But, by and large, the Scottish and the Irish repertoire, except the slow airs, tend to follow, or will follow, a given beat/rhythm/pattern. Then, there is the classical pipe musical which is in a category all its own, and it follows pulses more than beats. Going back to John Knox and others criticizing the Catholics because they weren’t following the written word of the Bible.īut you said that without the written word, it is more mechanical. And the emphasis that many Scots significantly put on the written word.
And later, historically, on top of all this, is the Reformation. What do you start with? You start with the written music. Well they had to be playing everything in unison. With 72 pipers and 20 drummers, I mean, they are hug bans. In the early 1840s and 50s, it’s the invention of pipe bans. At this time, the army became another reinforcing influence of this. It has a lot to do with Scottish history, the fact that the pipes were banned for a while and the tradition was almost completely severed, and then the attempt to rescue it by the aristocracy in the early 19 th Century, and then codifying it and making competition in order to select the best pipers. Now, that is probably, in the world of folk music, I would say, it is an extreme case of following the written music. For example, we work on a practice chanter, which is a lot quieter than the big pipes, and basically we’re able to pin things down in very fine detail. I always stress the importance of having a teacher who teaches students what the proper exercises are to strengthen their weaknesses.
#YOUR FACE HERE FOR BAGPIPE PLAYER HOW TO#
However, there must be some kind of oral instruction that goes along with it, because otherwise, people would sound very mechanical and never be able to figure out how to properly do the embellishments and so on. We learn it by beginning to understand how to play with written music guiding us. So what is the specificity of the traditional music? How do you learn it?
And the jazz community never caught onto them. Other groups have followed their path-breaking foray into musical culture, but they too fell into this way of improvisation, they went into the field of jazz and they lost their traditional audience, following. I used to represent a band from Toronto called “Rare Air,” that basically in the late 70’s was one of the first bands to use the pipes with rock music, and they spent time in Brittany, serious time, and sought out the best musicians they could, and came back playing a lot of music, but they were unique. But there are very few pipers who improvise. I consider myself a humble student of the Scottish bagpiping tradition, which extended into Ireland and Brittany, but I seek to play top-quality traditional music without putting my own ego stamp on it… At school, we encourage students to play the Scottish repertoire correctly, but behind it all, there’s a competition system that reinforces this approach. So how do you work on the unity between the two? Do you improvise with your instrument? So it goes out there and it comes back to you, but it still comes from out there and not from in here. When you externalize yourself in music, you are creating something in the outer world.
The subjective and the objective? There is always a difference between the inner and the outer, a separation between us and the outer world. Why this gap between the two realities of sound? You remind me of a technique I use: I record myself playing, and then sit back and listen, and I oftentimes say: “that’s not very good.” Whereas when I was playing, I thought that it was very good. I started my research on innersong while becoming conscious of a difference between what I heard about my performance, and how I was actually performing. 2016, made by Ellen Moysan in Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
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