Accidental

I didn't start this month with the intention of playing daily, but somehow or other it just happened, bar one day. I have just been in the mood to play and to learn new tunes. The fan yesterday simultaneously chided me for trying to learn too many new tunes at once and handed me another.

I'm partly wondering whether I will learn new tunes faster if everything I play is new and my brain is therefore always in learning mode, but it's also just that the tunes I love and want to play at the moment are all new tunes. I wish that I could say that two whole months of daily piping have brought my playing on in leaps and bounds, that I have learned a pile of tunes, but that's sadly not true.  I am not even sure if I have formed a permanent habit. But I've enjoyed myself, and that's surely the point.

Piping traditions

I've just finished reading Bridget Mackenzie's Piping Traditions of the Outer Isles of the West Coast of Scotland. This is a really informative book, covering the history of piping, but also touching on the way of life in the islands over the years, migration, island folklore and some military history.

There are some stories of Lewis pipers sitting drones over their right shoulders, or playing with their right hands on the top of the chanter. There are anecdotes aplenty on the various uses and abuses of alcohol in relation to pipes (I don't think I'll be pouring any wee drams into my pipe bag, thanks all the same!) There is also quite a lot of information about the different piping styles and how the full range has dwindled over the years in favour of a more regimented approach where there is considered to be a right and a wrong way to play a tune. Some of that seems to be related to the reach and influence a single teacher can have, although it seems some teachers actively encouraged pipers to interpret the music in their own way. It's one to dip in and out of, peppered with anecdotes, never dry or dull.

Unfortunately her reluctance to even name currently competing pipers means that it really stops in the back end of the last century. I suppose that stated reluctance should also have alerted me to the fact that when she says "piping" she means GHB, competition piping, pipe bands and the army. There is no mention of the cauld wind revival, piping for dancing is only mentioned in passing, and pipers in folk bands not at all.

There is also no discussion about why girls were not taught to play while their brothers were, although only one judge is noted as actively saying he disliked women playing pipes. One or two clearly did learn alongside brothers but abandoned playing, perhaps as family duties overtook them. She doesn't say when pipe bands started to accept women pipers, whether there was ever an absolute prohibition on them joining or whether it was just custom and practice. Perhaps there are women  players whom she has overlooked simply because they are not competition pipers.

Still, these are minor quibbles about an interesting book and a good read.

Five things - pipes in the Great Tapestry of Scotland

I discovered the Great Tapestry through one of the knitting blogs that I follow and had a book detailing each of the panels for Christmas. The embroidered panels tell the history of Scotland, from rocks rising out of the ceaseless sea to the reconvening of the Scottish parliament. Along the way it takes in new towns, whaling, tenements, Dolly the sheep, paisley shawls, the King James bible, the Jacobite rising and Pytheas the Greek.

There isn't a panel that specifically addresses music or piping, but pipes make appearances in several panels, mostly in the borders rather than in the main design.

Panel 38 - Blind Harry. Pipes in one of the border motifs.

Panel 40. Flodden. The central figure is playing a rather odd, single-droned bagpipe. Text in the panel refers to the flooers of the forest, a pipe tune played at funerals, which I first knew of through the Fureys.

Panel 92. The Scots in India. A sets of pipes is one of the items in the panel's border alongside a mix of items including a steam train, a tea pot, an elephant and a tiger.

Panel 101. Highland games. You can't have games without pipes!

Panel 134. D-Day. A piper leads out other service men and women, playing Hieland Laddie. (Women feature in many of the panels...none of them playing pipes.)

Panel 135. The first Edinburgh festival. Relegated to the panel border again.

Do not disturb

I played this evening with no dots. I managed the first two parts of the Horse with no problem at all. Hills of Perth was fine, except that the 3rd part was mysteriously missing and nothing would bring it to mind. Still, when I tried this earlier in the week it only had two parts, so I can't grumble.

It took a number of false starts to get to Kilbowie Cottage, and when the first part appeared I didn't recognise it. Bits of the 2nd and 3rd part were there, which is worse than earlier in the week when I managed both parts in full without too much trouble.

I had real problems with St Valery. I went round and round, pulling out Father John, bits of Leaving Barra and Vittoria,  but not a note of Valery could I play, hum or picture. After a while I had a quick peek at the dots and noted the opening four notes. That didn't help. Playing the high A, thumb grace, grip that I know is in the 4th part didn't help. I went back to the dots and looked over the first part. It was like looking at a foreign language: I could see the dots, but they made no sense. Then right at the end of the first part I suddenly recalled the tune, ran off to try it, but struggled to get the first part. Again, a real regression from earlier in the week.

But I can't decide what to do for the best. Should I let the tune ferment undisturbed and wait for it to bubble up when it is ready? It's a tactic I've tried in the past and sometimes it works and other times the tune simply falls into disuse and I forget I was even trying to learn it. Should I go back to dots? Should I listen to the tune more (I've got Springwell on the CD player now) and hope it comes that way? Or should I just keep trying to play it unaided? Even after all these years of learning new tunes it seems I have no clue what the best way to learn might be.

Recording is of an established tune (for me) and a session favourite. I am  hoping it might demonstrate a general improvement in my playing. It's My Home Town.


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Speak to me

"Donald asked RSM Maclean 'Well, John, and how is the pipe going?' John replied, 'She's going so well she's speaking  to me'."

Archie Maclean, as quoted in Piping Traditions of the Outer Isles of the West Coast of Scotland, Bridget Mackenzie, Birlinn, 2013.

Is this speaking the same as, or related to, the buzz, I wonder? Note that the pipe is referred to in the singular, and that, like cars, motorbikes, ships and countries, it takes the feminine. I have always given names and genders to objects of importance. The Monkey is male.

And while we are on the subject of the naming of things I note that the Shores of Loch Bea/Bee aka The Sands of Loch Bea/Bee is formally known as The Glasgow Police March Past. 

Also on terminology, tunes, and poems or songs, are not written or composed in this book, but are 'made'.

I'm intrigued by the number of pipers who went on to be schoolteachers (not necessarily of music) or in to the police (where the pipe bands might have been a draw, I supose). I don't know if this was just the case in the Outer Isles.

Here's a tune. Braemar, again, and still tightening up in the same places, still not relaxed with it, still struggling not to mix the 1st and 3rd parts.


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This and that

I've had a tune in my head all day. It felt like a B part. Once the A part turned up sometime after lunch I was able to identify it as Heroes of St Valery. As it was so clear in my head I was sure I could play it, although I know when I had the dots before I abandoned in disgust as it seemed all but unplayable. The dots took some tracking down, but once I had them I discovered that it's a nice straightforward tune, that it was the 3rd and 4th parts in my head, that I need to sort the gracing on it.  And if I add it to my repertoire will it go with Vittoria (as per Mr McLeod) or Home Town (pace Mr Gillies), or something else?

While we were lunching a wedding party arrived. I must have caught a flash of button on jacket because I wasn't all all surprised when I saw that the groom and, presumably his father, were in kilts. I refrained from asking where the piper was....

No wedding in the outer isles is complete without a piper, it seems, as I read Piping Traditions of the Outer Isles of the West Coast of Scotland. It's full of snippets of random facts of island and piping life that I know that the fan *really* enjoys when I read them out in bed, over breakfast... It's a little like the book of Matthew, with various pipers begetting other pipers, marrying each other's sisters and teaching each other's sons. I have been glad to read about tunes I play, pipers I've heard or whose tunes I have played, but sorry that there are glaring gaps (no James Duncan MacKenzie of Back), apparently to prevent swaying piping judges!

I'm playing around with Return from India (needs to be faster) and The Rejected Suitor: feels like a set. Also fiddling about with The Hag at the Churn and The Pipe on the Hob. Yesterday I played with the fan who suggested that Miss Girdle and Troy could both be slower. They need to be tidier, too.

That was a bit of a first: normally he asks for more speed. Another first was me being able to fling myself into a tune he had already started on (Braemar). I had less luck the second time as he insisted he was playing a tune we'd already done, I knew we hadn't and thought it was Magersfontein. Turned out to be Battle of the Somme, which I don't play, which explains my inability to join in that one.

Apparently I am still playing every day...

And here is St Valery, with intermittent gracing and some errors.


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Too much information

I listen to lots of CDs. Various tunes sound familiar, but where do I know them from? I know at least Jackie Coleman's from Skipinnish's Irish set, but does the fan play it, or it it a Sea Stallions tune? Siuthadaibh, bhalacha sounds as though it might be on one of Mr MacInnes's CDs, but not by that name. Mr Gillies mentions the Currie brothers ("one of the most notable piping families in Cape Breton of tbe 1930s and '40s"), and these are surely related to the Currie Cousins who give the name to a set on Piob is Fidheall. Then there is Michael Grey, whose name is familiar, although I am sure I've not come across  John MacLean, and perhaps I even know the name out of a  piping context. (But, no, it's this MG I have come across recently in relation to a pipe tune - but which?)

I get as far as The Earl of Seaforth's Salute, at which point everything else ceases to matter: like Bach cello suites it draws you in, binds you down, forces you to concentrate, causes you not to exist beyond a heart that hears the music. Where have all these tunes come from? Where do I know then from? I don't care. As long at this pibroch plays I don't care about anything much at all, just the music.

Fancy that!

From time to time I glance over some of the discussions on The Session. My eye was recently caught by one on musical memory, especially as the opening poster was looking for tips on remembering. As ever the comments varied from the flippant to the serious, but the general gist was that memory works in mysterious ways.

One poster mentioned Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain, so I trundled out to borrow it from the library. It is an interesting book, not too technical, and well written. Dr Sacks was (he died in 2015) clearly a well-read and cultured man and as well as citing standard journals such as JAMA he mentions Darwin, Henry James, EM Forster, Somerset Maugham, Nietzsche amd Proust, among others. He was also a musician from a musical family.

I suppose the clue is in the word "tales" in the title, because in the end it is not much more than a collection of fascinating anecdotes and case stories about the strangeness of the human brain in relation to music. The most concrete finding seems to be that music is independent of other types of memory, so that a man who cannot remember the day of the week or his wife's name will still be able to play from memory hundreds of pieces of music. Learning music may also be different from other types of learning, allowing someone who has never learned to tie their shoe laces, count muffins or draw an elephant to be able to accurately play and sing. Music is also linked in to emotion differently from other things, so where emotion is deadened by dementia, Parkinsons, psychopathy, autism or brain injury, music may bring emotion out.

So all very fascinating, and full of human interest, stories sad and happy, but very short on anything on how musical memory works, and therefore how one should best go about learning.

I suppose it's not surprising. Even my own experience is mixed. Some tunes fall into my head after one or two times having them as background sound in the car. Others will not stick despite repeated listening, on a loop, while doing nothing else at all. Sometimes I can throw dots away almost at once, for other tunes I need weeks or months with dots. Some tunes I can only play once they start to play themselves in my head, other tunes I learn very well but never spontaneously hum. Some tunes I can get if I "look" at the picture of the dots in my head, for others I struggle to "see" the dots, can't "see" enough to help, or just don't need those phantom dots. Songs I find easier to remember, I suppose because I can memorise words more easily than notes, follow the internal logic of the song (most trad songs tell linear stories), and then use the words and fragments of melody to piece together a likely whole.

I think this will all boil down in the end to more practice...

One fifth

I've got a few days off. I've been baking , knitting, reading, piping, listening to CDs. I've been thinking that The Yellow-haired Tinker has striking similarities to Miss Girdle, that I'd be interested in a CD of Hugh MacDiarmid's Haircut, and wondering why it is that the tune I like least is the one most likely to be going round my head at given moment (Last Waltz...).

I also had an excited moment, on noticing the tune called Fleshmarket Close, thinking that I could post a "five things" that would be five tunes that share a name with a Rebus novel, or even with a Rebus character (Big Ger surely deserves a march), or Rebus places (The Ox, of course), but sadly it looks like this would be a list of one. ...

12 step plan

Of course, I could stop, anytime. Anytime at all in fact. Really, it would be fine. I mean, look at yesterday. I didn't touch the pipes once. Not at all. A whole day without them. And I could do that again. Anytime at all. Absolutely no problem. No problem at all.

Kiss and make up

Sunday was our regular session. After last month's surge in numbers we dwindled back down to four. Four would be fine, although I only count as a half, if that, as I never play along with other peoples's tunes. The problem is not the lack of numbers so much as lack of shared repertoire. The fan and the Irish piper seem to have forgotten the repertoire they shared in the days of the band. The fiddler seems to have a pile of new tunes each month, but none of them are ever anything the others play or even know, and somehow no one seems much inclined to  learn his tunes either.

In some ways I'm the one creating shared repertoire and everyone is happy to pitch in for The Heights of Dargai, The March of the King of Laoise, My Home Town or Bonnie Galloway. It may be that they are catchy tunes, and it may be that my limited repertoire means I play most tunes most months. So despite the fact that I didn't much feel in the mood to go out yesterday evening I was all geared up to play lots of tunes.

And then disaster struck. The fan had terrible problems tuning drones. I think the problem is that, rather shamefully, I've not used drones since I last gave the monkey a polish. I'd forgotten that, so didn't ask the fan to do a pre-sesson tuning. The drones were difficult to tune, and wouldn't stay in tune. As I played the pressure was uneven, adding to the general awfulness of drones. I scraped through Flett, John Macmillan's boat trip, Dargai, and Home Town, but it wasn' t right, and it just got worse, with the chanter sounding sharp and the tube kinking and cutting off air a couple of times. By the time I accepted the Irish piper's suggestion to play without drones I was so cross and unhappy that I failed to be able to play either Woman or Galloway and I am afraid I gave up in a huff. By the time we got home I had pretty much decided that I was clearly in need of a break from piping....

But...I have tunes to play, other tunes I want to learn. And I didn't want to let the sun go down on an argument, to get the monkey out in a month for the next session thinking about how I'd been let down, how we had fallen out. So this evening I played my pipes. The fan got the drones about right. I played a tune with drones then flipped them off and ran through my current playlist and it all went well and I loved it. I think the monkey has forgiven me for doubting him: I got the buzz tonight.

Don't stop me now

I thought I was looking forward to the end of my piping month. I was certainly looking forward the end of January, to a few more minutes of daylight here and there each day. When February came I kept on playing, and I've played every day so far.

I suppose it's partly that I've got into a bit of a routine so that I don't feel I am juggling my evening in order to make piping time. It's partly that I have new tunes that I want to work on. It's also just that, despite the endless issues with comfort, or a lack of it, I do just enjoy playing.

I'll be playing again tomorrow as it's a session weekend. Not sure that any of my new tunes will feature, but actually it might be nice to play some of the old favourites. They've been neglected this year.

Bring me sunshine

I recently acquired Finlay MacDonald's eponymous album. On the face of it this is a straightforward piper's album: piper plays pipe tunes, old and new. The new tunes include many by Finlay, but also Allan MacDonald (the fabulous Plagiarist and The Road to Loch Nam Bearnish). The old includes the wonderfully named The Night We Had the Goats, and, one of the fan's favourites, I Would Have Preferred Thee at First, But Not Now Sir. A lot of it is fast and furious.

As with many pipe albums there is the odd track with whistles, a song (which I am afraid I listened to once and skipped thereafter). There is a track or two with border pipes. There are also some other instrumentalists, including Chris Stout on fiddle. Sadly, Simon Thourmire restricts himself to producing and arranging, rather than playing.

But there is a bit twist. The other instrumentalists are on drums (that's a full kit, not a snare), piano, soprano sax. I think if it had been a full on jazz/lounge sound with pipes running through it that would have been truly experimental, quite possibly not to my taste, but something to admire.

As it is the piping is reasonably standard and the drums and sax just trundle through bits of some of the tracks. It works for me inasmuch as it's enough to make the sound different without creating something I'd prefer not to listen to, and in the end I can just about block it out, which I am sure wasn't what Finlay had in mind, but it feels a bit half-hearted, accidental.

What it brings to mind to me is two images. The first is A A Milne's introduction to Now We Are Six where he says 'Pooh wants to say that he thought it was a different book; and he hopes you won't mind, but he walked through it one day, looking for his friend Piglet, and sat down on some of the pages by mistake.'

The other is Morcambe and Wise. I imagine Ernie in something suitably louche - a red smoking jacket perhaps - doing some gentle boom-sh-sh with brushes on drums and cymbals, when Eric walks across the back of the stage, with bagpipes.

"What are you doing?"
"What?"
"With those bagpipes. What are you doing?"
"These are my bagpipes. I was just going to..."
"Yes, but can't you see. We were sharing a moment of hip coolness. For real jazz cats. Not bagpipes."
"Oh, yes. Sorry. Sorry..."

And off Eric shuffles, but you know there will be a sudden cacophony, which might be pipes or someone falling over pipes or the cue for a joke about a haggis. And the worst of it is that I'm not sure if this way round or whether Eric and his sax is interrupting Ernie's mini lecture on the history of the noble pipe in battle...

Still, underneath, it's a decent album. I don't expect it to make its way on to my most-played list any time soon although I will be tempted, when the current crop of new tunes is settled, to consider I Would Have Preferred Thee and The Plagiarist, if I can get it.

Nightmare

There is a point where a tune wriggles its way into my consciousness in a way that means it bubbles along under everything else. It’s there of its own accord and sometimes it takes a while for me to notice it, and sometimes I have to stop what I am doing to listen to it, to hear what tune it is.

I say “hear” although it isn’t something in my ears, just in my mind. But it’s independent of my conscious mind. Once I’ve noticed it’s there I can make a decision to temporarily stop it, although once I go back to thinking of other things it will bubble through again. I can also make a decision to switch to another tune, although again the first tune might come back once I’ve taken my attention away.

Sometimes there is a previous stage, before the tune has embedded itself. The tune is in my head, but somehow requires my attention to keep it going, at least, I feel that it does, and somehow it is important not to let the tune stop. This seems most often to happen overnight. I feel as though I am constantly being woken by the tune, and the need to keep the tune going, and somehow it feels as though there is an almost physical effort on my part to keep the tune moving. There is certainly an element of concentration. I’m not sure whether I am, or feel I am, needing to pick the next note along, as if I were playing the piece, or whether the note is there, I just need to make the effort to hear it.

It happened last night with the Horse. I feel as though I’ve been awake half the night, flogging that horse along. At one point I think there was another tune, possibly Cottage, and I was keeping the pair of them going, like spinning plates.

Once I woke up I was busy listening to the radio, getting ready to go out, driving to work, chatting to a colleague, tracking down some stuff, concentrating on a number of things and not noticing if I had a tune or not until I went to make a mug of tea. As I stood waiting for the kettle to boil had The Women of the Glen in my head. Later in the day it was Cottage again, but somehow at an embryonic stage. It runs in my head but once I stop to listen to it then it stops, unless I consciously think how it goes next, which I suppose is what is happening with the new tunes in my sleep.

I’d be interested to find some research on this as I can’t be the only person who has had this experience. Oh, and I played this evening...