Non-standard Fingering/Ornamentations

[Doogie]

Their was some discussion a while back talking about perfect piping becoming a standard. Someone even mentioned that Uilleann pipes are going the way of the Highland Bagpipe, strict fingering over musicality. It was mentioned that if you put five pipers in the same room your going to notice differences in their piping methods. This got me to thinking. How many pipers are straying from textbook/tutor style methods and making up their own unique style? Whether it be a medical reason, hand, shoulder, or finger problem, or just to be unique or atypical. I myself had a carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand a few years ago, and I have had to change the way I do ornamentation in my piping. The hand just doesn't work the way it used to. In Highland piping a change in ornamentation, I believe, for most is not feasible. Especially those involved in competitions, the C nat will quickly cost you a win in a formal competition. I think Uilleann pipes are more versatile when it comes to the method in which an individual plays whether he/she follows traditional standards per say, or finds their own method for whatever reason. Cheers, Seth Hamon

[Black Rose]

My hands don't work for a number of reasons and I don't practice enough to compensate even if I could, but plain laziness and old fartiness aside, I recently humiliated myself by playing one-on-one in the 'round-the-group lessons from a very competent instructor at the local tionol. I have almost no tight-piping to begin with and of course that's all we were focussing on, but the thing that I absolutely had no success at was the simple assignment to sound an high E, and then go directly from that to an high A. After repeatedly losing the octave, being the last guy to suffer this corrective exercise in the circle, I asked said instructor to see if the chanter would actually do that at all. After some tries he got into the hang of it and made most of the attempts. The comment he'd made to the group was that there was absolutely no way you needed the crutch of passing through an high G or any other slur through F#/G to get to the A. You should be able to simply lift the A finger and get the note, and of course, immediately close the bottom hand. In actual practice, I'd spent my entire playing career--such that it is--learning to slide up to A invariably from one or all of the lower notes to insure it sounded. Assuming that I decided to re-learn not to do that, even though I like the way it sounds anyway, my particular chanter even in expert hands, in his words, "will do it--it will do it, but it has just a very narrow margin in it--you have to get the pressure just within that margin and then it will do it..." Not very encouraging.

I also confirmed the same from one of the other very good players present, particularly the business of sustaining a closed high A, which it would do, but only if you hit it just right and kept it exactly steady.

Now, I'm not that good and I won't be. And furthermore, though the reed in question was a nice new one and the best I ever got from the maker of my chanter, neither that nor any other reed I've made or bought or played in it really liked the closed high A. I consequently don't really play it closed in the upper octave if it needs to be sustained, hitting some G vibratto with a G andF# finger waggling or whatnot. It's plenty in-tune and steady then. I suspect, as good as the chanter is, neither one of these guys would suffer with the behavior of the chanter very long and both of them have very famous, custom-made pipes from the absolute number-one maker in the market today. You can't buy these pipes any more, the shop is closed to new orders. If you get my drift.

So I was left to wonder, yeah, it's possible, but is it practical? No. Not practical. Not on this chanter with this reed or any of my known working reeds, and not with me doing it. I need to be assured I'm going to get and keep an high A at least most of the time I want it, rather than a less-than-50% crap-shoot that makes me tense every time the note is coming up. The way I'm doing it actually came out of Rowsome's tutor, at the time my only instruction on the pipes.

I think there may be a fair degree of "standard" good practice that translates to a sense of universally "approved" technique, but even so, as this instructor put it about having to not blow any very much harder in the second octave, "Unless you have a really crap chanter or reed," which I submit, in comparison to what he plays, most of us have.

[ausdag]

Their was some discussion a while back talking about perfect piping becoming a standard. Someone even mentioned that Uilleann pipes are going the way of the Highland Bagpipe, strict fingering over musicality.

Hi Seth (Doogie) Hammon,

I was the one who stated that modern uilleann piping was in danger of going the way of highland piping, based on my 'personal perception' of what was coming out of you tube of a ubiquitous tendency among young pipers to play as perfectly as possible such that there now seems to be a homogeneous 'boring' style of piping valuing clinical, precise and monotonous, ie, no variation to, fingering over musicality).

I think it stems from the globalisation of piping where young, non-Irish with no cultural background in the music, hear 'popular' piping through the mass media that is fast and flowing mixed with modern instruments and think that that is what piping is all about, whilst not fully understanding and appreciating the intricacies contained therein (these are usually the ones who first mention that they can't understand why the likes of Clancy and Ennis are considered 'masters' when much of their piping is so 'out of tune' or even worse, that modern piping is far more (technically) advanced than in the old days ).

Even Jerry O'Sullivan seems to allude to this perception, but with specific reference to tight piping, in the interview as recorded by Jim Reilly in the latest 'Piper's Review' where he is quoted as saying, "In recent times some players try to mimic Paddy Keenan's piping but without the tight piping that Paddy throws in. When you hear the man himself doing it there is incredible artistry as regards his use of triplets, rests, double and triple tipping. Paddy is a master of staccato playing..." (The Pipers' Review, Vol. XXIX No. 2 - Spring 2010)(apologies to Jerry O'Sullivan and Jim Reilly if this is not the case).

In this light, I don't think Uilleann piping will ever become 'regimented' as Highland piping did once the British army got hold of it (compared with the original piping as is still evidenced in Cape Bretton piping as acknowledged by Hamish Moore in his liner notes to his CD 'Stepping on the Bridge' I think it was titled).

There will always be room for individual differences in technique. Tunes will never, God forbid, be notated with all the gracings included to be played only as such as is the case with GHB music.

However, the days of regional styles as evidenced by the piping of Clancy as compared to Ennis I fear are over. The fast and flowing styles of Doran and the old travellers still seems more personal than the 'rock-n-roll' piping of today.

Not that region is the sole determinant of styles. Clancy's style is based on what he learnt from Doran, Ennis' on his father, I presume.

O'Flynn's style is the culmination of tuition under Clancy and Ennis and Rowsome.

My concern is, why do so many pipiers these days seem to sound the same? Why does no one play like Paddy Moloney? Some try to sound like O'Flynn, to their credit, but end up going too far and sounding like robots. Why do many seem to want to emulate Keenan, but without the intricacies of Keenan's piping?

Is it because the perception is that perfect, monotonous piping that can be accompanied by the strident rhythms of the bouzouki or guitar are all that modern piping has become? Even the guitars and 'zouks are boring. Why doe no one emulate Andy Irvine's intricate string work when accompanying O'Flynn on the pipes? Why does it all have to 'thump' along like there's no tomorrow?

Perhaps I, as an isolated antipodean piper, am ignorant of the true situation in the back blocks of Ireland where pipers maintain their own styles with no care for You Tube and what the rest of the world thinks.

So to address your question, I hope every piper eventually attempts to stray from the tutors and textbook style, because no tutor book could ever teach the intricacies of Clancy, Ennis, O'Flynn, Moloney, Keenan, McCarthy, Rooney, and so on and so forth to name but a few of the older generation of pipers.

A final word of encouragement to anyone who thinks Liam O'Flynn's style of piping is simple and straight forward. Go back and REALLY listen to everything you have of his and over time you will, as I have, come to appreciate just how amazingly intricate his piping really is.

I used to do the wizz-bang fast and flowing style of piping accompanied by bouzoukis and vibrant guitars. Now, when I listen to the same old, same old, I think to myself, 'yeah, been there done that'. Not to discourage the young and up-coming, but to encourage them to do as I did and find the time to stop playing, sit down with recordings of the masters, as out of tune as they may sound, (there's a great CD, don't now if it's still available, called 'The Gentlemen Pipers, including a great version of Boys of the Lough, Patsy Touhey, If I'm not mistaken, my CD was stolen by a non-piping burglar about a decade ago) and think about 'why' are these people great? Eventually you realise, it's because they do stuff the tutor books and 'celtic band pipers' don't.

Cheers,

David G

BTW, One thing that did happen that really encouraged me to think outside the box was when I suffered a shoulder injury with resultant loss of 'compliance' by my left hand 'A' finger. It has since been reluctant to play good rolled triplets on A. So, instead of giving up, I have forced myself to think of other ways to play A triplets other than rolls. How can I play this tune without an A rolled triplet, but still make it sound good and not as though I stuffed up the triplet? It really has opened up a whole other side to the piping and the practice of variation. In the end it has been for the better, because now my tunes, by necessity, include other things, staccatos, variations in choice of notes, etc, besides simple A rolls.

[Black Rose]

Apart from chanters and reeds being physically different, and the notion of different pipers picking up tunes from a wide variety of sources and in a large number of self-taught ways, you come down to the internet. Symbolically that is for the time being, but almost literally as time goes on. And the local tionol. And the printed and audio tutors.

The fact is, you're wrong. The tunes are printed out note-for-note with all the gracings and effects and are accompanied with CD examples of exactly how they should sound. At our own local tionol for instance, a third instructor in the previously alluded-to exchange, joined a lengthy discussion on the influence of Highland piping in uilleann piping and so forth. We spent a long time supposing as you did here, that uilleann piping will never be regimented like Highland piping. And then the subject turned in truth, to how to stop being an Highland piper and be a "real" uilleann piper and make full use of the chanter's capabilities. In this context however, I found all three of these instructors were highly regimented by a great piping authority who was also the maker of their pipes regarding just exactly what "real" uilleann piping would look and sound like. This included in part, the suggestion that certain well known Highland converts could be spotted like a sore thumb in seconds of hearing them, and at least one discovery that a particular Scottish player I rather liked was apparently the poster child for anti-uilleann piping.

So, yes, note-for-note transcriptions started with Pat Mitchell's Willie Clancy collection and was cemented as a permanent concept in the Heather Clark tutor, and what is "acceptable" style around the world is pounded out on the boards at every fleadh until there are no "unacceptable" styles. Just like Highland piping. All over the world groups of piping clubs sit in a circle and play out of the Clark tutor note-for-note as a group, and then bring in the same noted pipers and pass them from club to club to pick up the same tricks, the same preferences, the same "style." The result by definition is homogenization on both a technical and musical level.

[ausdag]

So, yes, note-for-note transcriptions started with Pat Mitchell's Willie Clancy collection and was cemented as a permanent concept in the Heather Clark tutor, and what is "acceptable" style around the world is pounded out on the boards at every fleadh until there are no "unacceptable" styles. Just like Highland piping. All over the world groups of piping clubs sit in a circle and play out of the Clark tutor note-for-note as a group, and then bring in the same noted pipers and pass them from club to club to pick up the same tricks, the same preferences, the same "style." The result by definition is homogenization on both a technical and musical level.

I'm afraid you are right.

As for the Clancy collection, I find it most amusing when learners sit down with a tune from that book and try to play it exactly as written, as if that was the intended purpose of the book. It's only when you listen to Clancy playing the tunes that it becomes even more apparent that many of those little black dots represent Clancy's masterly 'sloppiness' so apparent in his piping, something which I admire greatly, yet virtually impossible to be imitated as an exercise as part of someone's 30 minute-a-day practice routine.

I have always maintained that Pat Mitchell's transcriptions are purely for finer study of the piping of one man, the particular notes he played at one particular point in time, maybe never to be repeated, and NEVER as a systematic tutor for the beginner or even intermediate piper.

[Black Rose]

When I first tried a serious start at uilleann piping, I was in Utah, not a very big center for the instrument, and it was the late-70's and outfits like Lark in the Morning in California had just started making the weirder international instruments more-or-less available in the States. They were also more-or-less-playable. I ended up copying a set of Wilkinson McCarthy pipes from Lark just to get hold of a chanter. I ended up reinventing the narrowish bore D just to make it play properly, but the only sort of tutor I had was the Rowsome tutor, which told me almost nothing other than how to sneak up on the higher octave, and it gave useless outlines of some thousand permutations of optional scale fingerings. No hint however, at what a normal scale ought to be.

The Mitchell book at least showed a scale. One scale. One set of fingerings, and keep the chanter on the damned knee unless you're pulling some stunt. Narrowed it down to something I could at least start out with. That much standardization is a good thing. The precise notations likewise gave you some idea what was going on on a fine level, not just the big notes. I still didn't have a clue if those were one-finger notes or two-finger notes with all those tight triplets and whatnot, but the Clarke tutor eventually took care of that as well for later generations.

I think it's great that pipes are now readily available and so are these teaching resources. Even the notion of competition promotes the instrument and raises the basic technical proficiency of pipers as a greater body. I wish I'd had that option when I was young enough to do something with it.

The price you pay for that however, is narrowing the acceptable standard of piping diversity, and that starts with "creative sloppiness," because in a system like described above, the peer pressure and institutional pressure is entirely designed to eliminate any sloppiness of any sort, musical, creative or not. In fact, I think if truth were known, the single biggest stylistic flag picked up by non-Highland pipers when they hear Highland players after they convert to uilleanns, is precision. Regardless of specific techniques or tricks or conventions, when it comes down to it the Highland convert is going to apply even the oldest, most common uilleann skills with a clarity and sharpness that is not part of even the most disciplined uilleann styles. Good Highland pipers that is. And the standard in uilleann piping is indeed raising on that score as well, making the difference not so apparent. So far.

On the one hand I hear the more disciplined tight uillean pipers slagging off at least implicitly a lot of the older, sloppier, open, wild players, but at the same time they look ascance at taking that disciplined piping style up a notch with the influx of Highland players. It really comes down to controlling the developing of the instrument and its music. I find this inherently funny, because the uilleann pipes are indeed an instrument developed in Scotland and played there first, if briefly, before the Irish players stole the whole idea and made it their own, by totally rethinking and butchering the instrument and the way you played it. Now that Highland masters are looking to take a piece of it back, I would find it hard to criticize what they do with it with any sort of authority.

[Nanohedron]

...butchering the instrument...

I think "doing surgical reassignment on" would have been a better way of putting it. Ya bloody-minded git.

[Black Rose]

Well, the first thing somebody did was yank off the foot joint of the chanter, just leaving a bare ugly tenon there to this day. All future makers did was slide on a ferrule without re-styling the tenon mounting or anything.

And then in the States, where the modern instrument actually was invented, they bored the chanter wide open and hung a load of keys and regulators on it, originally so they could play chamber music on the things.

There's not only an "American Style" when it comes to the feashana, but it wins the All Ireland a lot of the time. Likewise, even the great Irish pipe makers building pipes today are using American designs, so there is in fact, past the original Scottish Pastoral designs, and the original Irish narrow variants, the modern instrument which was ultimately developed in the United States. If you can't even control the instrument from developing into something new, perhaps bigger, brighter, better, in the opinion of the newer generations of pipers, just how does anyone imagine the playing of the thing can be controlled and limited from growing or mutating into something future generations will, and to some extent already do, consider to be bigger, brighter, and better?

[Nanohedron]

This is far beyond the scope of my little brainpan. I just try to play 'em while they're working.

[Black Rose]

By the way. My chanter is playing a pretty solid closed high A this week. And it goes directly from high E to high A. Must be the oil suspended in the humid air blowing up here from the Gulf in that there hurricane.

[Nanohedron]

I am so not going to go there with you and your A.

[Uilliam]

Wee bit o revisionism going on here methinks.Taylor born in Drogheda emigrated to New York thence Philadelphia coz o economic circumstances.He went with Irish pipes and developed them to accomodate the larger halls found..note adapted .Hence the monstrous Concert pitch we have today. They were still Irish pipes I don't think they where ever advertised as the New American Pipes (tho your welcome to em).
As for the Scottish pastoral pipe... well ye also had the Dublin ,London and Newcastle Pastoral Pipes..so not exclusively Scottish at all but played pretty much all over and made in the above Scottish Cities as well...Geoghan I think an exponent of the new type was methinks Irish...
Anyways enough o all this ....
Why don't ye just play the feckin things the way YE want to and enjoy yersel.There is no right or wrang as long as it is musically pleasant on the listeners ears.Competitions mean feck all as they are so subjective and depend on the whim o the judge fer good or bad.Fie on all o them I say.There are 2 camps today ,maybe more,I don't really care.a)Traditionalist b)The rest... bless .Take yer pick be whoever ye want to be and stop blaming the World and its Auntie fer the way YE play.
Uilliam

[boyd]

errrrrm


Hi.....
Is this the thread about fingering and ornamentation of the uilleann pipes????
Or is it to be found somewhere else??


Boyd




ps/ I agree with Uilliam.....just do your own thing!

The big thing in Uilleann piping is NOT to sound like the next guy,
try it....its very refreshing once you start to do it

[ausdag]

The big thing in Uilleann piping is NOT to sound like the next guy,
try it....its very refreshing once you start to do it

Agree, but that's the problem...it sounds as though not sounding like the next guy is becoming less and less the benchmark and sounding like the next guy who plays precisely and perfectly is. Was listening to Willie Clancy again today and couldn't help but think that I've yet to hear a modern player equal his piping. Not meaning 'copying' but equaling his ability to 'really pipe' a tune. I can't enunciate it any better than that. It's that elusive element that precise piping will never achieve.

[Black Rose]

Wee bit o revisionism going on here methinks.Taylor born in Drogheda emigrated to New York thence Philadelphia coz o economic circumstances.He went with Irish pipes and developed them to accomodate the larger halls found..note adapted .Hence the monstrous Concert pitch we have today. They were still Irish pipes I don't think they where ever advertised as the New American Pipes (tho your welcome to em).
Uilliam

Any time you condense a dissertation about a hundred years or more of history into a sentence or two you're going to end up with imprecision. However, you're thinking like an Old Worlder. My grandfather stepped off the boat in Superior Wisconsin in 1928 and he was an American. Then. He kissed Norway goodbye as he headed up the street for a drink. American VERSIONs if you demand, of the uilleann pipes as you admit were indeed DEVELOPED (I'm shouting because the italics procedure is too cumbersome) in America for American tastes and conditions. The point of the thread was the development of playing style, the comparison was being made to developing the physical sound and aspects of the pipes themselves.

We are fundamentally in agreement, and if Taylor and Rowsome felt free to physically and radically alter the basic sound and characteristics of the instrument itself in American environs, then why wouldn't it be expected for Scottish players to play in a Scottish fashion, or Mexican pipers play in a Mexican fashion, and these developing styles as the instrument spreads abroad, find as much validity as anything regimented by...oh, I'll just not name the organization for the sake of peace.

The RSPBA tried for generations to demand a particular style upon Highland pipe bands and the fact is they lost. There isn't a band winning the Worlds today that doesn't play mostly Irish style jigs, reels, hornpipes, or the more recent DCI inspired anthemesque hornreels or reelpipes and majestic, or so they think, theatrical themes, that came directly out of the drumming tradition of the USA with a heavy emphasis on the Latin influences. It's true that, oh, not naming the band, one of the hot, consistent winners from Western Canada plays a more conservative style than say, oh, not naming the band, certain bands from Eastern Canada for the World's event, but cut loose on their own and they both bring out the congas and drum kits and ceilidh bands for backup.

Highland drumming went from Alex Duthart's stolen Swiss closed rudiments in the 50's and 60's combined with Gene Krupa jazz kit rhythms to again, a heavily DCI inspired drum corps sound. The drums themselves have evolved into radically new sounds and constructions as have the Highland chanter. All of this happened in spite of heavy "official" regimentation and ruling bodies. The couple of Canadian styles now rule the Worlds, they stole from the Irish, and it's the Scottish bands fighting for a place in the contest. When I was a kid they said that would never happen, and an Irish band placing in, much less winning the contest was out of the question. In fact one of my first outings as a pipe major in the mid 70's provided a judge's comment, a very noted old fellow: "Don't come back with this Irish sh*t." He volunteered a lecture on how to properly point a proper Scottish jig afterward at the ceilidh.

Anyone caring to debate this pipe band development can feel free to go pull out a disc from the pre-1970's Scottish regimental bands and have a listen. They don't even PLAY medlys. They are dull, flat, and out of tune, and sloppy as hell. But you see, now this new style is the ruling regimen, new pipers will start out with this as their baseline, and do something else with it, all grumbling about repression and musical extortion from the judging bodies.

So, like I say, it's going to happen anyway, this changing of styles, but what will happen in a modern, enlightened society that is raised on all sorts of music, is that the sloppy crap, out-of-tune playing will no longer be acceptable in any of them. ("You don't have a style, you just don't play very well." That's how one argument with a Highland pipe student ended once...) The world in general is, and modern young pipers particularly are, long past buying the concept that "folk" instruments and players are sounding charming or quaint when untuned and sliding around for a melody. They have better ears, better fingers, better instruments, and more importantly, better examples.