Where do you go to, my lovely

First day back at work after a week away was a busy one, with the usual email avalanche and three meetings that weren't in my diary when I went away, two of them placed so as to wipe out the chance for anything but the briefest of lunch breaks. Nevertheless I felt reasonably upbeat, humming tunes to myself through the day.

It occurs to me that I haven't had tunes in my head of late. I don't know why, and rather like swallows I don't think I noticed them going, but I did notice when they came back again.

The tunes in my head needed to be played, which gave me a spur for my week of playing. I played a couple of tunes, shifted the bag to make it more comfortable, and suddenly got the buzz. I played through three tunes, not wanting to stop in case I lost it. But the bag got less comfortable, I had to shift it an inch...and the buzz vanished.

I kept on playing, anxiously checking to see if I could perhaps almost, sorta, kinda feel the buzz...but I think it's like being in love: you know when you are and if you have to ask then you aren't. Given that it came and went I can only assume that, rather prosaically, the buzz is linked to pressure levels, but I only know that I had it once and then lost it.

Pop-up piping practice

I've been thinking about getting back to playing, and playing regularly. We've just been away for a week, so of course I've played nothing at all until this evening. It went well today. I played for over an hour, everything was reasonably comfortable, I had good, even pressure in the bag, my fingers wre reasonable nimble. I played tunes I know and mostly had few problems with them. I ran through a pile of tunes, mostly sight reading things I have heard, things I used to play and never nail down, and The Road to the Isles (aka The Bens of Jura, among other aliases), just because it was there in the book and the fan had mentioned it recently.

You'd think that, considering how well everything went, I would have got the buzz, but there was no sign of it.

But it's the session (again!) at the weekend, and I need to get back into practice, and somehow a whole month is too much to commit to for daily playing. So my plan is that I do a pop-up practice and play every day for week from time to time, and hopefully least monthly, with the sessions there to remind me.

Goldilocks

I left my office one day last week and got half way to the car before I realised that I was still wearing my office shoes and that my driving shoes were still tucked under my desk. I decided I'd drive home in my office shoes, which that day were a reasonably sensible court shoe, with neither a very high nor very thin and fragile heel. They were, however, just a bit higher than my driving shoes, high enough to amend the angle at which my ankle rests, and to alter the angles needed in my foot on the pedal.

I didn't feel comfortable at all, so the next day I drove into work in a pair of flat pumps. The lack of heel was fine, but somehow the soles were quite slippery, and I didn't feel comfortable at all. I was certainly glad to get back to my driving shoes.

I do worry, however, that the only shoes I can drive in are my driving shoes. They aren't proper driving shoes. I normally just downgrade my oldest and tattiest pair of shoes to the role. The current pair of mid-height black courts replaced a pair of brown mock snake skin courts a few years back. I've had heels and soles replaced at least twice, but they are on their last legs. I'm going to have to adjust to a different pair of shoes. It's either that or give up driving!

I'm feeling like that with my pipes at present. I'm going through one of those periods when I can't quite get comfortable. It's not as bad as things got before I shortened the tubing, but it's bad enought to produce aches and twinges in shoulder, elbow and neck. I find myself feeling that in order to get things just right, or at least better, I have to be wearing certain things. Some are reasonably practical. If I am sitting down to play the chanter sits between my knees so a short, straight skirt isn't much use. But I've convinced myself that even the thinnest jumper means that the bellows strap for my elbow won't fit, but the top I do wear must have long sleeves so that the strap doesn't pinch. And, as previously discussed, I have to be neither too hot nor too cold. 

The most irritating thing is that none of these issues (short skirts aside) seem to either bother me or make any difference at all in a session, but playing at home I invariably change clothing or adjust the temperature, or abandon because of incorrect clothing or temperature.

Thankfully, my footwear doesn't appear to affect  my piping at all.

Crunluath

"Murdo stopped at the end of his pacing and broke into the crunluath. His toe tapped rapidly on the ground. His fingers bounded off the notes so nimbly that they seemed to describe short ripples along the chanter. The virile, slotted notes flew about, throwing a mesh of sound over the hearers, a contracting net that caught and drew the throats and breasts. And left them strangely numb and vibrant when, at last, the music  ceased."

The Albannach. Fionn Mac Colla.

I wonder what he meant by "slotted notes." This is the scene in which Murdo single-handedly resinstates the piping tradition among the men in the village, and thus revitalises the community. The strange thing is that this piobaireachd playing comes out of nowhere. Murdo isn't spoken of as a piper, apart from the playing of the feadan with the priest. It's as if the playing is innate, a core and hitherto undiscovered part of his Scottishness.

The mood of the passage I've quoted is immediately broken by Kenny's comment on Murdo's playing: "O, he'll learn!" Surely this is suposed to be taken as irony: a learner piper would hardly ensnare throats and breasts with his crunluath. Or perhaps it's sour grapes, for when the men first hear "the clear, lusty notes dropping out richly, forming a slow pattern against the wall of drones" someone suggests that the piper must be Kenny:

"'Thats's not Kenny,' says Murdo the Flea. 'Kenny never had that amount of skill in the fingers at him.'"

Iain Mor

"Iain Mor had died at the beginning of winter. Once his had been a great place and namely for the singing and the dancing and the piping and the telling of tales. Great had been the coming and the going about that place at one time and many the notable gatherings on winter evenings, and the fame of some of the men that would be piping there on evenings of the summer was no small thing. But that was in Iain Mor's day."

The Albannach, Fionn Mac Colla

A silver-mounted chanter

"One day the priest lifted a solemn finger before his nose and began fumbling in an inside pocket of his coat. With a face of portentous gravity he drew out a silver-mounted chanter, adjusted the reed and fitted it together. Then he began playing, while Murdo tapped time with his toes, inside his boot. When he had finished the little reel he played he handed the chanter over to Murdo, who played another, the priest taping on his knee with plump fingers and clearly delighted. They were there at the piping, laments, reels and marches and snatches of piobaireachd, sitting forward in their chairs as eager as schoolboys and the feadan passing between them until in the middle of a tune the priest happened to look at the clock, and he was up on his feet, clapped his hat on his head and skipped out of the room with the feadan still in his hand almost before Murdo realised the music had stopped."

The Albannach, Fionn Mac Colla.

Blogger advises me that this is my 600th post. Think how much piping I could have done in the time it took me to write them all!

Gile na gile

I found a translation of the poem. I also realised that much of the novel takes place earlier than 1932, but certainly not as early as 1892, the year in which women were admitted to Glasgow University.

In the end The Albannach is about Murdo, the protagonist, finding his true self, his identity as a Highland Scot, a Gaelic speaker and a piper. Oddly enough, considering the misogyny, it turns out that the great Murdo, the man who leads his village from the horrors of Calvinism into the sunny uplands of Alba, seems to have been taught to play the pipes by his mother.

"'God about us!' exclaimed Duncan Lachlan Iain, as if in the greatest consternation. 'A woman piper! I won't believe it. The day I see a man bear a child that day I'll see a woman tune the pipes, and that day I'll know I am dead. Man, man, they have not the wind nor the trick of the fingers nor the musician's ear not the poet's heart.'"

The Albannach, Finn Mac Colla.

This evening I certainly felt unfit to play. Following the fan's suggestion that I work on more reels and jigs I've been working on Troy, Miss Girdle and Crossing the Minch.  I've been thwarted by an utter inability to hold pipes and bellows in a way that doesn't involve a numb arm, cricked neck and sore thumb. Maybe it's the drop in temperature - I've had to resort to playing in fingerless mitts. In the midst of all the physical discomfort I got the buzz: there really is no rhyme or reason to it.

Reprieve

Our session has had its ups and downs, but before we took a summer break things seemed to be on a definite downward slide with dwindling numbers, and the fan and I had several conversatons about calling it a day.

Then last month was a little livelier with the new fiddler. This month the fiddler returned, we had a concertina player (an actual Irish player, which caused some consternation among those who play Irish tunes), and a chap who turned up with a drum, a flute, a whistle, a set of Uillean pipes and a set of lowland pipes. These had two stunted drones, the rest of the tubing apparently being internal. He said they were made by a chap in Arran (presumably at Dunfinion) but his chanter was made by Morag's maker, Simon Hope. He knew some pipe standards, but his gracing was definitely not GHB style, and the whole sound was more like Northumbrian smallpipes.

I had a few wobbles caused by the presence of newcomers, people arriving in a clatter and arranging themselves mid-tune, and probably, also, lack of practice, but On the whole it went well, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I just hope we can keep it up.

Iain Beag

"Iain Beag would always be out when it was a question of piping. He was one of the best of pipers himself and would stand there leaning his weight on his artificial leg and tapping time with his one own foot while he went through all the changing parts of a piobaireachd, and he plainly in his glory...He had left a leg in France."

The Albannach, Fionn Mac Colla

I like the understated manner in which the artifical leg is explained - the lack of sentimentality, the slight humour.

This is an interesting novel. There are familiar themes: the oppressive religious upbringing, the bright boy who goes away to be educated, a brush with vice and debauchery, the failure to break free. There is a little piping, a little of domestic life in a croft, a fair amount of evocative description of the land.

There is a good chunk of Gaelic in it, some explained, some not. Murdo is a sent a poem, which has quite an impact on him, so it's a shame to have no hint at all of what it means. Google translate is no help at all, telling me firmly that 'Gile na gile do chonnarc' is Indonesian and that, translated into English, it reads 'na gile gile do chonnarc'.

But, the misogyny! Other than motherly Mrs O'Callaghan, who provides bed and board and asks no questions, every last women is fat, ugly, stupid to the point of being little better than an animal, gives herself airs, or moans and complains. They make sexual advances to him. One - a prostitute in Glasgow - passes on a STD. At least, that's how I read it. It's part of the novel that is written in almost a dream state, Murdo being drunk throughout (it's all rather Bloom in Dublin at this point), and I supose there will always be a certain amount of reticence in a novel of that time (1932) on such matters. There are apparently no women students at Glasgow. Women revolt and oppress him. To be fair he's not overly complimentary about the men, either, but at least they have faces and personalities; the women are all breasts, backsides and blather. They seem to have little in the way of opportunities - they bear 14 children, are shouted at and ignored by drunken, or adulterous and righteous, husbands, nurse each other in illness and their only relief seems to be sixpenny novelettes. I wonder to what extent that reflected the real lives of women in rural Scotland in the first part of the last century.