A STARZ Original Series From Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore: Outlander

[OC Richard]

The filming is all done in Scotland. The interior scenes are filmed in a huge old factory that has been converted into the stages. Bear McCreary is doing all the music.

Edited to add, here is a bit about the pipes half way down this post.
http://www.bearmccreary.com/#blog/bl...der-sassenach/

Cool.

I'm sure the music is recorded here (Hollywood) because that's where Bear and all the musicians he uses are based.

Now, I've worked for Bear, performed with his group (as a sub for his usual piper Eric Rigler) and he's a cool guy and very innovative and daring with his use of ethnic instruments, however this bit in his blog is not correct:

Uilleann pipes hail from Ireland, and date back to a few decades later than Outlander‘s era... I’m fudging geography and history a little by including them, but its not inconceivable that highlanders of this era might have had access to Irish instruments. Furthermore, doing so opened up a world of musical possibilities for my compositions that I wasn’t willing to exclude merely for the sake of extreme accuracy.

There are a couple different errors here. One is the dating; uilleann pipes were well established and widely played throughout the 18th century, and in fact are quite appropriate to "Outlander's era". They were played well back into the 17th century.

The other error is thinking of the uilleann pipes as an "Irish" instrument. True that since the mid-19th century the uilleann pipes have been regarded in Ireland as "Ireland's contribution to the bagpipe" and the "only true unique Irish instrument" etc but this is not, actually, correct.

The centres of early Union Pipe production (the Union Pipe was the instrument's original and true name; 'uilleann' was invented by late 19th century Irish revivalists) were Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and London. (The makers in London were displaced Scots BTW.)

Far from being a 'folk instrument' the Union Pipe was devised and made by sophisticated urban instrument makers for the playing of the then-popular "pastoral music" by gentlemen and professional musicians.

So the use of the so-called uilleann pipes is doubly fitting for Outlander, both in time and in place.

Then we come to a particularly interesting observation by Bear, who as a composer has had to come to grips with the fact that bagpipes have drones. Most composers' answer is to have the piper shut off his drones, but Bear is rather actively thinking about them

I would argue the harmonic language of Scottish music derives from chords that sound pleasing against a drone. Scottish folk musicians were clever in writing around their drones. To maximize harmonic possibilities, Scottish drones frequently sustain on the “V” of the scale, not the tonic as one would intuitively expect. This allows one to harmonize the most frequently used chords, “I,” “IV,” “V” and “VI,” and still avoid clashing minor seconds against the drone. I believe this is why many Scottish folk melodies end on the “V,” instead of the tonic. This is just my theory, but it makes sense to me that the physical properties of these instruments would have a direct impact on the harmonic and melodic content composers from the region came up with.

I read something a number of years ago about the 'aha!' moment some musicologists had when trying to comprehend the Mediaeval use of drones in vocal music. They couldn't make the drone work in the way they were expecting, which was for the drone to always play the tonic. They finally realised that the same drone was providing the underpinning for songs in two different keys, the drone being the tonic of neither! Just as it so often works in Highland pipe music.

But I will quibble a bit with him saying "many Scottish folk melodies end on the V" because in a lifetime of exposure to Scottish pipe, fiddle, and vocal music I find this to be rather rare. It seems more common than it really is because two of the most well-known Scottish melodies do in fact begin and end on the 5th of the scale, Skye Boat Song and Scots Wha Hae.

This is to be distinguished from Highland pipers playing tunes of completely ordinary structure and tonality using the chanter's 4th as the tonic (the most well-known example being Amazing Grace) in which indeed the drone is playing the melody's 5th.

In any case the mixed use on the soundtrack of Outlander of the Great Highland Bagpipes, Union (uilleann) Pipes, and Scottish Smallpipes is absolutely authentic to the period and correctly reflects the musical situation in 18th century Scotland. Professional pipers of that time period commonly played all three instruments, oftentimes at the same performance.