Dunaber Music

CBC Radio One Interview

An excerpt from a piece produced by CBC Radio’s Aparita Bhandari. Broadcast January 25, 2010.
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Bagads: The Long and Short of It

Yesterday morning I dragged my ass out of bed and caught most of the bagad performances from the season’s first bagad championship. The camera work wasn’t especially sophisticated but the sound seemed pretty good and I was really thankful that a TV network in France opted to stream the contest live. Very, er, tres cool.
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A Good Reed Soaking is What You Need

My first email of the day was a seriously laugh-out-loud experience. I mean LOL in the real sense. Not just the sort of thing we all do when we often send a sort of nondescript note or text and add “LOL”: “I backed out of the driveway today and nearly hit the neighbour’s cat LOL”. Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t write that, but I know you get my gist.
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Happy New Year!

All the best to you and yours for a happy New Year – may it be the best ever!

And here’s one of the oddest postcards I’ve ever seen; someone actually posted this – in 1912!
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10 Favourite Musical Memories of the Noughts

Yikes. Its two days to 2010. Cliché alert: it seems like yesterday … we were all freaking out about the apocalyptic possibilities of a new millennium. Then, as now, I was working in the technology field and clearly recall being assigned a “war room” shift. For those not familiar with the tech business staple of system recovery, the “war room” is a small group of multi-skilled people charged with restarting failed computer systems. I was the scribe of the group (an important role, of course). With black marker at the ready I was set to record the crashing systems and falling sky. Continue reading 10 Favourite Musical Memories of the Noughts…

Merry Christmas!

Here’s a bit of a Christmas laugh for one and all: a Toronto Police Pipe Band Christmas Greeting (none of the elves, by the way, know they star in the show [oops] – but you may recognize Ian K MacDonald, Doug Stronach, Malcolm MacLean [of Ardnamurchan], Angus Douglas Lampkin and me).
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The Piper as Jack O`Lantern

An interesting image of an old postcard, circa 1912, provided here:
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It’s a Small Worlds After All

BBC’s live streaming of today’s World Pipe Band Championships worked beautifully. In one marvelous effort the BBC has transformed, in one big-servered swoop, the perception of the the grand event as a need-to-be-there happening, at least for observers. A good set of speakers and high speed internet access provided any listener, anywhere, with at least as sound a listening post as those on the Green tenth row back from the ropes. To those who have never attended the event the broadcast has allowed a look-in to how things work and gives a fair representation to the scale of the event. To those pipe band zealots who have been (many times before, like me) and couldn’t attend, BBC’s magnanimity provided a fix that helped ease the angst of not being there.
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Irony

Like a lot of you who happen to drop in I get most of my piping world news from pipesdrums.com. The Piping Live festival launch story really got me thinking – or annoyed, maybe that’s a better word (whinge alert).
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Online Music Directory

I have a few hard copies of various tune directories.  They are all out of date, though the oldest is not more than ten years old.  Directories are handiest for tracking tune sources, but interesting reading, too, for getting a sense for the printed proliferation of any one particular tune.   According to Iain Millington’s “The Complete Bagpipe Tune and Drum Score Index” (Montreal: Concordia University, 1992) , the strathspey “Mony Musk” is available in no fewer than 35 printed sources.  Who knew?  I find that impressive number interesting, especially for a tune that is not hugely popular (though, for what it’s worth, one of my favourites to play in solo competition). Continue reading Online Music Directory…