Anthony, go wash your mouth out with soap!!
Helen
This has been a rather strange discussion.
We recently saw an attempt to summarise what Doubleday was saying that
only got as far as his preamble, overlooked the clues in words like
"power" and "brilliant character", concentrated on his reference to
diminuative size and completely overlooked the main thrust of his
argument. This was in the final paragraph and roughly said that extra
keys on pipes encouraged the playing of pieces hitherto only heard on
fiddles and other instruments and that often the result was a musical
monstrosity.
I will need to do more than wash my mouth out, I'll also need to beg
forgiveness from the high priests and priestesses of piping for this,
but he is absolutely right and not only have I heard many such
monstrosities recently, I'm guilty of some of them myself.
Helen, wonderful though you are, the beauty and gut-tingling tone of
the pipes can move people to tears and has clearly done so for me too.
But if an instrument is lacking any possibilty of dynamics it can't
reach the highest heights of expression.
Here is a summary of my own piping journey if anyone should feel
inclined to read it.
As you might or might not know I was the one to whom Chris Ormston
looked up to in the early years with, as he put it, dewy-eyed
admiration. I remember asking him to come up from the audience to join
me on stage for a duet when I was the guest at Whitley Bay Folk Club
and he told the audience it was an honour and privilege it was to share
tunes with me.
Years later he wondered publicly on this list what had happened to that
piper.
The answer is, Greg Smith played "The Blackbird" for me.
His music, live, fresh, creative, flowing and resonant in my own living
room drove me to a radical reappraisal of the pipes and piping. As I've
hinted recently, it shattered my world at the time, plunging me into a
state of confusion which led to me barely touching the pipes from one
month to the for many years.
The good news for me now is the gift of fresh ideas on the pipes-front
where the lead is being taken from the last truly traditional style
player in Northumberland, Jimmy Little.
Not everyone's cup of tea and that's fine, but Jimmy and my teaching
of Alice Burn and Paul Knox have brought me back to the deepest love of
piping by focusing on the old country style of phrasing. This is much
harder to master than it sounds but, with each little step forward,
gives huge satisfaction . It also relies on the Heaven and Earth
combination of pipes with fiddle, 'Himmel un Aed'.
Enough!!
Congratulations and thank you if you read to the bottom of this. If you
have skimmed to the bottom and aren't inclined to read it, I don't
blame you one jot!
Cheers
Anthony
--- On Sun, 19/12/10, Helen Capes <helen.ca...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
From: Helen Capes <helen.ca...@paradise.net.nz>
Subject: Re: [NSP] Doubleday
To: "Anthony Robb" <anth...@robbpipes.com>, "Dartmouth NPS"
<nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Date: Sunday, 19 December, 2010, 20:34
"The pipes are a brilliant but not capable of the highest level of
expressiveness."
Anthony, go wash your mouth out with soap!!
Helen
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