Making Sound Sense: Musing on Burns, Music and the Piobaireachd

The writer muses on a past life in which piobaireachd – the most serious and complicated form of highland bagpipe music – played an important role in educating her literary sensibility. She now wonders if it is for this reason – the echo of the pipes' sound and scale still playing in her imagination – that she finds it hard to hear the music in Burns’s poetry. She poses the question: Can a poet be said to be speaking for a nation when aspects of that nation are absent from his scale and sensibility?