It has been interesting following the recent debate and reading Adrian's
comments from afar, particularly as I was teaching a workshop in the
Pacific North West last weekend and some sessions, particularly on style
and ornamentation, were coloured by the online comments of the previous
week.
As part of the session at the workshop we listened to recordings of well
known pipers and discussed what they were doing. It the case of the
older generation Billy Pigg stood out as a choyter. However Jack
Armstrong and Joe Hutton both used choytes but in a much, much more
restrained way and one had the feeling that when they did it they meant
it, rather than it being the main ornament in their repertoire. I need
now to listen the whole of the Wild Hills of Wannies LP to hear more
examples but haven't had time yet.
The modern revival in Northumbrian piping was in many ways part of the
greater folk revival on the 1960s and for those looking for older pipers
Billy was one of the better known. Perhaps his style was also more
exciting to the new folkies but he seems to have had a greater effect on
the next generation than his style, when compared to his peers in the
mainstream, should have had. I remember a review of the Joe Hutton of
Coquetdale LP that Ron Elliot wrote for the EFDSS magazine when he
talked about the purity of Joe's playing compared to what he called "the
provisional wing" of Northumbrian piping.
But we have now moved to a newer generation who are perhaps pushing what
Billy did even further. Something that struck me during the
conversations at the workshop was that we often get into these exchanges
on the newsgroup or in person and point fingers at individual pipers as
being the sources of the corruption of the tradition. However I think
the current situation has been greatly distorted by activities on some
non pipers with no real interest in the tradition at all.
Folk/traditional music has always been a minor part of the music
industry and those who run specialist labels have little chance of
getting rich (and running a specialist piping CD store I am getting to
realize this more and more.....). Enter those who saw the chance to make
some money by promoting an attractive young woman who was marketable
beyond the dowdy folkies. They also made sure that others truer to
tradition were suppressed by recording them, tying them contractually
but not releasing the LP/CD. Perhaps the initial problems in releasing
the New Horizons LP, which also involved Mr. Bulmer, were not accidental
either. The result of this is that majority of people who have heard
Northumbrian piping have not heard the pure tradition but have been
drawn to it by sound of "the provisional wing", promoted initially by
someone interested only in making money from it.
Pandora's box has been opened and I do not see that we can fully close
it again. Getting people to hear "pure piping" is a big part of it as is
making written material available that underlines it. Chris Ormston's
CD and the Clough book are both parts of this. Having people teach the
style is more important. Chris and Adrian are doing it in the UK and I
have been doing so in the US but the pupils have to be receptive to
it. Hopefully enough will be to start to swing back........
Ian
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
