Texas Tech University

TTU Vernacular Music students playing bagpipes

School of Music
Ensembles
Caprock English Bagpipe Consort Ensemble

​Caprock English Bagpipe Consort Ensemble

You do not need to be a music major to join an ensemble.

This ensemble is a community based ensemble that is a partner of the VMC.

​Caprock English Bagpipe Consort is the only ensemble of its type in North America, one that performs, arranges, and composes music for an ensemble of English Border Bagpipes. Much of the repertoire comes from England and France, as well as Belgium, Brittany, Spain (Galicia and Asturias), and other European regions with rich bagpipe and hurdy gurdy traditions. The composition of new works by ensemble members is also a priority for CEBC. Their drone-based bagpipe polyphony is much in the tradition of recent English and French revivalists such as Moebius Trio, Zephyrus: the English Bagpipe orchestra, as well as French ensembles such as La Grande Bande des Cornemuses, and Le Quintette des Cornemuses, and so perhaps has more in common with chamber music than the more ubiquitous North American and British bands of Scottish Great Highland bagpipes.

Based at the Vernacular Music Center at the Texas Tech University School of Music, CEBC was founded as a trio in early 2017 by director Roger Landes with Anne Wharton and Rob DeVet, but in the fall of 2017, they quickly became a quintet when Jordan Langehennig and Justin Glosson joined, soon followed by Patrick McLaurin in 2018 to make a sextet. Their inaugural recital was given on International Bagpipe Day in March of 2020.

The members come from a variety of musical and piping backgrounds: Irish Uilleann piping, Scottish Highland piping and competition, liturgical music, choral and band music, Irish traditional music, Balkan traditional music, as well as modern dance, ethnochoreology, and European BalFolk traditions. These myriad traditions and influences are all drawn upon for the intoxicating mix of regional styles and innovative approaches that are the hallmark of any Caprock English Bagpipe Consort performance.

CEBC exclusively play English Border Bagpipes made by Jonathan Swayne of Glastonbury, England.

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Roger Landes

Questions?

Roger Landes
Senior Lecturer of Musicology