My way

I don't have a music teacher. I've had teachers over the years, including one violin teacher who managed to make me give up and put me off ever playing again. Maybe she was doing a service to the world of music lovers, and perhaps I was just being overly sensitive.

My preferred way of learning how to do pretty much anything is to see it being done, read up on it, have a bit of a think about it, try it for myself. As I try I get things wrong, and my pet hate is for someone to point out that I am doing it all wrong. I already know that and I know that, for me, the best way to get it right is to work out why it is wrong in the first place. I dislike being watched while I am trying something out. I'm working things out for myself and comments from the sidelines, however well meant, are more likely to make me give up than inspire me to try harder, because I already am trying.

I've been thinking about this for a number of reasons. First, the needle felting. I've been pondering this, collecting pictures on pinterest, following blogs on it for a while. My sister gave me some felting materials and a kit for Christmas. I half read the instructions, and then spent time just working out for myself. The finished product doesn't look like the picture on the box because as I went along I wanted to try different techniques. I expect there are some things I've done in the most cack-handed and long-winded way possible, things I've done in the accepted way, and maybe some thing I've done in ways that no one else has yet thought of. I've done it in a way that I have enjoyed, that has inspired me to try more, look more, read more, learn more.

Playing my new tunes and adjusting the tubing has got me thinking about a teacher. I don't need someone to tell me where I am going wrong, and I don't really feel that I need praise (which the fan kindly supplies). What I need is a second pair of eyes and ears to confirm that I hit that grace note, or missed that one, or that I am transposing two bars in Sleat, or that my hands are tense when I play Miss G or Braemar, or my bellows are slipping. 

Learning  by myself, or teaching myself, gives me an opportunity to be creative and to challenge myself. I hate being told that I'm not ready to play that tune at the back of the book yet. If it's a tune I enjoy then I want to give it a go - it will teach me more, challenge and engage me more, than playing mangled themes from Beethoven or whatever learner violinists are fed with these days.

I thought about this while listening to Lochbroom. It's a whole CD of GHB, and nothing but GHB. Tunes include new and old marches, reels, jigs, strathspeys, a pibroch. It's perfect for listening to technique, tunes, and interpretstion. Iain McInnes is the producer and there are some of the tunes he plays - including My Home Town - but played very differently indeed. I love the fact that a reel can be presented as a jig, a march as a waltz; that you can leave out parts 3 and 4, speed a tune up, slow it down, or introduce a bit of a swing. It seems to me to be part of the fun and creativity of music. Tunes become rather like recipes - a general set of guidelines within which it's possible to subsitute ingredients, change ratios, or fiddle with serving suggestions.

Yet the introductory notes on Lochbroom lament "trends and fashions...becoming more bizarre". There is a remark about improved "finger dexterity" which suggests that this is Not A Good Thing, and a swipe at "slurred notes and accidentals that have no place in the true tradition of the instrument".

I have some sympathy with this view. I prefer my cooking to nod to traditon, and although I am happy to tinker with a recipe there are limits. Walnuts, sunflower oil, parsley and vegan cheese substitute might make a sauce but they are never going to make pesto, because that is always parmesan, basil, pine nuts and olive oil. In linguistic terms I tend to grammatical pedantry, but if we all still spoke Chaucer's English then at the very least we'd be lost for words half the time: life moves on, vocabulary moves on. Musically I am happy for genres to grow, blend, merge and create. Quite often what we think of as traditions set in stone have only been there a generation or two. Something that doesn't change or grow is a dead thing.

So these notes reminded me how strongly "the tradition" has bound some young pipers, and why there has been such an urge to do a musical Heston Blumenthal, and why SSP have been a breath of fesh air for some players, sitting as they do outside "the tradition" and therefore outside the rules. I've never encountered any of that, have only ever been left to get things right, or wrong, in my own sweet way...

(I nearly didn't play today - fancied a break after several days. Then I realised that it's now January and day one of my challenge, so of course I played.)