They draw on long established practices of community music-making, including gospel-singing, fiddling, piping, flute and accordion bands, drumming and fifing. Combining these traditions in innovative ways, they produce sounds that are both new and distinctive. Their focus on the local is complemented by the creative use of related traditions in Scotland, Ireland and the Scotch-Irish diaspora in North America.
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Reed's tunes include a variety of genres. According to Alan Jabbour's recordings, Reed often played "classic tunes, classic vintage, waltzes, schottisches, clogs, rag-like pieces from both grassroots and popular sources and several marches from the nineteenth-century fifing tradition." Not all of the techniques Reed used to produce these genres were common among many fiddlers. Reed held the fiddle under his chin allowing his left hand to be free.
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Armies from Switzerland and southern Germany are known to have used the fife (German: Soldatenpfeife) as early as the 15th century. Swiss and German mercenaries were hired by monarchs throughout Western Europe, and they spread the practice of military fifing. The fife was a standard instrument in European infantries by the 16th century. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the protocols of the fifes and drums became intricately associated with infantry regiments only.
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McDonagh had stayed uninvolved from active fife and drum performance, teaching and composition for many years. As new generations of fifers emerged, John remained reclusive to himself and a few close friends, preferring to stay in his apartment in mid-town Manhattan. That began to change in 1988 and John began to meet privately at his home with some former fifing colleagues and a few newer players. John also renewed his collaborative friendship with Roy Seaman, who was now living in Arizona.
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The Ulster Scots eXperience group including John Trotter formed in July 2005 as a break away from the Ulster-Scots Folk Orchestra. They are a Northern Irish band of musicians who perform music from the Ulster-Scots tradition. They are part of a wider revival of interest in Ulster-Scots language and culture that developed during the 1990s. They draw on long established practices of community music making, including gospel-singing, fiddling, piping, flute and accordion bands, drumming and fifing.
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The modern era of fifing in America began in about 1880, with the popularizing of civilian fife and drum corps in a musical tradition that has come to be known as Ancient fife and drum (or simply Ancient). The rise of these corps led to a demand for fifes that were superior in intonation and better suited for group playing than those used during the Civil War. This call was answered by the Cloos Company of Brooklyn, New York, and their Crosby Model fife. These fifes were one piece, cylindrical bore instruments with six irregularly sized and placed tone-holes.
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There is a loose federation of corps, though not a governing body, called The Company of Fifers and Drummers, which maintains a headquarters and museum in Ivoryton, Connecticut. Fife alone, or fife and drum, is also used in numerous European countries especially in the South of France (Occitania): Languedoc and the county of Nice; in Switzerland (notably Basel); and in Northern Ireland, where it is often accompanied by the lambeg drum. Modern players of Celtic music, folk music, old-timey music, and folk- rock include fifing in their arrangements of tunes and songs. The Junkanoo festival of the Bahamas and Jamaica includes the music of bamboo fifes.
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Archdeacon Hastings is a well-known Irish traditional flute player, and author of With Fife and Drum, a study of the Orange Lambeg and fifing traditions of Ulster. He has played with the Chieftains, and plays with Fr. Séamus Quinn on the CD Slán le Loch Éirne. Hastings was succeeded in September 2018 by the Very Rev Lynda Peilow, the first woman to serve as Rector. Every year on the Sunday before Christmas, the church holds the Civic Carol Service of Nine Lessons and Carols attended by the Mayor and City Council in full ceremonial robes and accompanied by the symbols of mayoral dignity - the Great Mace and Civic Sword.
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