Gimme, gimme, gimme

I've had a tune in my head on and off these last few days and this afternoon I worked out that it is Saw Ye Never A Bonnie Lass from Reclaimed. The CD has the piper, Martyn Bennett, introduce the tune. I can't remember his exact words, but the general gist is that the tune is what the fan would call a bit of a pig, which is a tad offputting. Still, I would like to play it, and the dots are out there in The Master Piper. It's on my list of books I'd like.

I haven't (yet) rushed out to buy it, partly because I'm aware that I've yet to touch the book of quicksteps purchased recently. I've also got my eye on Freeland Barbour's The Music and the Land. And John Maclellan's collected works. Oh, and John MacColl's tunes. And Roddy MacDonald's. (Last Tango in Harris! Good Drying!)

And that's just the tune books. I've got a gap in my Deaf Shepherd collection. Anna and Mairearad have got a new CD out. I don't have the latest Battlefield Band offering, I'm missing a Kevin MacLeod CD, and I would love to track down  something that had a very good review in The Living Tradition.  I missed Blazin' Fiddles when they were in this neck of the woods and am tempted to indulge in a CD from them to compensate.

It's a while since I mentioned it, but I'm short of hours in the day. I did find time to play today though, and once I found a couple of parts of Vittoria and Perth that had gone awol everything went well.

Shock of the new

I‘ve been pondering this week about how we approach new things, how there are some things we take to immediately while others take a while to grow on us. There are also some things we love for ever and others that we later look on with incredulity: how could I possibly have worn that dress/bought that sofa/loved that band?

I suppose some of it comes down to an individual’s ability to cope with change: some of us do seem to be more open than others to change, or cope better with change more in some areas of life than others. I can think of people who loathe anything at all to change at work, but are happy to travel to new and exotic places. I think it’s possible, too, to have a sort of change fatigue. As I get older I note a tiredness with change at work from my coevals. It’s not that we don’t like change, it’s just that this week’s latest thing we’ve seen before, probably more than once, and have suffered the consequences. In some ways it’s not change that we’re quibbling about at all: it’s more of the same old that is irritating us.

Some change in likes is probably that we never really liked the thing in the first place. We got caught up in a fad, a passing phase, the rest of the world all shouting about whatever is the new black, and we’ve got swept up with that tide and later we’ve looked at the photos and wondered what on earth we were thinking.

Some change in likes is a change in us. I discovered the Bronte sisters at university over 20 years ago. I can still cry buckets over Jane Eyre, but I can’t read Wuthering Heights any more. Barely out of my teens I thought it tragically romantic, Cathy and Heathcliff’s passionate, death-defying love. Now I find them self-centred, silly, childish, and very irritating.

Which brings me to the new that takes a while to get used to and the new we embrace at once. I bought  Fhuair Mi Pog  while back. I’d already heard and enjoyed Allan Macdonald’s playing and the CD had smallpipes. Of course I was going to love it. However, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. There are some pipes, but there, as ever, it seems, some whistles, and although there are pipes with song there are also songs without pipes. I was probably expecting a lot more pipes than there are: just six of the 15 tracks.

Then the tunes weren’t quite what I was expecting either. They weren’t really jigs or reels or marches or strathspeys, and I found them odd. And Margaret’s voice I found…interesting. It made me think of the glory days of technicolour musicals and the soprano voices there: a little harsh, a little tight, a little overly-refined, lacking (to my mind) the expansive passion, the warmth, the colour of an operatic soprano. I listened to it dutifully a few times, stuck it in the cupboard that houses rarely played CDs and forgot all about it.

Looking for some musical variety I dug it out recently to play in the car…and I am really enjoying it. Why has it grown on me? I suspect because one way or another it’s no longer new. I’ve been listening to Julie Fowlis quite a bit. Her voice has grown on me, and perhaps made Margaret’s seem more familiar, or at least, less unfamiliar. Julie’s voice has given me has certainly given me a different benchmark to put Margaret’s voice against, and now I know her voice better I am surprised by my original response to it. The style of song is more familiar to me, the particular rhythms of Gaelic. And of course this time I knew what to expect.

Which has probably all paved the way for me to pick up the LBPS excellent new CD Reclaimed and love it at first hearing. In many ways the presentation of the tunes is very new, very different, but in its separate elements it’s all things I know. Pipes and voice, pipes and strings, lowland tunes, the whole chamber music feel – the layers and harmonies of a small number of instruments – these are all familiar to me. And my favourite track with voice, well, my father is always one for reciting chunks of poetry learned by rote at school and Helen of Kirconnell Lea is one of those.

Not with a bang

My daily piping spree seems to have quietly fizzled out. It's odd, because at one point I was wondering whether January would turn out to have been my last challenge month.

It's partly the sudden drop in temperature, so that my hands have been too cold for me to play well. Throw in a couple of late evenings at work, a sudden urge to get knitting at a jumper that has been ignored since December, and a general lethargy (which I think is also down to the weather) and piping has just slipped quietly out of my evening routine. I'm not even humming pipe tunes at the moment. I've had Caladh Nua's Farewell to You  on permanent loop since the weekend.

Hopefully it will be a matter of a change being as good as a rest, and if nothing else there can be another challenge month in June.

My dog could do better than that

It’s the standard complaint about “modern” art: to the uninitiated it doesn’t look very competent. It looks like the work of someone who has no clue what they are doing. Generally, however, everyone from Picasso to Pollock has a training in art that would have covered life drawing, perspective, and so on. They know the rules, they know the accepted methods, and they have chosen to bend, subvert, reinterpret or break them. That is what makes them great artists.

But what of artists who weren’t “trained”, who didn’t know the rules but broke them anyway, and who have still been accepted by the art world? Grandma Moses, perhaps, or Alfred Wallis. Do we “allow” rules to be bent in some places and not others? Are there, I wonder, any self-taught concert pianists? Did Andrea Bocelli study music? 

I started off using online video lessons from a pipe major, and later had real life chanter lessons from Lt Col Willie Allen.  Thereafter I was on my own. In terms of GHB I am sure I break many rules, not because I choose to so much as because I don’t know them. I can’t flout a law that I am in ignorance of. Does that make me a creative smallpiper or a failed GHB piper? I think I am aware, when it comes to the rules I do know, when I am breaking them accidentally and when I am subverting them. I know the difference between unintended crossing noises (currently getting these in The Hills of Perth and trying to eliminate them) and gracing that isn’t quite within the rules but which sounds good and so I am going with it.

Bridget Mackenzie, in Piping Traditions of the Outer Isles describes how one set of rules, one way of doing things, grew and spread, through one or two people teaching a lot of pupils, through the conformism of military pipe bands, or through competitions, so that what was once *a* way became *the* way, with all other ways now considered to be the *wrong* way and so falling out of use and becoming lost. Pipe music must surely be the poorer for that. Bridget doesn’t really talk about the impact of written notation, but that which is written can have a wider audience than that which is transmitted orally/aurally and somehow holds greater weight.

And it’s not just the gracing or the timings, or the arrangements or the names given to tunes that have become homogenised.  Something that is a matter of individual choice becomes set about with rules, to the extent that Lewisach pipers felt obliged to shift their pipes from the right shoulder to the left.

I think this is one of the messages of Reclaimed. Cauld wind piping isn’t a poor substitute for GHB, pipes played by failed pipers or also rans (although many/most smallpipers are fine GHB players) it’s a thing in itself, with new ways of doing things, new rules to be made, and broken.

Reclaimed

Reclaimed is a compilation CD, which isn’t always a good thing. Too often compilations are mixed bags, a bit of a curate’s egg. This has is a common thread, apart from the pipes, which is the music of William Dixon. This is certainly one for my (long) tune book wish list. Several of the tracks use voice or strings (violin, viola, or cello). There are no banjos or bodhrans, no snare drums, no MSR sets. In short it’s neither folk nor GHB stuff, it is cauld wind pipes (not just Scottish) finding their own level. 

Reclaimed also gives me some additions to the list of things that go well with pipes. This CD gives us pipes and voice, which I already know from Seudan and Fhuair Mi Pog and hadn’t really thought about when I was compiling that five. This isn’t just singing with the pipes, though. Mairi Campbell on Now Westlin Winds, gives us voice used almost like drones, which works really well. And I’ve already said how good pipes sound with more pipes, mostly thinking SSP or GHB with Uilleann pipes, but I think this is the first time I have heard smallpipes played with more smallpipes, (Jack Latin) which is just perfect, actually. It’s a long time since I’ve played with another smallpiper. There aren’t many of us about.

While I'm mentally updating Five Things this CD gives us an extra place to hear Mr MacInnes. He’s on two tracks here, one unaccompanied set of three tunes (The Night Visitor's Song, Willie Stays Lang at the Fair and Well Bobbit Blanch of Middlebie) and with strings and voice on Helen of Kirconnel Lea. 

Eslewhere Mike Katz plays pipes by the Monkey's maker, there is an intriguing narrative piece on border pipes, a track featuring Martyn Bennett, and a rare chance to hear pastoral pipes. The icing on the cake of this CD is the informative sleeve notes.

Oh, the irony

Today is International Bagpipe day. It seems to have kept a low profile, although one relative sent me a newscutting that suggests - shock, horror - that the Scots didn't invent bagpipes. Who knew.

It's a shame the story of the piper playing on every continent didn't break today. I am not sure why the BBC felt the need to use the rather ugly term "bagpiper" rather than plain piper. At least they refrained from the "lone piper" cliche.

The irony is that today, despite humming Magersfontein at my desk, I've not felt inclined to play at all. Luckily I recorded a tune yesterday. Here it is.


Check this out on Chirbit

Man of steel

I had an OK day at work, came home and thought that perhaps I wouldn't play today. I've played all but two days this month, and yesterday I played twice: once with my fan and once on my own.

But then things started to go a bit askew and I got flustered. The fan came home reporting an incident that, had it happened at my work place, would have been my problem. I've been trying to stop myself running through the what ifs, thinking what his workplace ought to do, what I would do.

Then I made pastry and ran out of butter, which I needed for cheese sauce. So I put the pastry case in the fridge to chill, turned the oven on to warm, and walked down to the further of the two grocers  because I'm fussy about my butter and the closer of the shops tends to have the more basic stuff. Of course, the new improved Co-op no longer carries my preferred brand, so I came home with something else. So now dinner is running late and I needed to set the table, wash up, tidy the kitchen and hang some washing up while the pie is baking rather than in between the preparation, leaving me with no piping time. I'm feeling cross, flustered, a bit hard done by, and tired.

You'd think at this point I'd be grateful that I'd already decided not to pipe, but as soon as I felt I probably wouldn't have time to do it I really, really wanted to do it. So I flung myself and my pipes down on a stool and played right through Perth and Valery, without dots. Valery just came to me: I could hear a bar in my head and wanted to play it, without even realising what it was. Perth I just decided to play, and there it was.

And now I'm to tired to bother with anything much else, but I don't care because I dug deep and pulled something out of the hat, despite the pressure and the fatigue. Not unlike Mr Murray, the Man of Steel, my tennis hero.

Song without words

When I listen to a CD a lot the tracks I am most likely to skip long before I move on to a new CD are the songs, especially the “comic” ones.

Like a lot of people I suppose, I’ve always in the past tended to prefer songs to tunes, or instrumentals.  The world of pop is certainly geared towards songs: it’s what many of us are brought up on. I’m also a fan of classical music, some of which (opera) includes vocals, and much of which does not (Beethoven’s 9^th being a bit of an exception to the rule), which is perhaps why moving to tunes hasn’t been such a hardship.

I think it is this tendency for popular music to be songs rather than tunes that means people prefer songs. I suppose anyone can warble a song, and provided the words are roughly there, even if you’ve little idea of the melody, people will recognise it. The human voice is also compelling to us: we can pick voices out of noise in the same way that we can detect faces in a muddled background.

As an Eng Lit graduate I’ve always taken more interest in words than music, but a lot of songs don’t really have words that are worth taking much notice of. For lots of popular songs the bit that sticks in my mind is often a chorus, or a brief, and oft repeated refrain. I can call to mind Whitney Houston, for example, singing that she will always love you-oo-oooo-oo-ou, but couldn’t hum the rest of it or tell you what any of the other lyrics were.

And yet I would generally think that songs are easier to remember than tunes. Songs normally have some sort of narrative and we can see that, for instance, Lord Barnard can’t kill little Matty until he has found him with his lady, which can only happen after the page has tipped him off, which can only happen after the page has seen little Matty at church.  Some folk songs, through many re-tellings, get a little garbled (like Aye Waukin' O where we are told in quick succession that he dreams when he sleeps, he wakes up feeling bad, and that he never sleeps at all). Words are still easier to string together, to guess the relative order or guess at words we’ve forgotten, because we know the convention of forward momentum in storytelling, and because we know the rudiments, at least, of grammar and word order.

Possibly this is just as easy for those who know enough about musical theory.  As I get to know more tunes I am learning the different possible structures and find it easier to hazard a guess at what might come next in general terms: a repeat or a variation or a change.

One of the songs I don't skip on repeated listenings to Rare is Bonnie Earl O Moray, which is set to a lovely Swedish tune. Like many of Jock Tamson’s songs it is interestingly arranged. They tend to avoid the instrumental intro, verse(s) and chorus, instrumental, last verse (or repeat first or last verse) standard. This has a big chunk of tune, all the singing, another big chunk of tune, then a repeat of the first two lines of the song only.

What is interesting is that I can hum the tune but am struggling to get the words for the song. This maybe because the tune is simple, repetitive, and occupies more of the track than the song itself. What is even odder is that when I hum the tune while thinking of the words I find myself trying to adjust the tune to what I think the words are, even when it’s clear that if the tune doesn’t fit I must be getting the words wrong.

I'm also (and this post I wrote ages ago and have left to fester in drafts) listening a lot to Julie Fowlis' Gach Sgeul, and with those the tunes drop in to my memory but the words, being Gaelic, do not. Yet I still find that I am trying to hear the words, or at least, the sounds that the words make, in order to help me think how the tune goes. There is clearly something in my brain that is still giving preference to words, to the human voice, over music, still preferring the song to the tune.