Performances were around 10 minutes in duration. That’s an eternity in pipe band terms but pretty reasonable in the creative, exciting and free-wheeling world of the bagad.

A few observations here relative to our little pipe band world:

Stagecraft: I can’t think of a pipe band anywhere that bests the stage presence of any of the bagads we saw yesterday (and those presented were all part of the premier bagad grade – grade one to us). Although, to be fair, I found the constant licking of reeds by the bombarde players kind of gross – if not off-putting. I’d rather see a bombarde player’s back then have to see a gobbled reed.

Musicianship: Generally speaking, bagads have us over a cider barrel when it comes to understanding music theory and applying a few of its possibilities. For instance, standard throughout the contest was the mid-performance exchange of different pitched bagpipes. Harmony, too – beyond that of the bagpipe’s drone and chanter – was the norm, and in most instances really well done. As is the case with pipe band harmony, it’s the well-placed interplay of simultaneous note intervals that create memorable shivers and touch the soul. We have a lot to learn from the best bagads.

Melodic Variety: I found sameness to the bagad melodies – both in rhythm and tonality. And, from my experience, that is not always the way of things. For Highland bagpipe ears (those dialled in to around Bb) it can be said that the tonal centres of most performances hovered around F and C minor. That, and the requirement for bands to highlight dance music from the Sud Cornouaille region of Brittany, appeared to limit the potential of melodic and rhythmic diversity [how's that for political correctness!].

Bagpipe and Tonal Unison: Where the bagads may rock the musical thing in an overall sort of way, the best first grade Highland bagpipe bands are ahead of bagads when it comes to technical unison and unanimity of technical precision.

My overall observation is about pipe bands. I’ve been a big proponent of longer pipe band selections (medleys). I am not sure I’ve been on the complete right track on that front. Bagads and their 10-plus minutes of performance work for the most part because they have the latitude to rest: they can stop, start as they like and have the option to integrate a variety of sonic textures (meaning: use other sounds like accordion, clarinet, voice, etc).

I’ve recently gone through a season of playing a selection of music with next to none of the above qualities (four bar rest notwithstanding) and jeezuz, it felt like a lifetime.

Anyway, I suggest that until we shake up the profile of what makes up a Highland pipe band performance (instrumentation, duration, rests permitted, staging rules, general parameters),for a competition medley, maybe, five to eight minutes in duration works.

For lovers of the music of the bagpipe maybe the Breton phrase works: “Ur yezh hepken n’eo ket a-walc’h”

One language is never enough.

M.

It strikes me that pipe bands are no different.

A pipe band will attract people who are interested in joining the group because of really basic things: the band’s ability to win a competition, its social makeup and, finally, its musical aspirations. And for most people looking to join a band, I suggest that is the order of importance.

Like political parties, bands rise and fall in popularity, shift their approaches, their ethos and their leadership. The winningest parties represent the will and the perspective of the populist centre. Consistently champion pipe bands are much the same. Strong leadership, a general approach interesting to broad groups of people and sound decision-making (unfettered by any hint of the extreme) are the earmarks of successful political parties – and pipe bands. I suggest “successful” in the context of political parties is forming government and for pipe bands it’s winning.

This past August in Lorient I met up with Mark Saul, the famous Australian composer. Many fine pints aside, we talked a lot. Like me, he’s hugely supportive of any band’s efforts to “do its thing” – we both have a bias for that “thing” when it’s adventurous. We also talked about the risks in moving forward with “adventurous” when that approach isn’t of interest by the mainstream. Political parties never get elected when they take the adventurous, non-mainstream approach – think the Green Party, Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party or Britain’s Liberal Democrats.

Like many pipe band enthusiasts a lot of pipe band judges are not keen on extremes on the musical spectrum. If “adventurous” approaches make winning harder what’s the long-term viability of “adventurous”?

I wonder. It’s a risky business and one that most pipe band leaders tend to avoid.

Mind you, I can tell you I joined one pipe band fringe group many years ago and ended up a member of a World Pipe Band Championship team.

If it happened once, surely it can happen twice.

Here’s to the fringe – parties and pipe bands!

M.

M.

The raga is an interesting art form. A melodic, heavily improvised, exploration of a simple theme, the raga might be compared, to a fair (yet limited) extent with pibroch. I’ll leave it to you to delve in to the raga and make your own comparison but I will suggest, the level of performance sophistication and musicianship required to deliver a raga exceeds what’s needed to deliver a postively impactful pibroch.

Right now, I don’t want to dwell on the music. It’s Ravi Shankar I want to talk about. I mean, eighty-nine! He’ll be ninety in April! Sure he may’ve been helped to his place by his (strikingly beautiful) daughter, Anoushka, but once seated, he displayed calm, controlled, musicianship. His ability to move his aged hands up and down the lengthy expanse of the sitar – and at sometimes impressive tempos – is other worldly. What magnificent music. This old master made some seriously great energy happen.

Relative to the overall number of Highland bagpipers in the world, it seems to me there’re few who actively perform past age fifty or so. Outside of pipe bands it’s a real rarity. In fact, come to think of it, outside of non-competing pipe bands it’s still a rarity.

Maybe with more performance venues, places other than solo competitions for instance, we might see piping “Ravis” appear. To now we’ve been pretty good fostering a youth movement in the piping game.

I see Ravi Shankar making remarkably beautiful, masterful music on the cusp of his tenth decade. We need to think about nurturing a piping master’s movement, one that has nothing to do with prunes – or competitions.

M.

Regardless: the crowd on the field was hugely positive. I think moving forward pipe bands will find that matters more and more.

For anyone interested the name was inspired from the score sheet musings of the ensemble adjudicator at last year’s world’s qualifier: he scrawled, “not playing in the Scottish idiom“.

I think, like some of you, that the percussion accompaniment really makes the thing work. And, surprise, regardless of what bubbleicious1989 thinks, I really think the thing works. Drum Sergeant, Doug Stronach, bassist Reagan Jones and the whole percussionista group constructed inspired and appropriate scoring making great use of space.

Most pipe band people like their musical space jam-packed with clearly audible sound; lots and lots of notes – everywhere. Without “content” as I hear drummers call all them notes, there is no viable accompaniment. Like silence between two new acquaintances, rests or, open space (or “open real estate” as the drumming adjudicator wrote at last week’s contest), is generally uncomfortable for pipe bands. I hope that perspective changes.

One of the most common and ill-informed comments heard around is, “I can’t judge it if I can’t hear it” — usually said in reference to percussion rests in performance. Someone said, “silence is the best of all musical states”. Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, I know silence in performance is not easy. Perfectly placed silence, or rest, is surely one of the most important and difficult elements in music. It takes a seriously deft hand to pick the right points in time to halt sound and accent melody with rest. A thought to be explored another day.

It’s becoming increasing clear to me that had we submitted “Idiomatica” as a group of named melodies – perhaps “sections” would be a less presumptive word since so many felt it amelodic – the performance would have been perceived very differently and less audacious.

Idiomatica is a medley freely assembled in the style of the band’s choosing. Like any other band in the contest, it is one group’s expression of a medley. A medley of melodies, one that starts off in one planned place and ends in another.

In orchestrating medleys, we can rest and be thankful.

M.

“Ensemble” is a common topic of conversation in the Toronto Police Pipe Band – like most bands. Rhythm, sound, composition, technique, balance, dynamics all words we use in the context of creating a pleasing ensemble of pipe band voices. I’d think of ensemble as rhythm, sound and tune/composition coming together but prefer Doug Stronach’s descriptors: rhythm, melody and harmony.

So consider pipe band ensemble: the confluence of rhythm, melody and harmony. By the way, I tried to keep this as jargon-free as possible – there’s room for improvement on that front.

Click here for a pdf version of the image below

Food for thought.

M.

As a sixteen year-old I recall thinking I was pretty clever being able to march [while playing the pipes] to create a St Andrew’s Cross formation — all in a feather bonnet and plaid. The crowds loved it then.

But in this vid we see something on a whole new level! Seriously, wouldn’t your local Highland games crowds — and beyond — eat this Assam Rifles stuff up? I mean, be honest. For sheer entertainment, this trumps pipe band MSRs, medleys and just about anything the best our leading pipe band exponents might dream up.

Go Assam Rifles Pipes & Drums!

M.

I don’t think the PPBSO is any different from other like organizations around the world. The set bores. Scintillatingly soporific. The pipe band set represents a configuration of tunes that represents a singularly unimaginative representation of the best voice a pipe band can offer. The pipe band MSR is a parochial “treat” we can no longer afford. To reach a broader audience, engage new markets and really let the pipe band art blossom, we need to seek to promote our movement’s best musical offering. Like a jittery pre-contest piper or drummer, we need to drop the set contest.

Set loyalists will point to tradition. I say, the set is more habit than tradition. We’ve been playing sets for less than eighty years. Set loyalists might say it’s the meat and potatoes of the music offering players technical and performance discipline. Yes, half point there, but there’s far more opportunity to learn about music, technique, harmony, rhythm and the magnificent possibilities of ensemble in a medley performance.

Training for a set contest makes a piper or drummer a pipe band sportsman, a competitor, perhaps. The medley contest makes a piper or drummer a musician. Are we about Beckham or Beethoven?

Sets gotta go.

M.

We pipers and our tunes compositions: it’s all about people, places, battles. Religion? Not so much.

M.

There was a time I slavishly spelled pibroch the Gaelic way – lots of letters. I was (and am) keen on things Gaelic; I wanted to say, I think, I was a member of what J. Reid Maxwell called the “Piobaireachd Club”, and was on the inside Gaelic track – one heavily covered in peat no doubt. Poncy MacPoncypants.

It really doesn’t make good sense that we insert Gaelic spelling of pibroch in English text, English prose, does it? Among other things, it really doesn’t do much to promote the music to outsiders. We all know what happens when we come across a funny word we can’t recognize or pronounce. We almost always skim over it and quickly move on to something more comfortable, something easier to take in. To a reader of a report of one of our Big Music contests the peeobaireached took 13 minutes to play…

I note that Gaelic speakers I know, when writing in English, almost always spell pibroch the Anglicised way. That, too, is a political statement I think. Anyway …

I always enjoy talking to my français-speaking friends; their français is always a pleasure to hear. That sentence is a bit silly, isn’t it. What English-speaking person refers to French as “français” when speaking English? They say French. French is the English equivalient of français, of course.

Now take the word Gaelic. You often hear an Anglophone say Gaelic the Gàidhlig way as in, “She speaks lovely Gallic”, or, “He has the Gallic”, with the “a” sound short. To me that’s the equivalent of ordering fries française at McDonalds. My granny, who I’ve written about before, always said, “Gaylic” when speaking English, with the “a” sound long. That makes sense to me.

That I’m even writing about such trivialities speaks volumes about the parochial nature of things related to the Great Highland Bagpipe.

The tip today just might be to never question your granny’s wisdom.

M.