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.

Fantasy album

This is pretty much what I played this afternoon.

Bloody Fields of Flanders/Hills of Perth
I think of this as the geography set because it has fields and hills, but it's also a homecoming, from Flanders fields to Perthshire. I really need to record this pair.

The Highland Brigade at Magersfontein/Heroes of Vittoria
The heroes set.

Women of the Glen/Sound of Sleat
Geography again - glens and sounds. Probably I should record this again, as hopefully it's in better shape than it was back in January.

John Macmillan of Barra/South Georgia Whaling Song
Always known to me as Father John's Boat Trip.

My Home Town
Because travel and being away and homecoming all imply the existence of a home.

Heroes of St Valery/Heights of Dargai/The Shores of Loch Bee/Flett from Flotta
This was a rather marathon set, the pipe equivalent of the rather indulgent guitar solo adding 20 minutes to an otherwise run of the mill tune. A heroes' homecoming set, this, from St Valery and Dargai back to the shores of a loch and a Scottish Island. To be honest it's rather too long, and I am still not sure about the Dargai/Bee/Flett combination.

Bonus track was Amazing Grace, which I suppose is a spiritual homecoming.  Clearly the album will be called No Place Like Home and the cover will feature my feet wearing ruby slippers. Now I just need to consider who I might recruit for backing...!

Done and dusted

I have too much to do. I needed to shop on my way home this evening, cook dinner, and bake cakes. Once the cakes are done that’s the end of that…until the next time it’s the fan’s turn to take cakes into work, and dinner needs cooking every day of the week, unless we starve: even takeways would need ordering and collecting and eating every day.

Sometimes I think that work – my job – is the problem, in which case time off work would be the answer. The house needs cleaning, but if I took a week off and scoured and polished and reorganised the entire house from top to bottom, well, the dust would start accumulating again before I’d even got to the end. There is no meaningful way in which housework is ever “done”.

I could just spend that week knitting, and that way I’d get my jumper finished and make a good start on a shawl for my cousin’s baby. I’d almost certainly also think of a dozen other things I wanted to knit with stash yarn, and that’s before I’ve even thought of buying more yarn. I could decide that when the jumper and the shawl are done I’d be finished with knitting…but where would be the fun in that?

It’s ridiculous, really, this feeling that I have lots to do, lots to get done. That somehow the only good state to be in is one of having Got Stuff Done. It’s treating life like Christmas. The way that you think I just need to clean and shop and write cards, bake a cake, get a tree and put the decorations up, and post packages and travel or feed people and make up beds, and write thank you cards and take the decorations and the tree down…and then at last it’s all over! Which is when you realise you’ve not enjoyed the run up, and the day itself has come and gone, and all you can do is start looking forward to next year and promising yourself that you’ll enjoy the doing of it, the preparations, the doing of stuff, and not just look forward to twelfth night when you’ve got it all done. It’s the doing that is as important as the having got it done.

Why do I mention this? I suppose it’s partly feeling that the endless slew of stuff to get done is a zero sum game, whereby if I go home via the supermarket, cook dinner and bake cakes there won’t be any time for piping. If I go to the allotment I won’t get any further along with the knitting. I if do the crossword I can’t write letters. I can’t decide if I need to make piping more of a “must do” item – give it a higher priority, if you like – than other things on the list, or whether I just need to go with the flow, do the pressing stuff, and then whatever I feel like doing. I worry that I don’t feel much like piping at the moment, but then sometimes I don’t feel like knitting or reading or tackling the crossword.

I’m also wondering whether I am getting bogged down in the concept of a sort of piping D-Day (maybe that should be P-Day), on which the piping will be done. I will have learned all the tunes I want to learn, be able to play them all note perfectly on demand at sessions, never miss a grace note, never lose pressure. I will, at last, be A Real Piper! But actually, that sounds rather dull, and surely the only thing to do then will be to move on to something else. I need to enjoy the getting there more, enjoy doing stuff, not getting stuff done.

Good company

I was playing this evening, for the first time in days. I played Return to India because I've been humming it a lot, Dargai, Bee, Flett, John Macmillan. 

As I played I thought of of how there are some friends we see very rarely, then we meet, and after they have gone we say "what lovely people! What good company they are! I can't believe they've really been here for five hours, is it really almost 1am? We should see them more often!" Somehow, though, what with one thing and another, you know it will be a year or 18 months or more before you finally get round to meeting again.

Hope it's not like that with the monkey, because that is how I was thinking as I was playing: how enjoyable it was, how I should do it more often.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Making a stand

I try not to think much about posture, simply because it was something that I used to have to think about too often. My mother seems to have spent most of my formative years poking me between the shoulder blades with the injunction to "stand up straight, child", only varied by "sit up straight". The only thing I remember my ballet teaching saying was "head up, bottom in, tummy in", and when I acquired a new violin teacher I remember her opening salvo being "I don't like the way you stand..."

I do sometimes suggest to the fan that his playing might be improved if he didn't hunch over his fiddle while sat on an armed chair, which pins his elbows to his sides. Perhaps it is my aversion to thinking of my own posture that has stopped me realising that if I don't sit up straight then my drones drop onto the stock, and my hands come in close to my body, making me more likely to rest my wrist on the bellows. Not that this moment of enlightenment helped this evening when I found it difficult to get comfortable.

I've been dreaming a lot of my pipes recently. I don't have problems with posture, bellows, wrists or anything else in my dreams. In fact, last night, in a real throwback to my adolescence, I dreamed I could fly, and all the time I was flying I had my pipes in my arms. I'm not sure what an interpreter of dreams would make of this, but I wonder if it's linked to yesterday's session, when I made plenty of mistakes, but did not have one moment of stage fright.

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.)

Please release me

I still keep pondering how it seems that tunes choose me, rather than me choosing them. I spotted a discussion on the session recently where people identified tunes that they knew, and liked, but somehow never could play. Some of them were extra long or complex, but on the whole it was about tunes that just didn't click, one way or another.

Conversely there are some tunes that just won’t go away. Although I think I have tunes in my head, at the hummable level or below, most of the time, one of my key tune points is when I am cleaning my teeth in the evening. The moment I stand with toothbrush over the sink the tunes kick in. For a long time, rather randomly because I can’t think when I last heard it played, the tooth cleaning tune was Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. Sometimes that tune has a break and then the substitute has been something from the first act of La Traviata. More recently both tunes were replaced by Horsburgh Castle. It always seems to take me a moment to identify it, and it always seems like such a good tune, and then I realise what it is and get hit with a tiny bit of disappointment, because it’s one I can already play, but don’t get excited about. Unlike the Hebrew Slaves this one has popped up during the rest of the day, too.

At the moment all tunes, it seems, have been replaced by The Eagle’s Whistle. I’m not even sure if it came out of nowhere or whether listening to either Sealbh or The Sea Stallions recalled it to mind. Either way I hadn't thought of it for ages, much less played it, but it seems to be always in my head, round and round, at teeth-cleaning time and throughout the day. I wonder if it’s trying to tell me something.

Crossroads

I've not being playing much of late. Work has been difficult, and then we've been away. Perhaps I needed a break from it after a period when I've played pretty much every day.

I've vaguely been feeling that in a way I've got as far as I can go, that I've hit a plateau, or a comfort zone. Hopefully it's not a brick wall. Hopefully it's actually more of a crossroads. I can play in an OK sort of a way that people can apparently enjoy listening to. I can play in a way that I enjoy, and know enough tunes to keep playing for around an hour, without having to repeat myself. I still enjoy learning new tunes: not just the point of having learned, having acquired a new tune, but the actual breaking a tune into pieces, putting it back again, playing bits over and over. I know enough tunes that I can play three or four times at a session and not have to play the same tunes each time.

So I feel I've arrived at a point that we might call "good enough". My playing is OK, it sounds nice, people are happy to listen, I'm happy to play. I could stop here, maybe sometimes learn more tunes, do my thing at sessions, play to amuse myself at home. This could be as far as I get on my piping journey, and I come across various folk at sessions who seem to have just got to a stage where they are never going to set the world alight, but they are happy with what they do, and it's enough.

I could stop here...but I don't want to. I want to keep on getting better, I want to move on to the next stage, but I am not sure what the next stage looks like or how I get there. I have wondered about finding a teacher, especially to help get me back to holding the bellows in a way that is comfortable. I feel I need some more solid goals and someone to help get me there. The fan suggests that this is the stage to move on to performance in some small way. He thinks we could make a duo, although he has a potential third in mind. I'm not even sure how you go about asking somone if they'd like to play with you, out of sessions, but perhaps only to work on sets for sessions. How do you even go about choosing someone to ask?

For now I suppose I just sit here, at the crossroads, and play my pipes, and hope that eventually the way will become clear, I will be able to get up and carry on my journey.

The plot thickens

I was a little bemused by the title of "Father" John Macmillan, associating, as I do, the title with the Catholic church, because I vaguely believe, inasmuch as I think about such things at all, that the Scottish Isles are generally non-conformist. However, Wikipedia tells me that over 70% of the population of Barra is Catholic. I've also managed, without much effort at all, to track down details of Father John, Catholic priest, born 1880, died 1951; writer of songs, singer, folklorist, popular priest, and friend to Compton  Mackenzie, the author.

I'm having less luck finding out about Norman Macdonald of Broadford, Skye, who may, or may not, have written the tune and named it for Father John. Nor can I find anything to shed light on why Donald Macleod dropped "Father" from the title...or why Deaf Shepherd decided to add it, whichever the case may be.

The Whistlebinkies apparently play Father John on their album, Claddagh where they attribute it to Norman Macdonald and call it Father John. I don't have this album...yet. The review in Common Stock sheds no further light. I will have to check Synergy album notes when I am in the car.

Negative

The fan has been talking about the uncanny valley today. It's that gap between real and fake that causes gut reaction, that "eew!" moment when you take take a step back, realising that what you thought was real, and in this specific context, human, turned out to be fake, or an android.

It has struck a chord because I'm in the throes of two things which are no longer what I thought they were, and I am having to get to know them all over again. The first is a sock pattern. It's a different construction from anything I've used before, which has been challenging in itself. But the real stinker is nothing to do with construction, but with colour. The first sock has a purple pattern on a cream ground. The knitting chart, so as not to distract those who want, green and red socks, say, or pink and orange (believe me, someone might) is in black and white. So for the whole sock white=cream and black =purple.

The problem is that sock two is like a negative of the first: it has a white pattern on a purple ground, so now white=purple and black=cream. The main pattern, once I got going, isn't a problem, but the increases at the gussets are, and I keep having to stop to think which colour is which.

The fan suddenly spoke up this evening to say he didn't think I was playing Miss G quite right. I pointed out that I was following the dots, which I presented to him. He hummed through the dots and had to admit I was right (it happens from time to time!) He poked about the web and found a different version of Miss G, which is almost the same as mine, but not quite. My eyes are reading one set of dots and my fingers want to play another...And all along, "my" Miss G was an imposter, just like Barbara Wallace and the other girls who visited Dr Wiseman in Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair, which is keeping me entertained while I knit, knit, knit my back to front sock in time for Christmas.

Lady Mondegreen

Aha! Listening to Jack Tamson's fabulous Bairns, and what do I find (among some pretty fantastic music), but Lady Mondegreen, aka The Bonnie Earl O Moray.

The best seasonal mondegreen I know is Strawberry Ships, but the one I remember most from childhood is "You eat your small corner". I took Small Corner to be some sort of porridge, heaven only knows why.

Eating an elephant

One of the many fatuous management phrases you come across these days is the one about change management and any hugely big task: how do you eat an elephant? The, not particularly amusing, answer is "a teaspoon at a time". The idea is that any really big job can be tackled if taken in small enough  pieces. Well, learning the pipes is certainly an elephant of a job, and sometimes I do feel as though I am proceeding at a teaspoon-sized rate.

But, really, what kind of an idiot thinks they can get through an entire elephant with a teaspoon? Fair enough if you don't mind which side of the end of the century you're finishing it, but personally I have a limited amount of time. How many five minute practices would it take me to hit the fabled 10,000 hours? I think I've mentioned this before. Even at 20 minutes a day it works out as the rest of  my life, assuming I reach the same old age attained by my great aunts and grandmother, and then some.

And I do wonder if actually there is value, apart from clocking up the hours, in playing for longer. Obviously playing for longer helps build up stamina. Clearly I will never have to play non stop for an hour, but I suppose it's the same as cars being able to go much faster than the legal limit. It means that when you are at the legal limit the car is well within its comfort zone, and if I can play for an hour non-stop, for instance, then 20 minutes or so should be a doddle, as should playing for 5 or 10 minutes at a time in chunks over a longer period.

Stamina aside I wonder if it helps to have time to go over, and over, and over a tune. To play something, or several somethings, else and then play the tune again and again. Does that speed up the learning process or is it better to play something and then leave it? Sometimes when I play in this way I feel I get better each time, but equally often, it seems, I get steadily worse, or improve to a certain point and then lose it totally. I remember from exam revision days we were told that you can only concentrate for 20 minutes at a time and should take a short break after that, and then breaks of increasing length interspersed with shorter periods of work, then begin again after a long break. Sometimes when I repeat a tune endlessly, break with another tune and go back to the first things have got better. And some times they have got worse, often quite a lot worse. I can literally got from almost having a tune and just fiddling about with the finer points of gracing to having not a clue how even to start the tune. (The fan has noted before that I am living proof of the fact that just because you can do a thing once doesn't mean you can do it again...)

Generally speaking I play until something else becomes pressing (dinner in the oven, the phone ringing), or I get tired, or I get really frustrated and fed up with playing . Sometimes I can work through frustration, discomfort, memory blocks and sheer idiocy, and sometimes I can't.

Whether it's a teaspoon, a ladle or a JCB, there is still an awful lot of elephant to be eaten.

(Can you believe - my 400th blog post!! No wonder I don't have enough time to play pipes!!)

Smalls

I always feel that "girdle" is somehow a snigger-inducing word. It reminds me of adverts I used to see in the weekend papers for Miss Mary Girdles and the Playtex 18 hour girdle, featuring larger ladies being reduced to unfeasibly sylphlike proportions thanks to a swathe of heavy duty elastic. Less amusingly it's a symbol of the restrictions of women's lives: I am sure that there is an episode in The Edible Woman where  woman's reluctance to wear a girdle or similar contraption is taken to be pretty much evidence of moral delinquency, if not downright insanity. These days it is more likely to conjure up the lovely, and surely girdle-free Ms Lawson, and her girdlebuster pie.

I was rather bemused, when googling these pieces of underwear to discover that you can still buy such things... The only girdle I have is Miss Girdle, and she's coming on OK. She has speeded up since the last time I recorded, perhaps become more uneven. This is a prime example of slowing up on the tricky bits and racing through the easier bits. She's also almost totally denuded, poor girl, of any but the essential gracenotes, which seems a shame.

I've mentioned before that I've a mind to pair Miss G with Horsburgh. My problem has been that I felt Horsburgh was going to be one of those tunes that somehow I never quite manage to learn. The A part I've had for ages, the B part, I felt, was eluding me. I've pushed the dots away this evening to test things out and I find that I know the whole tune, although there is one bar in the first version of the B part that gives me pause for thought, and I have a slight tendency to repeat the first version of the B part, or to run straight into the second version. But on the whole I *do* know it, and now just need to work as getting it better, with Miss G.

I've still not written about Inner Sound. This is partly down to wondering how useful it is to write about CDs - the fan (not originally, but I've forgotten where he borrowed it from) says that writing about music is like dancing about architecture...and he has a point, although generally language is our main medium for expressing thoughts on all aspects of life, so why not music? Less philosophically the CD is in the car where I have had it on permanent loop for 3 or 4 weeks, and I don't want to bring it in in case I forget to take it back out. Sometimes you are recommended to have two copies of a cookery book or gardening book: one for the kitchen/shed and one for the bedside. Inner Sound is definitely a two-copy CD: one for the car and one for indoors.
 
Check this out on Chirbit

Bridge over troubled water

Life isn't always straightforward, things don't always go as you hope. But there are always pipes.

Got the first part of Braemar by heart. The second and third are there, but I needed a prompt to find them. Getting there.

Missing

Missing the fan. He'll be back the day after tomorrow.

Missing the 27 degrees and glorious sun we were promised today. Where is the summer? I've had to stop playing tonight because my hands are too cold. (I need to knit fingerless mitts for piping in).

Missing the end of the first part of the Cudgel. I had it, but it has gone AWOL today. Lost the dots, too, so couldn't even check.

Missed a day's playing yesterday. Something big and unexpected cropped up at work this week to go with all the big and expected stuff. I got home late and after dinner I spent an hour an a half at the plot and after that I was very tired and curled up with a book and a cup of tea until it got dark and I went to bed.

Missing the fan. Did I already mention that? Only two more sleeps and he'll be home again.

Out of the woodwork

After the recent reappearance of Teribus and the Barren Rocks this week I've found myself playing Captain wotsit: the second, long abandoned, half of the Nova Scotia set. As I played the A part I assumed I'd crash out at the end of the second repeat, having no idea at all how the B part went. The mice knew.

Not getting to play for very long each day this week. It's been a bit chaotic, delayed by traffic a couple of days, a hair appointment one day, when I resorted to chanter practice only. But it's going OK, and I'm feeling relaxed about my piping, am enjoying it. I'm pleased with the quality of my gracing: I'm really getting some of those blips and chirrups instead of clunky notes. I could still do with more grace notes, more speed, more accuracy.

In other news I found (via the Session) this interesting website on Scottish music, I have two courgettes growing at the plot and about half the world's ant population on the artichokes, and I broke my ipod! I love my ipod: it allows me to remove the dross from Radio 4 and listen only to the best bits, and I really miss it. I've had to order a replacement....