can affect everything,” she explains. “It’s a thing that’s alive, that you always have to be in conversation with. Sometimes they’re sitting really well, and you can really take your time. Other times they’re not so happy and you have to take that into consideration.” She thus sticks to a certain structure as a baseline for what she does, but reacts to the variables differently depending on the situation.

Often alone on stage, Chaimbeul also works with a looper as a sort of electronic sparring partner to her playing. “That came about after I recorded with Colin. When I was thinking about performing these pieces solo, I wanted to have another melodic aspect that I could interact with,” she says. “What I like about this is that it does react to what you’re playing live, nothing is pre-recorded or pre-set. It’s quite random, so you can kind of play off of that. And yeah … ” She laughs. “Sometimes it feels like there’s someone else there.”

Chaimbeul’s hybrid live set-up can be understood as representative for an artist who continues to be at home in different musical worlds, playing at more folk-minded events while also sharing the stage with electronic artists at festivals such as MadeiraDIG or Rewire. “I sometimes have completely different audiences, but a lot of times it’s like these two worlds come together. You might have someone who usually listens to pipe bands sitting next to someone who listens to, like, noise!” She laughs. “I quite like that.”

Winter in Summertime

For her Signature Project for Monheim Triennale, Brìghde Chaimbeul will lower the temperature a little. Loosely based on a previous project, it will see the musician collaborate with dancer Molly Scott Danter, who like Chaimbeul grew up on the Isle of Skye. “There will be a nod to traditional dance in the same way that the music is a nod to traditional tunes, but we will take it somewhere else,“ she says.

This is also true in regard to the work’s underlying theme, informed by the many stories about the Gaelic folk character, the “sharp-witted old lady” Cailleach Bheur. “She is very wild and powerful. She comes around every winter and is usually described as the wind, the frost, storms, ice, the wintertime weather or landscape,” explains Chaimbeul. “The piece follows her journey of her waking up to the start of winter until her death, which marks the start of spring.”

Such personifications of the seasons abound in Gaelic folklore, as Chaimbeul notes. “It’s like you’re making a sort of human connection out of something that might feel out of your control.” The dualism of light and the lack thereof will also inform the added visuals, which Chaimbeul characterises as abstract. “They sort of react to what is happening, the movement of my fingers, the sound waves, Molly’s movements,” she says. “At the same time, it will create a dark, insular world.”

Chaimbeul is quick to point out that these contrasts are merely an expression of the cyclicity of life and that darkness in this context doesn’t necessarily represent negativity. “Winter is sort of a quite dark time; a cocooned time,” she explains. “It is a season in which the Gaelic community would take part in rituals. So it’s about people coming together, telling stories, creating comfort together even though everything outside is a little dark and wild.”

This makes her new interpretation of the Cailleach Bheur lore possibly the quintessential Chaimbeul project: informed by verbal traditions, nurtured by community, highly unconventional.