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: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Anthony Robb [[email protected]]
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
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