If an average Lowland Scottish gentleman were approached around 1700 and asked to play “One of these things is not like the others” with the list of tunes I presented in my Introduction, he would almost certainly have singled out neither of the two pieces we might choose today – not the French air (the only piece from outside of Scotland) and not the fiddle dance (arguably the only real “folk” tune in modern parlance). Instead, he would probably pick the bagpipe pibroch. He would most likely find this bagpipe music extremely foreign, even strange (whereas he might well know a version of the Lully tune, which circulated around Europe in different forms). Even in the unlikely event that this particular Lowland gentleman just happened to possess enough Highland connections to have a passing familiarity with the pibroch genre and its stylized ornaments and repetitions, he would probably still consider the bagpipe piece the odd one out. Unlike the other two melodies, the pibroch was an occasional piece with a rigid set of performance rules, and it did not lend itself to dancing. In other words: for the purpose of categorizing the pieces, the Lowland gentleman would not really care who wrote them, or even where they came from. He would want to know how they functioned, how they were being used in a specific circumstance.