About a different topic, Masters Making Boo-Boos, I wouldn’t consider various notes in phrases coming out in different octaves as “boo boos”. They’re just part of the uilleann pipes. Of course you don’t want your Highland chanter playing notes here and there an octave too high! But on the uilleann pipes it’s common. One example is the one-finger G which on some (many?) chanters usually pops out in the 2nd octave whether or not the rest of the phrase is in the 2nd octave or the low octave.
One thing I think IS a boo-boo is when the piper fingers C natural in the low octave and a High D squeals out. As it happens, on some (many?) chanters the fingering that gives C natural in the low octave is the same fingering as High D, with predictable results.
This can be heard on albums, even by the finest pipers, from time to time.
This might be too far of a digression, but is there a significant number of just SSP players, and are there any non-GHB-based styles common on the SSP? I know they’re a revival instrument, and that by and large they’re seen as a way for pipers to play indoors, but I’ve always been interested in the SSP, even more so in many ways than the UP, and yet the vast majority of advice, literature, etc. seems to be geared to those who want to or already play the GHB.
I ask because I wonder if the tradition is changing at all, away from competitions/pipe bands and towards sessions/trad bands, and whether that will end up making GHB more relaxed about differences and “mistakes” in playing.
I feel the pub session, as the habitat for the uilleann pipes, is only the public face of the instrument/player that we see. The default state of the uilleann pipes (IMO) is solo playing with plenty of variation within the tune…an action that puts it outside of the session and ensemble playing.
This is all very interesting. Since visiting Scotland this year and hearing about the history there, I have a question. They told me the pipes were suppressed after the defeat of 1746(?) and for a time (several decades?) only the British military were allowed to use GHB openly. Whether this was completely true or not, could it account for the by-now tradition of favoring the uniformity required by playing in GHB in groups, where careful unison is necessary? The British military wasn’t known for fostering individual expression back in those days, were they?
They were not suppressed. Certain items of dress were, partly as the Jacobite army had been effectively using them as a uniform in 1745 (even Lowland and English Jacobites had been seen wearing them).
The banning pipes thing appears to come from one legal case where an unfortunate piper (who likely played bellows blown pipes!) had been trying to argue that though seen with the Jacobite army he wasn’t technically ‘in arms’ with them. The judge wasn’t convinced and ruled that his pipes were in this context an instrument of war. He was convicted, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he’d tried to argue on a technicality.
This was just one case however, not statute, and the pipes were never banned. Having said all that, I do think the early involvement of the military, and of the Highland Society of London who had a very narrow definition of what piping should be like, did have a strong effect of standardising performance. Donaldson’s book on the “Highland Pipe and Scottish Society” is pretty good on this aspect IIRC
Agreed. Concert-pitch pipes are a relatively modern innovation, generally attributed to the Taylor Brothers making them for stage (principally vaudeville) players at the end of the 19th century.
Agree..pipers who learn to play by learning tunes in sessions, I’ve noticed can tend to become fossilised and stuck on playing a tune only one way - the session way.
I’ve even had to try and explain to a piper in this category that the way I played a tune for him was not, in his words, ‘an interesting version he hadn’t heard before’ as if I had learnt it from some different tune book, but my way of playing it at that point in time and it may well be different the next time I played it - that’s what you’re supposed to learn to do. I tried to refer him to a Sean Reid Society (I think) article on rhythm and variation in piping (or maybe it was Pat Mitchell’s explanation in his Willie Clancy book) but I don’t think he followed it up.
Non-GHB pipers who take up the SSP, like me, take comfort in the fact that there is a Lowland tradition that allows more freedom from strict competition-style technique. More informed GHB pipers who take up the SSP will acknowledge the lowland piping traditions and maybe try to apply that to their Smallpipe style of playing. OTOH I have been accused of obviously not coming from a GHB tradition because my way of playing the SSP (based on the lowland style) obviously didn’t conform to this person’s idea of ‘correct’ small-pipes technique. But the chanter doesn’t lend itself nicely to that way of piping.
the native habitat of the uilleann pipes is the pub session. These are the places the music lives and breathes.
We’ve been here before but I will to say it again: no it is not. It may seem so to the casual onlooker who is not part of the traditional music fraternity but the pubsession is only one fragment of what you can call, for brevity, ‘the tradition’.
The traditional music community is involved in activities much wider than playing in pubs. Playing in pubs is a social outlet, a source of gigs but it is not (thankfully) the be all, end all of traditional music playing.
pipers who learn to play by learning tunes in sessions, I’ve noticed can tend to become fossilised and stuck on playing a tune only one way - the session way.
There seems to be a trend of music becoming more of an ensemble activity where apart from the ensemble sound not an awfull lot is going on in the individual player’s music. But that is only one side of the coin, there is still a lot of music played where the overall sound is one of flowing lines but densely textured by layers of variation and melodic and rhythmic invention, players knocking sparks off eachother.
I’d like to add a mention of the Highland piping tradition from Cape Breton where it seems to have risen (or been brought across the Atlantic) prior to the “militarization” of the instrument. In Cape Breton, the pipes were, and still are, often used for dancing. (Google Barry Shears and or Alec Currie for more.) This style included rhythmic and melodic variations not dissimilar to the use of pipes to foster Irish dancing—or playing for shear, individual enjoyment. So, I wouldn’t put all Highland piping into the Pipe Band Model. Neither, as Gumby suggests, would I put all Irish piping into the Session Model.
This style included rhythmic and melodic variations not dissimilar to the use of pipes to foster Irish dancing—or playing for shear, individual enjoyment.
Pipers and dancing, I don’t think there’s one way about this. Some of the older Miltown Malbay people who knew Willie Clancy well used to say ‘he would never play for the sets’. Probably along the lines of Garrett Barry who is reported to have said he played ‘for the heart, not the feet’. Or the Dorans, I heard it said more than a few times you wanted Johnny for sheer heart, inventiveness, beauty and enjoyment of the music, for dancing though, you’d get Felix.
Yes I’m an outsider, an American, not part of the Irish traditional music fraternity in Ireland.
So for the preponderance of people in Ireland who play the uilleann pipes in Ireland, what is the range of activities you refer to? Which activities are the most common regular ones?
Never having lived in Ireland, all I know about is the Irish players who have moved here. The ones I’ve known over the last 40 years regularly attend our local sessions and the session, and playing alone at home, are their primary regular musical activities. The serious session players are always working on new tunes and yes that time is at home.
I’ve heard many comments from Irish people over the years which have helped create my impressions (wrong though they may be).
For example, many years ago I knew a fiddler, an American guy, who was a very good player. He had visited the local sessions but not found the tunes interesting, so most of his time was playing alone, learning tunes he liked.
He starts dating an Irish girl, fresh from Ireland. They go to the local session and she is dismayed that he’s spending nearly all of the time listening and not playing. Afterwards she asks why and he says he doesn’t know those tunes. She says “give me your fiddle and I’ll go down there and in two months I’ll be playing all those tunes!”
Doing paid performances, being part of formal performing bands, seems to be a side thing for most session players I know. This is in stark contrast to the professional jazz musicians I know to whom doing gigs is their primary thing, and rarely take their instrument out of its case unless they’re getting paid.
In any case the contrast still exists between mainstream uilleann piping and the mainstream Highland pipe world, unless the uilleann pipers in Ireland regularly dress up in costume and march around together in a field, playing in tight unison, and are being judged for that.
