This piece hold special significance for me on a personal level. Scottish Fiddler J Scott Skinner wrote this lament in memory of his friend and my ancestor Sir Hector MacDonald, a Victorian-era soldier and war hero who committed suicide in 1903. I wrote this piece during a period of many losses of my own. In reflection on the feeling of losing a mentor or a personal hero and in an attempt to honour their memories in the same way Skinner honoured Hector’s I put this arrangement together fairly quickly.

The first statement is evocative of the Scottish bagpipe with a drone on the low D string and quick ornamentation to represent the trills and turns of a piper. What follows is a reflective setting of the rest of the melody that slowly builds into a moving climax before returning back to the drone setting to close it off.

Performance time: ~4:00

Difficulty Level: Intermediate