Upper Potomac Pipers Weekend, 11-13 January 2008

[MarkS]

Posted on behalf of Joanie Blanton:

The second annual Upper Potomac Pipers Weekend will be held on January 11-13, 2008. Held at the historic Hilltop House Hotel in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, the weekend features a variety of bellows-blown bagpipes from England, Ireland and Scotland in a rustic, retreat setting, allowing players to learn from some of the best pipers in the country, share tunes, trade secrets and expand their knowledge in this relatively arcane aspect of traditional music.

There are four kinds of bagpipes featured, Scottish smallpipes, Irish uilleann pipes, Northumbrian smallpipes, and Border pipes which are played in the border region between Scotland and England

These instruments are seldom played alone, and in order to make our tune sharing more fun and lively, we’ve added classes in fiddle, flute and repertoire that is friendly to one or more varieties of pipes to round out the weekend, and make it possible for friends and families to attend together.

The weekend starts out on Friday evening with a Piper’s Round Robin in the Tap Room at the Hilltop House… a sort of combination jam session and show-and-tell. Since there are no mass producers of these instruments, all pipers are intensely curious about other player’s pipes, who made them and want to know more about how they work. This style of evening allows novices and professionals to share information together in an informal way and get to know each other at the start of the weekend.

Saturday and Sunday daytimes are divided up into workshop sessions of two-hour lengths in technique and repertoire with breaks for meals, shopping at the fest store, and lessons.

Saturday evening will be a more formal concert with the weekend staff, at the Harpers Ferry Intermediate School, followed by informal jam sessions in the pub and elsewhere where folks can play tunes together. Since the pipes are in different keys, different styles of pipes play entirely different repertoires of music and cannot play with each other so there is likely to be several different groups gathered in separate locations.

The staff of seven includes our four featured pipers; Jerry O’Sullivan, Fin Moore, Bob Mitchell, and Ian Lawther who each play several kinds of pipes, flautists John Skelton and David Cantieni and Cape Breton fidder, Wendy MacIsaac. Classes include 4 types of bagpipes, Scottish and Irish flute and fiddle, technique classes on all of these instruments and repertoire from Scotland, Ireland and Cape Breton for all instruments.

http://www.squeezethebag.info