Is 'the NSP don't move Anthony as much as the fiddle does', a sentence about the NSP or about Anthony?
As for Peter Kennedy's 'Drops and Raises' aren't they a survival of 18th C performance practice, which may well have been exactly how the genteel pipers of the early 19th C would have wanted to play, if they could? Peacock certainly has some ornaments notated, and they are certainly playable. John ________________________________________ From: lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu [lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Robb [anth...@robbpipes.com] Sent: 20 December 2010 11:30 To: Dartmouth NPS Subject: [NSP] Doubleday Post Script and retraction Thanks, Helen, for making me look more deeply into my words. "Highest" is, on deeper thought, a bad choice as pipes in the right hands (as Inky Adrian recently pointed out) hit the heart and brain every bit as surely as, say, Heifitz or indeed "Choralation" (Rowan Johnston's New Zealand choir). I'm not sure if it'll be any better, however, if I substitute fullest for highest. By which I mean hitting heart, brain and body (particulary the feet), simultaneously. This is far harder to pull off on the pipes than, say, the fiddle. It's what Peter Kennedy in the introduction to the Fiddler's Tune Book (OUP 1954) calls "Drops and Raises" a topic he devotes 8 paragraphs to. This is not done easily or by many and clearly not the genteel ladies and gentlemen who were probably the only people able to afford keyed pipes in the mid 18 th century. This takes us back to Doubleday. For me this letter to the Duke of Northumberland said 3 things: a) the old style pipes were brilliant, perfect for the job and really pwerful for their size (I know some who say similar re their Blackberry), b) the recent development in extra range attracted a fashion set who, more often than not, made a dog's dinner of the pieces they attempted, c) this bad playing was giving the pipes themselves a thoroughly underserved bad reputation. There is a fourth thing which was not in the extract posted but something that if not said openly was perhaps implicit in his letter, so this is my d) please do something about this parlous state of affairs. I add this because if the year is correct (1857) it was the same year the Duke appointed a second Duke's Piper, one James Reid of North Shields, to promote the pipes (presumably on Tyneside) and show people how they should be played. I would love to think that a consequence of this was that the genteel folk thought, 'pipes are not for us after all' and promptly sold them on for a fraction of their cost to the likes of the Cloughs and others who knew what to do with them. Pure speculation and merely the result of my own "digestion" of the piece so proper research could well prove me wrong. It would, nevertheless, be a lovely and fitting end to the tale. Cheers Anthony -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
