Sorry about my '...' marks, which were not to indicate a direct quote - but rather to paraphrase the gist of an earlier email, the passage:
"Years later [Chris] 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 quotes round my paraphrase were only to say what sentence I was asking about. I'm glad you've returned to the pipes and are now doing your bit for North Northumbrian traditional music. As your piping on Cut and Dry had a powerful effect on me, though, I see where Chris was coming from. De gustibus non disputandum, but at least it keeps the list server busy. John ________________________________________ From: lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu [lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Robb [anth...@robbpipes.com] Sent: 20 December 2010 17:21 To: Dartmouth NPS Subject: [NSP] Pipes & Fiddles Today John Gibbons wrote: Is 'the NSP don't move Anthony as much as the fiddle does', a sentence about the NSP or about Anthony? The answer has to be it's about both. My question is where did the sentence come from? Definitely not the email you are replying to, where I said, "... 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 included the reference to "Choralation" because that choir had almost a whole audience moved to tears in Hexham Abbey on the 12th of this month. Not only was I saying the pipes had the power to move me as much as fiddles they even had enough power to move me as much as the human voice. This for me is the ultimate compliment to pipes. He goes on to say: 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? Well John, they might well be but I don't think so. Here's a little bit of what he says: "This rhythm on the fiddle is created by the traditional tecnique, or as the country musicians call it, by the "drops and raises. .. This rhythmical technique gives the pulsating effect the dancers call 'lilt'. But it also gives continuity. The shimering melodic line, fluctuating from weak to strong, flat to sharp, short notes to long, soft to loud, gives a continuous living environment for the pulsations. Continuity is also aided by the occasional use of drones. .. Inheriting the technique 'traditionally' makes for a standard of dance playing very difficult to acquire in any other way. Let me repeat that the tunes inn this book are only outlined in the notation and some wider experience is required than learning them from the printed page. Listening to good traditional players on gramophone records or on the radio, or better still, in the flesh, will inform the fiddler as no notation can do." Peter Kennedy That's a taste of it but enough to allow people to decide the answer to your question for themselves. Cheers Anthony -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html