We’re coming up to the bagpipe competition season and everyone who aims to seriously take part is hard at it trying to make the best music they can.

Today’s May first – a big day for those of the Pagan persuasion (Beltane and all that) – and a slew of other groups of varied and disparate kind. Maybe a few of you rushed out early this morning to wash your faces in May dew – an apparent tonic and secret to youthful appearance [by the way, the May dew thing seems to be working for me, as so many of you can clearly see, just an unsolicited tip].

But for me the month of May has always been the start of the outdoor bagpipe competition season. My first outdoor contest was in May. It was at “Alma Highland Games” [and that seems weird to key in as Alma is a pokey little place in the middle of the American state of Michigan - not so highland] where I launched my solo competitive piping effort.

It was 1977 and Star Wars was the movie tearing up the global box office. Me? I was playing “Hills of Perth” at Alma for Bob Worrall’s teacher, the Ulsterman, Bill Millar. And here’s my score sheet – or what’s left of it:

So, in case you have trouble reading Bill Millar’s infamously poor scrawl – and – the text tears of the old score sheet – here’s what he said:

“This boy needs more practice”

Break – 5/5 [Hello! No breaks in the performance of one march - 5 outta 5!]
Time – 8/10 “Expression is lacking” [the highlight of this score sheet]
Tone and Tuning – 12/25 “Pipe chanter very sharp on top; drones no’ in tune”
Expression – 13/30
Execution – 13/30 “Execution is very ragged”

So, all in all, a score sheet to toss in the bin. I didn’t. As you see, I have shreds of it now. Like almost all constructive criticism I’ve received – and continue to receive – I took it at face value. And practiced. Practiced my face off.

In 1982 I again went to Alma games, five years after my unsuccessful rendition of “The Hills of Perth” and won professional prizes – at my first outdoor open contest.

I add this little factoid with a view to encourage people – I know it appears as something less noble, but it is here to point out the power of practice. Really.

Yes, maybe Bob Worrall and Jim McGillivray blootered it up, paving the way for my wayward entry to professional prizes – but that’s not my point. My point is practice delivers great rewards: win or lose – with practice, better music is made.

M.

So, after a bit of research this aft, here you go:

Aside from a bit of wet, maybe, know that no injury was suffered in the filming of this snippet – aside from sore kangaroo feets.

M.

People come from all over with Canada, the US and the UK standing out as the top three countries of visitor origin. Readers land here from some of the most unlikely places with regulars from Kiev, Ukraine and Western Samoa (probably spammers, I know).

People – you – seem most interested in pipe band stuff, especially anything to do with the World Pipe Band Championship – seriously – and least interested in my cheery little quotes or bon mots; those little gems I imagine are especially thought-provoking. Oh well, pearls before swine, as the saying goes (joke!).

So there you have it. Five years.

Onwards and onwards.

M.

Henry David Thoreau, (1817 – 1862),
from the “Conclusion” to Walden (1854)

Regardless, cool advert in all it’s Madison Avenue cheesiness, “May you aye hae a friend; be your fortunes oop [!!] or doon”.

And check out Buddy’s eyebrows! They’re a couple of weeks shy of the butterfly stage.

Cheers,

M.

Checkout timing mark 01:00 and catch the lyric “…for he goes birling down and down the white water..”.

“Birling”, you’ll know, is the spinning and moving forward of the logs in the water (and is, in fact, now a sport!) but note that birling is an old Scots word for rotating or to move rapidly – the kind of thing pipers’ pinky fingers do in the closing parts of Donald MacLeod’s “Crossing the Minch”.

M.

Hope you enjoy the tunage.

M.

Like the best proverbs, there’s a real feel of truth to it:

“Straightening the bend in old wood is a difficult job.”

(Gaelic: An car a h’ anns an t-seana mhaide, is duilich a thoirt as).

A nice change-up to the old-dog-new-trick, keep-an-open-mind lines.

M.

Here are a few of my favourites:

“‘No! No! A thousand times, no!’ poor Penelope squealed as her pixyish frame disappeared beneath the lust-engorged loins of Hector the hulk, mindful all the while that she still had 997 “no’s” to go.” (p.68)

“‘I always wanted to live in Helena, Montana,’ he said with a faraway look in his eye; ‘I’d open a little bistro and call it the ‘Handbasket’ and the whole world would go there!” (p.97)

and finally:

“Peabo, the cat, washed his fur in the warm sunlight that streamed through the window, thinking to himself as he licked his soiled paws, ‘Why, it’s not so bad having a baby in the house,’ and then coughed up a hair ball and bits of a rattle.” (p.35)

As “Still Game‘s” Tam Mullen‘s wife Frances might say, “What am I like?!”.

M.

Here’s the scoop: After meeting and date number three or so they start talking a little about their families. He says to her something like, “my Mum’s family comes from a little place in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland: Benbecula”. “Yikes”, thinks my sister – or something like that. That’s where my father’s mother comes from!

So it turns out that the Benbecula village, or maybe more rightly stated, “enclave of houses”, that is Torlum, Benbecula, forms a seriously common thread for both of them. On the birth of their first child I have a feeling they were on high alert for overly close eyes – or, worse, only one: mid-forehead.

Of course, all’s well but interesting to learn more of my brother-in-law’s family; most probably, my family.

Here’s a tune he passed to me. Provided here at his courtesy. I looked at this and thought right away that the way to find out more about it was to talk to Reay Mackay, a Godfather of North American piping.

Reay is a veritable fountain of piping knowledge, a child prodigy and so a person who has made music through a good chunk of 20th century piping life. In his insight to this tune, he didn’t disappoint.

This tune, “Alex MacMillan”, is my brother-in-law’s grandfather [**small world alert**born in Torlum one year after my grandmother with the same surname as my grandmother's mother, the 1891 Scottish census shows both families living in Torlum at that time ... I digress]. It was written by Donald Ewen Macpherson from Skye. Reay relayed yet another fascinating back-story to this manuscript [I admit: it's the second back-story that may interest you].

First, the tune is really good. We both agree, it’s full of merit, clearly written by an accomplished musician and completely playable and worthy of competition. Second, **small world alert** the manuscript is from the hand of Murdo MacLeod, one of Reay’s teachers and Benbecula emigrant – and, just by the way, a pupil of John MacDougall Gillies.

Reay said he could recognize Murdo’s hand anywhere and has copies of tunes written in the same stylish pen. So here we have a tune for a Benbecula man, composed by a Skyeman and in the hand of another Benbecula man – all immigrants to the Toronto-Hamilton area, you’d have to think they were all good pals.

But the really interesting thing about this is related to the composer of “Alex MacMillan”.

Donald Ewen Macpherson was something else: a real all-rounder. Not saying the guy could just play jigs and the big music, no, this guy could play the whole gamut of bagpipe music and highland dance, toss the caber and do all the heavy events – and do them well. In fact, as Pipe Major of the Royal Scots he won the wrestling championship of the British armed services [William Donaldson, “The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society: 1750-1950"].

Macpherson was a man cut from the all-rounder rough cloth of John MacColl and D.C. Mather. Though those guys, while Highland dancers [the kind of Highland dancing, by the way, the Gaelic College is so down on], didn’t seem as big on the heavy events. Not like our Donald Ewen Macpherson.

So what’s the deal with Donald Ewen Macpherson and his buckshot aim at all the prizes on offer at the Highland games?

We only have to look to Donaldson for a little insight. Referring to the early days of the twentieth century he notes the problem [p. 205] of the “same old names” turning up in the solo piping prize lists with the “struggling young player” never seeming to catch a break. I suggest that’s probably an age-old problem. Though pipers like Donald Ewen Macpherson had a solution to covering their travel – and other – expenses: they competed in all the events they were able:

“Given such difficulties, some young pipers preferred to concentrate on track and field events, where arcane considerations of authority and reputation did not predetermine the outcome, where they did not have to bear written accreditation from social superiors before they could even enter (as was the case with piping events at a number of games, including the Northern Meeting), and where victory and defeat were normally unequivocal. Robert Meldrum recalled one of his own pupils, Donald Ewen Macpherson of Skye, ‘who was a most promising piper, playing some splendid piobaireachds, but he preferred the athletics side of the games…”

Indeed he did. He emigrated to Toronto and, according to Reay, opened a gym on Queen Street in Toronto, one of the city’s main streets. Signs, like this tune, point to his continued involvement in the piping world.

So, there you have it: an interesting story and damned fine tune – all courtesy of my brother-in-law.

That’s Brother-in-law: thanks to our small world, with the biggest of upper case Bs.

M.

PS. Interesting to note that on emigrating to Canada Alex MacMillan joined the 16th Battalion (The Canadian Scottish) and in WWI fought at the Somme serving in the same regiment, and battles, as piper James Richardson, VC.