Accidental

I didn't start this month with the intention of playing daily, but somehow or other it just happened, bar one day. I have just been in the mood to play and to learn new tunes. The fan yesterday simultaneously chided me for trying to learn too many new tunes at once and handed me another.

I'm partly wondering whether I will learn new tunes faster if everything I play is new and my brain is therefore always in learning mode, but it's also just that the tunes I love and want to play at the moment are all new tunes. I wish that I could say that two whole months of daily piping have brought my playing on in leaps and bounds, that I have learned a pile of tunes, but that's sadly not true.  I am not even sure if I have formed a permanent habit. But I've enjoyed myself, and that's surely the point.

Piping traditions

I've just finished reading Bridget Mackenzie's Piping Traditions of the Outer Isles of the West Coast of Scotland. This is a really informative book, covering the history of piping, but also touching on the way of life in the islands over the years, migration, island folklore and some military history.

There are some stories of Lewis pipers sitting drones over their right shoulders, or playing with their right hands on the top of the chanter. There are anecdotes aplenty on the various uses and abuses of alcohol in relation to pipes (I don't think I'll be pouring any wee drams into my pipe bag, thanks all the same!) There is also quite a lot of information about the different piping styles and how the full range has dwindled over the years in favour of a more regimented approach where there is considered to be a right and a wrong way to play a tune. Some of that seems to be related to the reach and influence a single teacher can have, although it seems some teachers actively encouraged pipers to interpret the music in their own way. It's one to dip in and out of, peppered with anecdotes, never dry or dull.

Unfortunately her reluctance to even name currently competing pipers means that it really stops in the back end of the last century. I suppose that stated reluctance should also have alerted me to the fact that when she says "piping" she means GHB, competition piping, pipe bands and the army. There is no mention of the cauld wind revival, piping for dancing is only mentioned in passing, and pipers in folk bands not at all.

There is also no discussion about why girls were not taught to play while their brothers were, although only one judge is noted as actively saying he disliked women playing pipes. One or two clearly did learn alongside brothers but abandoned playing, perhaps as family duties overtook them. She doesn't say when pipe bands started to accept women pipers, whether there was ever an absolute prohibition on them joining or whether it was just custom and practice. Perhaps there are women  players whom she has overlooked simply because they are not competition pipers.

Still, these are minor quibbles about an interesting book and a good read.

Five things - pipes in the Great Tapestry of Scotland

I discovered the Great Tapestry through one of the knitting blogs that I follow and had a book detailing each of the panels for Christmas. The embroidered panels tell the history of Scotland, from rocks rising out of the ceaseless sea to the reconvening of the Scottish parliament. Along the way it takes in new towns, whaling, tenements, Dolly the sheep, paisley shawls, the King James bible, the Jacobite rising and Pytheas the Greek.

There isn't a panel that specifically addresses music or piping, but pipes make appearances in several panels, mostly in the borders rather than in the main design.

Panel 38 - Blind Harry. Pipes in one of the border motifs.

Panel 40. Flodden. The central figure is playing a rather odd, single-droned bagpipe. Text in the panel refers to the flooers of the forest, a pipe tune played at funerals, which I first knew of through the Fureys.

Panel 92. The Scots in India. A sets of pipes is one of the items in the panel's border alongside a mix of items including a steam train, a tea pot, an elephant and a tiger.

Panel 101. Highland games. You can't have games without pipes!

Panel 134. D-Day. A piper leads out other service men and women, playing Hieland Laddie. (Women feature in many of the panels...none of them playing pipes.)

Panel 135. The first Edinburgh festival. Relegated to the panel border again.

Do not disturb

I played this evening with no dots. I managed the first two parts of the Horse with no problem at all. Hills of Perth was fine, except that the 3rd part was mysteriously missing and nothing would bring it to mind. Still, when I tried this earlier in the week it only had two parts, so I can't grumble.

It took a number of false starts to get to Kilbowie Cottage, and when the first part appeared I didn't recognise it. Bits of the 2nd and 3rd part were there, which is worse than earlier in the week when I managed both parts in full without too much trouble.

I had real problems with St Valery. I went round and round, pulling out Father John, bits of Leaving Barra and Vittoria,  but not a note of Valery could I play, hum or picture. After a while I had a quick peek at the dots and noted the opening four notes. That didn't help. Playing the high A, thumb grace, grip that I know is in the 4th part didn't help. I went back to the dots and looked over the first part. It was like looking at a foreign language: I could see the dots, but they made no sense. Then right at the end of the first part I suddenly recalled the tune, ran off to try it, but struggled to get the first part. Again, a real regression from earlier in the week.

But I can't decide what to do for the best. Should I let the tune ferment undisturbed and wait for it to bubble up when it is ready? It's a tactic I've tried in the past and sometimes it works and other times the tune simply falls into disuse and I forget I was even trying to learn it. Should I go back to dots? Should I listen to the tune more (I've got Springwell on the CD player now) and hope it comes that way? Or should I just keep trying to play it unaided? Even after all these years of learning new tunes it seems I have no clue what the best way to learn might be.

Recording is of an established tune (for me) and a session favourite. I am  hoping it might demonstrate a general improvement in my playing. It's My Home Town.


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Speak to me

"Donald asked RSM Maclean 'Well, John, and how is the pipe going?' John replied, 'She's going so well she's speaking  to me'."

Archie Maclean, as quoted in Piping Traditions of the Outer Isles of the West Coast of Scotland, Bridget Mackenzie, Birlinn, 2013.

Is this speaking the same as, or related to, the buzz, I wonder? Note that the pipe is referred to in the singular, and that, like cars, motorbikes, ships and countries, it takes the feminine. I have always given names and genders to objects of importance. The Monkey is male.

And while we are on the subject of the naming of things I note that the Shores of Loch Bea/Bee aka The Sands of Loch Bea/Bee is formally known as The Glasgow Police March Past. 

Also on terminology, tunes, and poems or songs, are not written or composed in this book, but are 'made'.

I'm intrigued by the number of pipers who went on to be schoolteachers (not necessarily of music) or in to the police (where the pipe bands might have been a draw, I supose). I don't know if this was just the case in the Outer Isles.

Here's a tune. Braemar, again, and still tightening up in the same places, still not relaxed with it, still struggling not to mix the 1st and 3rd parts.


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This and that

I've had a tune in my head all day. It felt like a B part. Once the A part turned up sometime after lunch I was able to identify it as Heroes of St Valery. As it was so clear in my head I was sure I could play it, although I know when I had the dots before I abandoned in disgust as it seemed all but unplayable. The dots took some tracking down, but once I had them I discovered that it's a nice straightforward tune, that it was the 3rd and 4th parts in my head, that I need to sort the gracing on it.  And if I add it to my repertoire will it go with Vittoria (as per Mr McLeod) or Home Town (pace Mr Gillies), or something else?

While we were lunching a wedding party arrived. I must have caught a flash of button on jacket because I wasn't all all surprised when I saw that the groom and, presumably his father, were in kilts. I refrained from asking where the piper was....

No wedding in the outer isles is complete without a piper, it seems, as I read Piping Traditions of the Outer Isles of the West Coast of Scotland. It's full of snippets of random facts of island and piping life that I know that the fan *really* enjoys when I read them out in bed, over breakfast... It's a little like the book of Matthew, with various pipers begetting other pipers, marrying each other's sisters and teaching each other's sons. I have been glad to read about tunes I play, pipers I've heard or whose tunes I have played, but sorry that there are glaring gaps (no James Duncan MacKenzie of Back), apparently to prevent swaying piping judges!

I'm playing around with Return from India (needs to be faster) and The Rejected Suitor: feels like a set. Also fiddling about with The Hag at the Churn and The Pipe on the Hob. Yesterday I played with the fan who suggested that Miss Girdle and Troy could both be slower. They need to be tidier, too.

That was a bit of a first: normally he asks for more speed. Another first was me being able to fling myself into a tune he had already started on (Braemar). I had less luck the second time as he insisted he was playing a tune we'd already done, I knew we hadn't and thought it was Magersfontein. Turned out to be Battle of the Somme, which I don't play, which explains my inability to join in that one.

Apparently I am still playing every day...

And here is St Valery, with intermittent gracing and some errors.


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Too much information

I listen to lots of CDs. Various tunes sound familiar, but where do I know them from? I know at least Jackie Coleman's from Skipinnish's Irish set, but does the fan play it, or it it a Sea Stallions tune? Siuthadaibh, bhalacha sounds as though it might be on one of Mr MacInnes's CDs, but not by that name. Mr Gillies mentions the Currie brothers ("one of the most notable piping families in Cape Breton of tbe 1930s and '40s"), and these are surely related to the Currie Cousins who give the name to a set on Piob is Fidheall. Then there is Michael Grey, whose name is familiar, although I am sure I've not come across  John MacLean, and perhaps I even know the name out of a  piping context. (But, no, it's this MG I have come across recently in relation to a pipe tune - but which?)

I get as far as The Earl of Seaforth's Salute, at which point everything else ceases to matter: like Bach cello suites it draws you in, binds you down, forces you to concentrate, causes you not to exist beyond a heart that hears the music. Where have all these tunes come from? Where do I know then from? I don't care. As long at this pibroch plays I don't care about anything much at all, just the music.