The Northern Scot & Moray and Nairn Express, 6 July, 1946
Elgin Courant, 10 July, 1946
Honoured by King
Tribute to Moray Author’s Work
New Bagpipe Compositions
His Majesty the King has been pleased to accept a work entitled “The Royal Collection Highland Bagpipe Music,” the author of which is a Moray man, Mr. John Grant, Lochnagar, 35 Groathill Avenue, Craigleith, Edinburgh.
Mr. Grant joined the Volunteers in 1893 and won the championship gold medal of the 3rd Volunteer Battalion Seaforth Highlanders Pipe Band, in which there were 32 pipers. Since then he has spent his entire spare time furthering the art of piping and especially in helping young pipers.
Mr. Grant, who will be 70 in August of this year, still enjoys good health.
“The Royal Collection of Highland Bagpipe Music” is “Dedicated to the memory of Queen Victoria, by whose Royal patronage and encouragement the great Highland bagpipe and its classical music were, after a period of depression and neglect, restored to that high and exalted position which they now hold.”
Beautifully Illustrated
The volume takes the form of a de luxe manuscript, and is bound in Royal blue morocco leather, with gilt title on outside cover surmounted by a crown. It is beautifully illustrated throughout its two hundred and twenty pages, with twenty-five landscape water-colours, and each page has a decorative Celtic outline, while the dedications and the titles of the tunes are given in Gaelic as well as English. The water-colours are the work of Mr. H. T. Wyse, Craigleith Grove, Edinburgh.
There are in all twenty-two original Royal tunes:–twelve piobaireachdan, eight marches, and a Strathspey and reel, which link with the biol mór of the Celt, the names of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, King George V, King George VI, and Queen Elizabeth, together with the Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, and other members of the Royal family.
Martial Music
Mr. Grant’s other compositions commemorate the 1939-45 war and include:–” The Martial Music of the Battle of Britain,” comprising for piobaireachdan, and a victory march, Strathspey and reeal; “The Martial Music of the Fall of Germany,” containing three marches and dedicated to Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery. Also salutes to “Winston Spencer Churchill,” Prime Minister, and President “Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” and a “Lament for the Duke of Kent.”
Mr. Grant has also prepared during the war years a new and comprehensive work entitled “The Highland Bagpipe Instructor, “the first of its kind ever attempted, which deals with every movement in bagpipe music, and makes them clear and simplifies the mysteries of the Toarluath and Crunluath as well as other very intricate movements whereby no difficulties remain for the ardent student or pupil to solve in the stirring music of the piob mhòr.
The publication of this work has been delayed on account of the excessively high cost of production and the scarcity of paper.
