Less is more

We went to a session yesterday. Technically the fan runs it with the fiddle player, and technically it's an Irish/Celtic sesson. In practise either the fan or the fiddler can't make it and the very few regulars have a tendency to whack in something English, or American, or Italian. We've had a one or two absolutely cracking evenings at this sesson, but it's dwindling, not to say dying. Yesterday there were only four of us there. I play no Irish, one played no Scots. Two of us were mono-instrumental. Luckily the other two played five instruments between them, although one was another fiddle.

The slower, more relaxed atmosphere was helpful. The pub itself was half empty with most of the drinkers sat outside enjoying the cool weather that is passing for late spring around here. Rather than waiting patiently for gaps I cheerfully joined in with going round the table and taking turns. This meant I was able to trundle out three sets and three standalone tunes. The sets were pairs only, and none was perfect, but mostly it went well and I even gave Father John his first outing. But really, three sets and three standalone without resorting to The Rowan Tree or Bonnie Galloway. Surely this is progress writ large.

We were profusely thanked as we packed up by a group of Venezualans who had enjoyed the music and streamed it live to family at home, in part because it reminded them of the happy days when they lived next door to a Scot who played his "gaita" every morning. Whether the Scot was in Venezuala or the Venezualans in Scotland, or, indeed, if both parties were elsewhere at the time I didn't discover. It's a funny old world...but always good to see music bringing people together, overcoming language and geography, evoking memories...

(I've forgotten to menton that the Monkey and I have been together for two very fruitful and enjoyable years. Much as Morag got me going it has been the Monkey who has been the making of me as a piper, I feel.)

Diagnosis

One of the things I sometimes do at  work is to manage projects. I rather like projects. There is a buzz about them. Everything is new, everyone is interested. You call meetings and attend other people's meetings to tell them all about it. You get new stuff done, made, sorted, up and running. You report on milestones. Everything is alway going forward, and even the set backs are a phase, something to fix and move on from. Everyone takes note, everyone gets involved. I feel as though I am in the middle of things, doing something real, something worthwhile. I like feeling that at least in part of my job the outcome is something I can point at with a stick. See that? That's what I did today. (This last is really important to me because on a day to day basis I'd be hard pressed to explain what I've done of any worth, what difference I've made.)

The bit I don't like about projects is...the end, or, as it is usually known, business as usual. It's that point where whatever you've done stops being the new thing and moves to being just part of the everyday. It takes a while: it doesn't happen in a flash on tbe day the project officially closes. It starts a while before that and can carry on for perhaps a year or so afterwards, but eventually whatever you created or instigated is just part of the furniture. The buzz of newness has gone. No matter how complex, time consuming, irritating or downright wrong things were before the project, no matter how much easier, faster, efficient, safer, cleaner, effective things are after the project everyone forgets the before and maybe even starts to whinge about the after....

And I think that is what has happened to my piping. I had a project which was learning to pipe. It involved doing lots of new things that I could point at with stick: playing by heart, playing tunes back to back, playing with others. It all had the buzz of the new. And now, I've in no way finished learning, but I've moved to to the state where playing pipes is something that I take for granted that I do: business as usual.

Panacea

Roll up! Roll up! Ladies and gentlemen, prepare youselves to see a miracle! The Pipe Doctor is here to cure all your ills!

Did you plant out squash and sweetcorn the day before howling tempests, sleet and rain struck? Did you cancel a planned holiday because your boss wouldn't let you take leave? Did you work out that thanks to timings of your least favourite work task you won't get to have any leave next year? Has the public library catalogue been down all weekend preventing you requesting books? Did you get stuck half way through the crossword? Did you send your sister a sub-standard birthday card because you couldn't find a really nice one anywhere? Do you seem to have been struck down with adult-onset hayfever for no reason at all? Just 30 minutes with the Pipe Doctor will cure these ills!

Yes, I know, first world problems. I enjoyed playing. It just about took my mind off things. But I'm still really cross about the cancelled holiday. We were going to Ireland to play music and see really nice people.

(Braemar Gathering doing OK except for one phrase that keeps getting mangled, got the 4th part of Troy, but the 3rd part still gives me problems and I end up clutching tight on my chanter. Still only two parts to Father Macmillan.)

Relative velocity

I had a few tunes with the fan earlier in the week. It was the second time in the space of about a week, which meant I was slightly less unused to drones. I really have to use drones every time I play, even if it is for just the first or last tune or set.

Some tunes he tells me I start slowly and then speed up. When I was a child, if I thought I was short of paper for the piece I was writing I would write faster, as if somehow hoping I’d reach the end of my piece before the paper ran out. It’s the same urge that leads me to read faster when coming to the end of a book that I don’t want to finish: as if perhaps if I can reach the end sooner there will be more book to read. I realise this makes no sense at all, but it’s what I do. I have a tendency to do the same with tunes. If I feel as though I am not playing well, my hands aren't quite right on the chanter, or I’m not 100% confident in my musical memory of the tune at hand then I tend to speed up in the hope of getting to the end of the tune before the mistakes arrive….

On another tune I speeded up because I felt I was going rather slowly and the fan seemed to be going much faster. He pointed out that he was simply playing more notes to the bar than me, so the second time around I tried to ignore it and just carry on at my own pace.

I've fiddled about with some faster tunes: Atholl Highlanders, Miss Girdle. I’m still stuck between slow but accurate or fast but messy. I think the messy is moving from wholesale chaos to general untidiness. And the fast must be improving as the fan notes that there were points when he felt it was a push to keep up with me.

Please release me

I still keep pondering how it seems that tunes choose me, rather than me choosing them. I spotted a discussion on the session recently where people identified tunes that they knew, and liked, but somehow never could play. Some of them were extra long or complex, but on the whole it was about tunes that just didn't click, one way or another.

Conversely there are some tunes that just won’t go away. Although I think I have tunes in my head, at the hummable level or below, most of the time, one of my key tune points is when I am cleaning my teeth in the evening. The moment I stand with toothbrush over the sink the tunes kick in. For a long time, rather randomly because I can’t think when I last heard it played, the tooth cleaning tune was Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. Sometimes that tune has a break and then the substitute has been something from the first act of La Traviata. More recently both tunes were replaced by Horsburgh Castle. It always seems to take me a moment to identify it, and it always seems like such a good tune, and then I realise what it is and get hit with a tiny bit of disappointment, because it’s one I can already play, but don’t get excited about. Unlike the Hebrew Slaves this one has popped up during the rest of the day, too.

At the moment all tunes, it seems, have been replaced by The Eagle’s Whistle. I’m not even sure if it came out of nowhere or whether listening to either Sealbh or The Sea Stallions recalled it to mind. Either way I hadn't thought of it for ages, much less played it, but it seems to be always in my head, round and round, at teeth-cleaning time and throughout the day. I wonder if it’s trying to tell me something.