4 August—Several years ago, while I was in Stop & Shop trying to decide which ice cream flavors (on promo, of course) I needed to sustain me, I was humming my favorite bagpipe tune, “The Green Hills of Tyrol.” A woman next to me with the same dietary problem commented on my earworm. I hadn’t known what an earworm was. It didn’t sound too healthy. But she knew “The Green Hills of Tyrol.” Remarkable. Turned out her late father had been a piper.

What she didn’t know is that “The Green Hills of Tyrol” was transcribed by one John MacLeod during the Crimean War in the 1850s. Nor that MacLeod had lifted the tune from Rossini’s 1829 opera “Guglielmo Tell.”

(MacLeod reminds me of the first time the family went up to Nova Scotia, round about 1950. I was seriously Jewish back then, before I converted to antisemitism after being shipped off to Hebrew-speaking summer camp. When my father ordered bacon for breakfast, I reminded him it wasn’t kosher. Oh sure it was, he insisted. It was Schmulka MacLeod’s kosher bacon from cows.)

Back to the Tyrol, then, here’s a solo piper blowing “The Green Hills of Tyrol,” followed by a regimental pipe band leading off a traditional set with it, followed in turn by Rossini’s “La Tua Danza Sì Leggiera.” (Rossini must have known about the zampogna and piva, Italian bagpipes, by the way, but certainly didn’t have them in mind when he wrote his Green Hills precursor.)