Robert Nicol - The Desperate Battle (of the birds) (1953) RARE!

Here is an old rare tape recording of the famous Scottish piobaireachd piper (i.e., classical bagpipe music), Robert Nicol (1905 - 1978). Here in this tape recording from 1953 he is first introduced by Robert Lorimer who died in 1996, the man running the tape machine. In this recording he plays the entirety of the piobaireachd, "The Desperate Battle (of the Birds)", as he got it from his teacher, John MacDonald of Inverness (1865 - 1953). At the end, Nicol, Brown and Lorimer go over what they thought of Nicol's playing, after listening to it back on the tape. Interestingly, while there was no easy way to determine a "pilot frequency" to tune a recording to (it's not that anyone could generate 50 Hz and tune the tape's electrical hum to that 50 Hz), they actually used a tuning fork with the note G4. But, even with my own ears, I still matched the 50 HZ tone of the electricity on the tape to a generated tone of that same frequency, although I well could have used that tuning fork's pitch as a reference. However, I've only heard badly tuned tuning forks so that would not have been my best way to tune the recording anyway. Also, given that this particular tape player on which it was recorded wasn't the best, the odd tape slip can be heard throughout the recording, which is also notable in some of the opera singer Cristina Deutekom's live (video) tape recordings. Particularly at the very beginning of the segment with the pipes, the tape originally slows down to the correct pitch because originally the tape machine had to speed up from 0. Any pitch change when played back is actually inverse to what the actual tape machine did.