ausdag wrote:
Liam O'Flynn, Paddy Keenan, Willie Clancy, Tommy Reck…each sound distinctively different from each other...
I listened to a few Gordon Walker videos...I couldn't endure it for long...the piping all sounds the same to me, like competition Highland piping.
I'm glad you used those very words, it "all sounds the same to me", because that's the universal comment everyone says about genres they haven't deeply listened to.
People who don't listen to Country Music say "it all sounds the same", ditto people who don't listen to Baroque music, who don't listen to Jazz, who don't listen to Irish traditional music. I hear it every day. I'm guilty of it myself! I don't listen to Country Music and indeed it all sounds more or less the same to me.
Why does this happen? Because every musical genre has defining parameters. Those who have listened to thousands of hours of music in a particular genre have come to accept the defining characteristics of that genre as the baseline norm, to the point where these characteristics are taken for granted, perhaps no longer noticed.
But an outsider, who has listened to little of a genre, ONLY hears those defining characteristics, and are blind to the range of style within the genre. To the outsider it does indeed all sound the same.
The insider, on the other hand, is somewhat blind to the defining parameters and instead focuses on everything else, all the differences, all the sub-genres within the genre, the individual characteristics of each individual band and musician. To the insider the outsider's claim that "it all sounds the same" is incomprehensible.
The identical thing happens with accents. Many outwith North America can't tell Canadians from people from the USA, while many outwith Australia and New Zealand can't tell those unique accents apart. The truth is that US English and Canadian English have many shared traits, and it's those shared traits which outsiders hear, quite rightly. But the people within that accent-group accept the shared traits as the baseline norm and focus on the differences, which is why they can immediately tell the two apart.
Ditto Australian English and New Zealand English. They have more shared traits than unique traits. Outsiders hear the former ("they sound the same to me") while insiders hear the latter ("they sound completely different to me").
Which is all to say that you'll have to take my word for it that there's a wide stylistic range in what people dismiss as "competition Highland piping". The best players, none more so that Gordon Walker, have the same rare imminence in both technique and musicality as Paddy Keenan. The difference is that Gordon Walker comes from a genre that many people haven't spent tens of thousands of hours listening to, and playing. (Did you notice his superb phrasing in his 2/4 marches? The lengthening of the first and fourth pulse of each four-pulse phrase? That's just one of many subtle things insiders listen for, but are not heard by outsiders.)
BTW the vast majority of people wouldn't be able to tell the playing of any of those uilleann pipers apart, as distinct as they sound to us who have listened to tens of thousands of hours of uilleann piping.