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.