Assuming the contest remained in Glasgow the Royal Concert Hall complex might be booked for the main event. The main stage for the senior grade finals and the less large rooms for carefully scheduled band tuning assignments. Other stages in town could be engaged to allow the full roster of events. Not enough appropriate stage space? Erect a honking big tent, like the Piping Live! stage in George Square, for instance, and build the space needed.

Yes, I know there’s a lot of logistics to overcome to make an Indoor Worlds happen (or, under cover, at least). But I know most bands would appreciate it and the move indoors would undoubtedly elevate band musicianship even higher.

And the pipe band cape carrier? S/he’d fade into the mists (and heavy rain showers) of memory.

To all the bands on the weekend: good luck and stay dry – on the outside, at least.

M.

The comment is meant to be the apex of praise meaning “you’ve played like me, welcome to the rarefied world of me”…or something like that…the comment assumes that the person writing the crit sheet is the last word, the sole arbiter of good style, good music. And, I suppose, strictly speaking, a piping judge is just that, for the time s/he is sitting and taking in a competition.

The you’re-playing-like-me comment is, of course, meant with the, um, best intentions, but I wonder: if that is the best of golden praise is this kind of comment helpful in the broader context [corporate-speak alert]? I suppose from the point of view of those who view bagpipe music as a sort of precious museum piece; a static, unchanging, and slightly fragile thing, well, this comment works – it makes sense: we’re all “tradition-bearers” dammit and the tradition must be passed unchanged from one generation to the next in a bullet-proof box (maybe one like that natty Louis Vuitton World Cup trophy case).

For me, comments like this are not helpful. Bagpipe music is brilliant. A tip of the hat to the Scots, inventors of the modern world. Like the people who invented it the music is resilient, formidable and, like all great art forms, tailor-made for evolution. It stands on its own without any need of the good-intentioned propping up of judges or Gollum-like fawning.

Yesterday I read a comment on one solo piping judge’s scoresheet: “engaging”. Great comment. I suggest the listener’s engagement, the degree to which a musical rendition moved a person, is one of the best – if not the best – criteria for assessing the merits of a musical performance.

It’s not often easy to keep an open mind. But when it comes to listening to music, at least, an open mind is a state we should all strive for.

Easier said then done.

M.

From my earliest piping years its been Blair Drummond: A tune that’s both a perennial pipe band March, Strathspey and Reel favourite and a tune at the top of any top solo piper’s competing strategy.

I’ve always thought of BD as a great tune and yet if you’re to google “Blair Drummond” there is zippo bagpipe-pipe band-drum reference until around about the one hundred and tenth entry. Eek. And that reference is a year 2000 world’s CD.

Anyway, I’ll say now that Blair Drummond hasn’t found it’s way on my list by design. It’s been by chance. The tune is not one of my solo favourites. Yet, due to its six-part nature (and, therefore, part of a small and select group of pipe band repertoire) it’s the trophy wife [husband? Blair is a bit of a masculine given name, to my mind] of untold competing pipe band’s competition sets. In my many years playing in grade one pipe bands, there are few where BD wasn’t a featured strathspey. In fact, the 78th Fraser Highlanders of the olden days won a worlds with BD.

Anyway, a just a thought for the day – a hot day if you are in my neck of the woods.

I hope that the tune at the top of your own most-played list merits its place.

M.

- John Dryden, English poet (1631-1700)

M.

While she convalesced she gave concerts around the world presenting music composed especially for the left hand – though she used her right. Her story is an inspiring one. As she recovered she progressed from “left-handed” Ravel and Prokoviev compositions to the more familiar two-handed compositions on which she has built a career.

Today she spoke of one of the biggest professional changes that occurred as a result of her health problems: Fialkowsaka no longer agrees to play music she doesn’t like.

The standard way of things in the classical music world is something like this: a soloist is called up and asked to perform with an orchestra. The soloist is given the music to be played. And that’s it. You learn the music and show up and play well (one hopes) and get paid. Don’t like the music you’re meant to play? Tough. “Suck it up, princess”.

Fialkowsaka says now when invited to play she acknowledges the repertoire request but, if she doesn’t like it, she tells them and suggests what she will play. Apparently orchestras work with her – no probs. “I play better and audiences are happier,” she says.

The piping parallel is crazy clear.

I was thinking of all the sub-par, damn-near crappy tunes I’ve had to learn over the years courtesy of set tune lists – “The Blind Piper’s Obstinacy”, anyone? And I think Janina F has it right. Wouldn’t the world be filled with much sweeter music if musicians – and pipers – could play the music they pleased?

The same thing happens in bands, of course, but bands are not democracies. A talk for another day.

M.

PS. You should be able to listen to this show by podcast. Have a listen.

Depending on how they were taught, or their personal bias – perhaps related to what they may’ve heard or the first recording their Granny bought them (or not) – pipers have their own idea of what is right and what is pipe music of merit.

For me, it’s when I sit as a competition judge that I find (much to my surprise) this listening “template” especially pronounced.

Tunes played by competitors, no matter how sonorous the instrument, or engaging the technique, just clang, for lack of a better word at this moment, when phrasing is presented outside of what I’m used to hearing. I’m not suggesting we all dismiss phrasing that’s different. I’m saying the usual way of things is we take fast note – and – more often than not, then dismiss the performance.

I think it’s a rare listener, a rare adjudicator, who can sit back and take in a performance on its own merit – regardless of its capriciousness.

Of all forms of Great Highland Bagpipe music it’s in the judging of pibroch where this one-dimensional “listening template” is endemic. It happens in solo light music, too, and pipe bands, for sure, but pibroch? Well, listeners hear with templates glued to their lugs.

The piper’s slightest deviation from a judge’s preconceived idea of how the tune should go is trouble – for the competing piper. “Ooh, what were you thinking when you played the first variation of ‘Rory McLoude’s Lament’ with the low Gs and As long?” might (and has) been said by the pibroch judge. “Off with his head” – or off with his chance of a prize – is the way of things in this instance.

Anyway, this is all to say I think we’d all be better off if we could somehow manage to have a catholic taste in our music. I’m thinking, by the way, that “catholic” is a great old-fashioned word that makes good sense in this context.

A fine Dave Mathews quote for you: “Good music is good music, and everything else can go to hell.”

When it comes to the music, it’s probably so much better to not think, “It’s my way or the highway”.

M.

Anyway, from that point on my tune “Fleshmarket Close” has been cursed with inaccurate publishing and just plain wrong compositional attribution (I can hear “Chewin’ the Fat” guys now: “Ooooh, compositional attribution”).

So. Fleshmarket Close. It’s a reel I wrote September 21, 1986. I can tell you exactly where I wrote this tune (and I can’t say that for many I’ve made). And its with great presumption I imagine you give a rat’s ass.

The tune was written in the flat of then Polkemmet Colliery piper, Ian Morris. Ian’s place was in the west end of Edinburgh, a place known as “South Gyle” or, an area, I think, generally known as, “the Gyle”. After university I was determined to stay in Scotland for a good bit of time to take lessons from Captain John MacLellan and, to be truthful, delay the inevitability of working life. I did stay for a while though not as long as originally imagined. Anyway, money was tight and thanks to the largesse of my friend Andrew Berthoff – who himself was merrily crashing at Ian’s flat (a fellow Polkemmet bandmate) – I came to stay a very short while at Ian’s place (“Come and stay,” said Andrew, “he’s away, he won’t mind a bit” – [man, I hope Ian knows this story]). So, while sitting in front of Ian’s TV, while Ian was away and Andrew was busy making pies at “Mama’s Pizza” in the Grassmarket [still one of my favourite pizza places anywhere], I wrote Fleshmarket Close.

Andrew B was doing a recent office tidying-up and came across the following manuscript. He passed this score along. Note the careful penmanship, the near-architectural lines of the score. There’s next to nothing about this manuscript that is similar to my current scoring technique (read: scrawl) today. Unemployment and time-on-hands, I guess, have benefits in writing legible manuscript. So here is that score.

I published my fifth book not so long ago and included a four-part version of Fleshmarket Close. Up until that point, for people who knew it, the tune had always been a two-parter. After publishing, Andrew reminded me of my original score and the original four-plus parts. I had completely forgotten.

For those that enjoy the trivial minutiae of bagpipes [and when it comes to pipers I say their numbers are freakishly legion], the score here has added interesting sidelights. For instance, Bill Livingstone’s handwriting is seen down the right hand side of the page: “CHANGE”, he writes. Who knows what he wanted changed in such a pristine and perfect score – but fun to see all the same. His band, and mine at the time, the 78th Fraser Highlanders Pipe Band, did end up starting a medley with the tune – two parts only. Maybe I was obstinate and wouldn’t change the score. So unlike me.

Fleshmarket Close came the morning after a long session in the Old Town with Brian Lamond and Andrew. I remember Andrew and me toddling down Princes Street, collecting Brian Lamond, who was busking in front of Jenners’ department store, then heading to Milne’s Bar on Hanover Street. We’d have a pint while Brian packaged the spoils of his pipe box and off we went. Up to the Old Town with first stop Fleshmarket Close and Jinglin’ Geordie’s pub - the famous newspaperman’s hangout.

There you are: Fleshmarket Close – and Edinburgh. Still up there with my favourite places anywhere. But like the tune I made, both places not as traditional as people seem to think.

And “Fleshmarket Close”? Surely, the coolest name of any piece of art, as Ian Rankin also found years later.

M.

This piece has me and Colin Roy MacLellan playing our hearts out in the March event at Oban. The video speaks for itself. If any piper should ever get uppity about the piper`s true place on the world stage of music, videos like this will quickly bring them down to earth.

Can you imagine the best pianists or violin players – or didgeridoo players, for that matter – having to lay out their music interspersed with`fun-runs`, hill races and caber tosses?

Me neither.

M.

So much easier, I know, to make multi-instrumental music without the untempered Great Highland Bagpipe getting in the way. But he says that’s not why the pipes were left in the cold box . His composer’s brain was in the key of funk apparently. And that was a good thing for this project. Think fuzzy-hatted brothers playing the Park Bar – if the Park Bar was in Detroit – or Chicago (if the horns are going like on “Under the Influence”).

The vocal tracks – the songs – stand-out. I thought he’d blown the budget when I heard the silky smooth “Lonely Man“, sure he’d hired James Taylor as guest. He didn’t of course (well he may’ve blown the budget but it wasn’t by booking JT). He’s built and sung a really good song.

I think Calum has to be the poster boy for piper-as-musician. It strikes me that most pipers think of themselves as pipers. Not musicians and certainly not artists. They’re pipers. Then there’s Calum: musician, artist and – by the way, by chance and by blood – a piper. A real MacCrimmon. His brilliant forbears invented and refined an art form. They, too, were musicians, artists and, lucky us, pipers.

I think we need more Calums. More musician-artist-pipers. More MacCrimmons.

I’m not sure about Scotland but I know there’re pieces of “Man’s Ruin” ready for commercial Canadian radio – and, all of it, for your Walkman or iPod thingie.

M.

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.