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WELCOME
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| Alistair Campsie, author, journalist and piper, once wrote an essay about pibroch, the oldest classical music in the West, which is now played on the bagpipes. Later he added a book exposing the scam worked on it, rendering it incomprehensible to its own nation and formal musicians alike. |
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There followed muggings, international smear campaigns, destruction of his writing career, homelessness and poverty, in the worst UK literary scandal of the 20th century which has now oozed into the 21st.
E'er you look - burn the book The scam was to substitute traditional pibroch, almost certainly derived from the lost harp music of the Celts, with the distorted versions of an Angus MacKay, who was Queen Victoria’s first piper, falsely claiming they had been handed down unchanged from the legendary MacCrimmon pipers…
But Angus had been covertly disturbed for years, insisted he was married to the queen and was going to murder Prince Albert for having sex with her. The reason, Angus howled at the doctors certifying him insane at Bedlam, was that he was her rightful husband and the royal children were his too.
What happened to Alistair Campsie, one of the last pipers trained in traditional pibroch, is revealed in this website, which also exposes the enormity of what was done to his family. He was hounded into a heart attack and warned the next could be terminal, leaving his young children fatherless.
By coincidence the scandal was largely hatched out in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, recently made UNESCO's first City of Literature - where "inconvenient" books were formerly burned by the public hangman.
Now other sinister methods of censorship seem available to destroy the artist in Scotland which the international communities of writers and musicians may want to investigate and come to the aid of one of their own, along with all others who believe in the freedom of artistic expression and the written word.
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Around the site
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This unique and ground-breaking website contains an experimental book which is the sequel to my earlier The MacCrimmon Legend: The Madness of Angus MacKay. To read the sequel in sequence finish the first link, then click on the word -- "continue" at the end of each link to move to the next, through to the end.
Certain chapters provide a link in the text to other links. You may find it better to read the new links then return to the original link to keep to the sequence. Music clips of the changes made to certain pibrochs by Angus MacKay have been inserted into two links, Big scam for the Wee Spree , and Inside the Tangled Web .
The reason for publishing the sequel, The MacCrimmon Scam, in this fashion is that deliberate forgeries were written into the corrected final proofs of the original book, for which I was blamed. These corrected proofs and the typescript, which are the property of the author, were then stolen, presumably to conceal the forger's handwriting and thus identity.
Follow the links to discover the truth about how a phoney legend was used to inflict Angus MacKay's versions of pibroch on pipers, and thus the musical world, while destroying the traditional and melodious music.
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Site news and updates
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The site will be regularly updated and new links added which will corroborate the present astonishing disclosures. Letters to newspapers which have been withheld from the piping world will be published to let pipers see how honestly, or otherwise, they have been treated.
SHOP...opening soon with books and "Pibroch of My Clan" frames (Cameron, Clan Chattan, MacDonnell of Glengarry, MacFarlane and MacGregor) containing the authentic traditional settings of the pibrochs handed down by the Old Masters, framed in silver and black.
Also for sale is the stop-ciggies paperback of all time, Cary Grant Stopped me Smoking (The Hypnagogic Method), taught by the film star to Alistair Campsie, who found it painless, permanent and almost instant. And if you want a laugh try The True Story of the Ball of Kirriemuir (don't lend it to your grandma -- she'll pinch it).
Both were brought out by The Piper's Press to fund publication of The MacCrimmon Scam, to be packaged with a CD of the radio series, Pibroch, the Tangled Web, which has been re-recorded and digitised, containing musical examples of how the tunes were altered and distorted. The existence of the radio series has been suppressed for more than twenty years and in particular concealed from the the many thousands of dedicated North American and Commonwealth pipers.
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The sacred cow
Propagandists have long known that if you use a legend to float your scam you can get away with bloody murder. And the MacCrimmon "legend" was no exception, yet it was utterly divisive.
Basically it asserted that a family called MacCrimmon, who were the best pipers the world has ever known, ran a piping college for 300 unbroken years on Skye (1500-1800) where they invented the musical form pibroch, and composed all the best tunes. All the chiefs sent their best clan pipers there for seven years' training, but no matter how hard they practised they could never equal their masters whose like was never seen nor heard again.
It was a pretty legend and MacCrimmon pipers had undoubtedly surfaced in Skye in the early 1700's. Yet with few, third-rate exceptions, the purported "MacCrimmon" pibrochs had earlier and different names and had been stolen and renamed to prop up the false legend which still had not been properly invented by 1818. All the other artefacts were proven fake, yet it became Scotland's most sacred cow, proving that the Hanoverian (i.e. Protestant) pipers were the best players and composers to whom the Jacobite (i.e. Catholic) pipers had to go for training but could never equal, such was the political climate of the time.
And no-one dared question the legend. To do so was heresy.
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The freedom of speech
UNESCO recently made Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, its first city of literature signifying approval of its record in the freedom of expression for authors and the nurturing of an intellectual climate in which writers could freely practise their art.
Now I would ask the new Scottish Parliament to penetrate the cultural underbelly of the same city and investigate my silencing and destruction as an author there after I wrote an "inconvenient" book, leading to the utter violation and obliteration of my human rights.
And I do this in the hope that my fellow writers and musicians will never again experience the same cruelty which was inflicted on my family and me, reducing me to ill health, and bringing us to eviction, homelessness and poverty, especially at this time when Edinburgh is applying to become an official "City of Refuge" for writers who have been forced from their own country. The scheme is run by PEN International, the world-wide writers' organisation. "It's a freedom of speech issue", said one of its Edinburgh City of Literature organisers.
And I do this not merely for my family and me but for the intellectual freedom of all the children of our future, no matter if for now they only draw a chalk line on a slate, or tuck a blade of grass between their thumbs to blow a note in true. Perhaps their piping voices should matter most to us in the international community of the arts.
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© Copyright 2008 The Piper's Press
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