I don't know IB, but I do know that you yourself just referred to "Indian bagpipes"...surely it's a good thing that there are now different pipes/earthy sounds from different nations..?

Just one nation, WAV - the Bagpipe Nation as I say, which stretches from North Africa to Scotland and all points in between & often beyond. Culturally diverse, but unified with respect to this particular innovation which originated, as with so many things, in the Arabic world with the reed-pipes and shawms that by some other route of organological evolution became the orchestral clarinet and oboe respectively. The shawms & pipes still exist in diverse & innumerable variations (please note this with respect to the last line of #96 of your poems) pretty much unchanged; my brother brings me idioglottal cane reed-pipes made and sold by children on the streets of Damascus. Part of the traditional way of playing them is circular breathing, which at some point 2000 years ago suggested the use of a bag.

How this then manifests itself into the various types of bagpipe is largely a matter of applied technology with respect to the cultural software of where such things at last fetch up. In Northumbria for example, where the aristocratic French Musette (itself derived, supposedly, from folk prototypes in Brittany) was adopted by certain the native musicians to become the Northumbrian Smallpipe, which further interfaces with the Highland Pipe to create the various Border hybrids, cauld-winds & half-longs we know today.

Different pipes & earthy sounds indeed, but inside the drones of the Scottish babpipe is the same idioglottal cane reed that could be found in Ancient Egyptian reed pipes 4000 years ago; which is identical to that being made by kids on the streets of Damascus today, with or without the bag, or balloon, or bladder, which in many cases is optional.

The facts are there to be enjoyed, WAV - studied & pondered over not to be bent out of shape to fit your cranky nationalistic conclusions.