Scottish, Irish, and just generally Gaelic Flute Music?

[OC Richard]

I've had one foot in the Scottish Highland piping world, and one foot in the Irish Traditional Music world, since the late 1970s.

My take on it is that in Scotland the older traditional dance music has been dominated by the fiddle and the Scottish pipes (both the Great Highland pipes and the numerous species of Scottish bellows-pipes).

Interestingly the pipes haven't travelled as well as the fiddle, and in places largely influenced by Scottish music such as Donegal, Cape Breton Island, and to a lesser extent Appalachia the fiddle is king.

Of course there are places in Scotland where fiddle has always been king such as the Shetland Islands and Aberdeenshire.

Ireland is a different story. For whatever reason there's traditionally been more instrumental diversity. What instruments have traditionally driven the music varies greatly from County to County.

Donegal has been dominated by fiddle. In Clare the uilleann pipes, flute, fiddle, and concertina have long been popular. Sligo as I recall has traditionally been about fiddle and flute.

I'm talking in generalities. I'm sure exceptions can be found for each and every thing I've said. And recently there's been tremendous cross-fertilisation because anyone anywhere can watch a Youtube video by anyone from anywhere.

There quite possibly have always been Scottish fluteplayers. Perhaps somebody has done a Doctoral Thesis on them. But my impression is that Scottish fluteplaying has long been a tiny minority thing. If there's an old traditional Scottish stream of fluteplaying I've not heard about it.

There was a Scottish band in the 1980s called The Whistlebinkies who had a fluteplayer, but he sounded to me like a "classical" fluteplayer. A few Scottish trad/pop bands in the 1980s and 1990s had a thing where one of the musicians whose primary instrument was accordion or Highland pipes or whatever had later picked up flute. The guys I heard were playing in a mainstream Irish trad style.