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Promoting the Bagpipe Revival since 1986

The Bagpipe Society

Alfranio’s Phagotus

Instrument makers tend to be obsessive in nature. It helps, when things don’t go well in the development of an instrument, to focus on the faint possibility of there being a solution to the problem at hand, no matter the time it might take. So it must have been for Canon Alfranio in Ferrara in Italy in 1510

when he was desperate to make a name for himself by inventing a new bagpipe of such complexity as to amaze all who saw it.

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