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.

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.)

Five things - fiddle CDs

The violin was one of the first instruments I came across in life. My father had one handed down from a family member, although I've no idea who, or what they played on it, nor why my father never learned himself. I always knew I would learn, and eventually I did for a few years, but never really got on with it. I didn't hear any fiddle playing: Dad's taste ran to Yehudi Menuhin, Aaron Rosand and the Mendelssohn  violin concerto. 

These days the fan is the one playing the fiddle and my preference is for Scottish, of course, although both Irish and Scandi figure in  my CD collection. Here are five of my favourites.

Eclection. Gabe McVarish. Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton...a truly eclectic mix, with the added bonus of Jarlath Henderson on pipes.

Welcome here again. Martin Hayes and Denis Cahill. One of my favourite duos. Not your usual Irish fiddle, this album is measured, slow and contemplative. Hearing tunes played this slowly, and so plainly  - just fiddle and very discrete guitar - makes you really listen and rethink Irish music.

All dressed in yellow. Fiddler’s Bid. Mostly Scottish, Shetland at that,  with the odd foray into Scandinavia, and one of the liveliest and most uplifting albums I have.  I make no apology for giving it its second five things mention.

Vamm. The album is eponymous. More Scots and Scandi stuff.  

Canaich. I've mentioned this - the first in a trilogy - in my five things on Scottish CDs. It's incredibly evocative of Scottish landscape, I love the use of the spoken word in it, shame about the wrong sort of pipes...

Just squeezing in Salmander by Bellevue Rendevous. Gavin Marwick composed some of the tunes and there are Brittany tunes  and some Klezmer among the Scandi stuff. 

Thunderbolt City

The fan said today that I am doing better than he expected. It's not that he thought I wasn't capable, just that he doubted my ability to stick at it, given how many other instruments I've tried.

There are people who marry the first person they meet, and are happy 50, 60 or 70 years later. Many of us are less lucky and have to hunt around, which might entail everything from one night stands and disastrous dates to moving in, to give it a go... As I've mentioned before I played recorder at school - I think many people of my generation did. Before that, at my first primary school, I remember playing triangle for Away in a Manger and I have a tiny scrap of a memory that involves a concertina, but I can't have been older than four at the time. There was the violin, played to please my father. There was the trumpet, which was hopefully close enough to the baritone my sister played to be equally fun without being close enough to annoy her. That went well, and in the end it was a maths O level that came between us because I couldn't do both, and maths seemed more pressing at the time.

There was a guitar - Stairway to Heaven - taught by someone else's boyfriend... There were penny whistles, because Dad thought they'd be fun; there were ocarinas because they came in pretty colours. There was even a mouth organ, but I have no idea where it came from, and we never really worked out how to play it properly. The mandolin, of course, the mandola and bouzouki (too big).

Even when I started with my pipes they were a poor substitute. I'd fallen in love with those big, hunky GHB. I had romantic visions of me on a loch side with my pipes and the music. I wasn't prepared for the harsh reality of marching bands, uniforms, and kissing goodbye to my weekends.

And then, after a while, I stopped pining for those big, chunky, hunky GHB and fell in love with my little Monkey. Why would we not be together forever?

I'm pondering whether or not I feel I want to play every day in September. I've played today, just in case, but also because its the last of my 9 days of holiday. To mark the occasion I've also recorded! This is Cabot and Captain, again, this time with the Whaling Song. I start way too slow, partly because if I am too fast I go into Captain instead of the trail. I then fumble because I realise I have the dots, and worry they will distract me. I speed up. I make a few fluffs. I go through each tune twice.  I fluff in Whaling where there are what the fan calls snaps - at least, if they aren't there Id like them to be, but somehow they make me forget the next note. Whaling is too fast - you cold never sing at this speed. Tempo is something I must get fixed. No drones - and how thin the pipes sound without them. A bit lost. Which makes sense really, because pipes and drones belong together.


Check this out on Chirbit

Quick and easy

Back in the days before I was a piper I always felt that I want an instrument that was quick and easy. Whistles and recorders, for all their faults, can be whipped out with no notice and played upon at once. My violin (and it was a violin, not a fiddle, as I was taught - or bullied and demoralised - in the classical tradition) had to come out of its case, have the rest attached, it had to be tuned, the bow tightened and rosin applied...it all felt like a palaver.

Now, you'd think the pipes would be just as bad. I have to remember where I left them, get them out of the case, strap on the bellows, strap on the pipes, tune the drones; but somehow it doesn't take very long and it doesn't matter. What I would like now is some gadget that sets up to record instantly without me having to find batteries with more than 5 minutes' life left, or fire up the laptop and find the connector leads, and, and, and... If this marvellous gadget could record everything and just let me snip out the section I wanted at the end that would be great.

Because I didn't bother with recording this evening I can't share what is probably my first ever go at getting twice through the Tree and then twice through the Rocks. Also on the menu this evening, Galloway and Teribus, Flett, the King and the Whistle. Oh, and the Banks of Allen.