Compromise

I sat down with the fan to try out On the Ocean again. The moment he reminded me of the starting note I was away. A part done and dusted.

The B part is proving trickier. Partly because it simply is more complex, more varied than the A. It's also at least in part the top note, using (for the first time ever) my extra key. Trying to grace that note, or to move between it and something - anything - other than the next note down is quite a tall order. Having all of my top hand off the chanter, other than my thumb against the key, feels distinctly odd.

The B is also tricky because the fan sometimes forgets the variation he has created for me to make the tune playable within the range of the pipes, and sometimes he updates and amends the variations as we go along. It did my head in, as they say. In the end, he played, explained and guided me, I played, and then I wrote down the notes I had played. So the A was born dotless, as it were, never having existed in any other state for me. The B started dotless, and now has dots, which I suppose I will use to learn from. It's not necessarily the best of both worlds, but it gets me out of a corner.

Now, I wonder what would sound good with The Ocean?

The downside of the dotless life

I may have mentioned that I've had Out on the Ocean in my head a lot of late, so I decided to learn it. It's quite basic, it's lively, it's Irish, people at the session know it...

The fan had no dots for the version he plays. He printed some from the session for me. They were all in keys I can play...but they all had too many notes. So the fan taked me through the tune until I could play it. The B part was a challenge as some of those extra notes had to be turned into other notes. I actually used my extra keyed note, and discovered that gracing on that is a serious challenge. I played phrases over and over until I had them nailed. And then...life intervened, the tune went out of my head, and I 've only just this evening had the opportunity to get back to my pipes. I asked the fan to hum the tune, then he went out. I picked up my pipes and...no tune. Totally forgotten. I googled. I found a version. Got it. Picked up pipes and...no tune.

The fan will come home later and I'll be able to ask him to take me through the tune again. Hopefully the tune will sink in, my fingers will remember and the tune will be learned. But what would have happened if I'd got the tune from someone in a session? Someone just passing through and not intending to return. Am I supposed to play the tune for several hours solid and thus remember it forever from that one time of playing it? Or does learning from ear only really work if you are learning the tune from a neighbour or someone who you see every month or week at a session? I think that next time I go through the tune with the fan I'll be noting the dots down and getting the best of both worlds!

Great Expectations

It's funny that you define a goal, see a possibility, aim for it, reach it...and immediately, it seems, become dissatisfied with it. What looked from a distance to be enough turns out, on closer inspection, not to be enough at all, just a point on the way to getting somewhere that is still just out of reach.

I'm partly thinking about the tennis, of course. As Dustin Brown is quoted as saying in the paper today: "When I came to quallies, if someone would have said 'sign here for beating Rafa, making the second round and qualifying' I would have signed". But now, of course, it's not enough, because once he beat Rafa to go through to the third round he could see himself going through there, too, and suddenly it's not what he acheived that he can see, but that shining next round that he missed. I suspect Heather Watson and James Ward feel the same. They acheived more than they could have hoped for and all it does is hold out the possibility of more, and the disappointment of the failure to reach that.

Even when you do reach those shining Elysian fields and win a Grand Slam, or two, it's still not enough, because you want to do that again, and again.

It may be that this is because tennis is a competitive game, so that part of the point is always to be better than the person on the other side of the net. Part of it is perhaps the rewards. When you normally earn slightly less than it costs you to get to the tournament it must be such a relief to win a couple of year's salary in one week. And the better you do the easier it it to get into other tournaments: no need to qualify if your world ranking gets you straight in, and hopefully you'll be playing players ranked below you. Yes, life must become easier in all sorts of ways.

And yet. And yet there are players who slog away at minor tournaments, clambering through qualfiying rounds, hoping for wild cards, who in a career spanning years never make it past the first week of a grand slam. If it was fame or money or an easy life they were after they could have found easier ways of achieving those.

At the end of the day they must surely play because it is what they want to do, what they enjoy doing. And it is for themselves that somehow their best is never good enough, and acheiving something new is only a tantalising glimpse of more that might be possible if only they push on, one more time. It is, I think, a lot like playing music. Somehow there is always more to be achieved, more you could do, another round you could get to.

Session statistics

How many musicians make a session? Last night there were just the three of us... luckily the other two are multi-instrumentalists, they have a shared repertoire, and the fan and the other guy are getting the hang of my tunes. We were eventually joined by a chap learning some songs, and he gave us a couple, which the other two gamely accompanied him on.

Normally at a sesson I get to play so few times that I have a choice of tunes. Yesterday, by the time I'd done My Home Town, Bonnie Galloway, King of Laoise, the Nova Scotia set, Dargai (without Loch Bee because it took me three goes to remember how to start Dargai so I didn't want to risk it), Magersfontein and Flett and Fathr John I felt I was running out of tunes. The fan advised repeating one or two, but that feels like cheating, like turning back and retracing your steps in a walk, which is a pet hate of mine. I know that my tunes are becoming more familiar to fellow sessioneers so that they are happier to play along, but I'm starting to get bored and feel as though I am churning out the same old. I need (and how many times have I said this?) some new tunes, a couple of new sets , something short and lively and easy to learn...

The other guy did say he was getting the hang of Laoise but wasn't sure how many parts it had... I had to admit that it's just the two: I played some "unauthorised variations".

Despite the smallness of the gathering I had nerves again. I tried remembering to breathe, tried picturing myself safely at home playing to myself, but I think it works best when I just try to listen to the music.

My Home Town we played through four times, at that fan's suggestion ("one more time!") And it was the tune that went best, with both of the others joining in and it felt good.

The audience was small, too, with most people sitting outside in the sun. Mostly we had just the one, later joined by two others. They wandered off, but came back before they left to say how much they enjoyed it. The other fan was barely two, at a guess, and utterly mesmerised by music and musicians.

Learning from Allan

Although it is frowned upon in folk circles, I think on the grounds that it is not traditional, and can only give the general impression of a tune, I am pretty much wedded to learning tunes from dots. For those of us without regular first hand access to other musicians the only way to come across new repetoire is recordings, and for those of us who struggle to pick out tunes by ear, dots are a godsend. Dots enable me to play a whole range of tunes that actually I've never heard anyone else play. Dots also keep alive tunes that aren't much played. As long the dots exist an unplayed tune is never dead, only sleeping.

I do find that dots are, of course,  very useful for telling you which notes to play and in which order. What I don't find they help with so much is timing. I know they do tell you timing, but for some reason this is something I find difficult to read from dots. As to the feel of a tune, the way it is played, the way it sounds, well, I've found that there are as many ways to play a tune as there are people to play it, so I tend not to worry about that. Eventually a tune will decide whether it wants me to play it fast or slow, with a lilt or a swagger.

One thing I really haven't touched as yet is pibroch. The dots aren't that hard to come by, but in lipin g mythology pibroch is handed down between pipers through canntaireachd. It has itself has a glamour and a mystery to it, somehow, that prevents a casual approach, perhaps like opera. Most people would be happy to warble along to a pop classic come karaoke night at the local, but except for those few tunes that have crossed to the pop side of the floor (Nessun dorma) I expect few people would have a go at a piece of opera. Clearly there is a whole argument here about popular vs elite culture and so on, but in itself opera is considered to be difficult, a voice needs to be trained to attempt it.

So I've steered clear of pibroch. Then when we were looking, the fan and I, at some hypothetical sets for the hypothetical gig, he wanted to know if I hadn't got a slow air to kick a set off with. No, I said, I did not have a slow air. I don't play Irish pipes, these are Scottish pipes and there are reels, jigs, strathspeys, slow marches, quick steps and laments but no slow airs. But after a while it occurred to me that the Scottish piping equivalent of a slow air is pibroch. The one that came to mind was Lament for the Children. Julie has a song that uses it, and Allan MacDonald on the Seudan CD has it as the tune for the dark haired man.

I found the dots easily enough. I wanted to stick to the urlar, or ground - no doublings and variations for me! I tried it out on my chanter. I played it slow: too slow, as it turned out. I coudn't make head nor tale of it. Then I thought of Allan, and then I started to hear him in my head. Not the words, but the rhythm, the shape of the tune.

Fhir a' chinn duibh, thug mi gaol dhuit
Fhir a' chinn duibh, thug mi gradh dhuit
Thug mi gaol 's thug mi gradh dhuit
Thug mi gaol nach d' thug mi chach dhuit
Fir a' chin duibh thug mi gradh duit

It's not quite the same tune, according to the sleeve notes, but it's close enough for me to learn from, to learn as if I were learning pibroch through cannterairachd, learning from Allan.

Julie

Friday before last the fan and I scooted up to London for a gig. Traffic being what it is it took us two hours to get there, which meant we had to abandon all hope of having anything to eat, and threw ourselves into the foyer of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse just as doors opened.

The venue itself is a sight to behold. Smelling of new wood - it involves a lot of wood- with a painted ceiling and backdrop and lit by candles, it looks like a stage set itself. It feels very small and compact with the pit sitting (on benches) at the feet of the performers, and the stalls hanging over the stage, and the circle just above.

I imagine an original theatre of this age would be full of cat-calls, heckling, audience pariticpation, small children, old folk, animals, food, drink and life in general. This modern incarnation is rather more sedate and furnished with officious, verging on rude, staff, who insist that any edibles are in a bag, coats are not draped over the sides, cameras are not used. The ban on cameras seems particularly iodiotic in such an unusual and interesting venue, and surely it could do no harm to allow pictures before and after the performances.

The performance itself was Julie Fowlis, Eamon Doorley, Duncan Chisholm, Tony Byrne and a double bass player,who didn't seem to be comfortable with the evening. He spent time looking at his right hand on the neck of his instrument as if he wasn't sure where the notes were, and fiddled with various sheets of music on a stand...

I do like Julie's voice, although I have to say the thought of an entire evening of it wasn't my idea of a good evening out. I haven't listened much to the CDs of hers that the fan has, but they seem to me to be overly polished and perhaps a little insipid as a result of that.

As a live act I have to say she's well worth seeing. She does a good line in chat to the audience. Some of the ballads were beautiful, especially where she accompanied herself on harmonium. There were some lively instrumental sets and some mixed sets, with Julie flipping between whistles and voice. She got some audience participation for Smeorach Chlann Domhnaill and declared that we sounded like the London Gaelic Choir. There were some gaelic speakers in the (very appreciative) audience, which must have helped.

Eamon cracked a joke or two, Julie signed CDs afterwards, and all in all it was a good evening. Improvments? It would have been good to have heard Julie's pipes, and I still wish we'd managed to have time for dinner...

Less is more

We went to a session yesterday. Technically the fan runs it with the fiddle player, and technically it's an Irish/Celtic sesson. In practise either the fan or the fiddler can't make it and the very few regulars have a tendency to whack in something English, or American, or Italian. We've had a one or two absolutely cracking evenings at this sesson, but it's dwindling, not to say dying. Yesterday there were only four of us there. I play no Irish, one played no Scots. Two of us were mono-instrumental. Luckily the other two played five instruments between them, although one was another fiddle.

The slower, more relaxed atmosphere was helpful. The pub itself was half empty with most of the drinkers sat outside enjoying the cool weather that is passing for late spring around here. Rather than waiting patiently for gaps I cheerfully joined in with going round the table and taking turns. This meant I was able to trundle out three sets and three standalone tunes. The sets were pairs only, and none was perfect, but mostly it went well and I even gave Father John his first outing. But really, three sets and three standalone without resorting to The Rowan Tree or Bonnie Galloway. Surely this is progress writ large.

We were profusely thanked as we packed up by a group of Venezualans who had enjoyed the music and streamed it live to family at home, in part because it reminded them of the happy days when they lived next door to a Scot who played his "gaita" every morning. Whether the Scot was in Venezuala or the Venezualans in Scotland, or, indeed, if both parties were elsewhere at the time I didn't discover. It's a funny old world...but always good to see music bringing people together, overcoming language and geography, evoking memories...

(I've forgotten to menton that the Monkey and I have been together for two very fruitful and enjoyable years. Much as Morag got me going it has been the Monkey who has been the making of me as a piper, I feel.)