That's pretty much the way I was thinking. Of course, one also has to
investigate the origins of the NSP themselves and why the chanter was
stopped considering the vast number of bagpipes found around the world
with open ended chanters.
I do have a keyless chanter and I agree that the need for staccato seems
(to me) far more obvious than with keyed chanters (maybe just because
Meggy's Foot was the first tune I learned on it).
I suppose I was making a comparison with the musette de Cour which does
have music that plays the twiddley bits (OK, ornamentations) which seem
anathema here although they are generally played staccato. It was that
that got me thinking about this recent rift between players (ie stopped
chanter, OK on the musette, not on the NSP).
Somewhere that use of ornamentation seems to have been classed as
"wrong" with NSPs.
Of course, if the French played ornamentations, the British would
probably consider that not the done thing so is the history of the two
countries :)
Sorry, don't mean to be stirring things.
Colin Hill
On 17/06/2011 14:24, Gibbons, John wrote:
When I had a go on a replica (Dunn?) keyless chanter Francis has made for
Graham Wells,
I got the feeling that the staccato style was almost required of the player, by
the way the instrument responded.
If that was true of the early NSP in general, then the staccato style must
surely go back that far too.
There is no point closing the end of the chanter - losing a note from the range
-
unless you want at least the option of staccato.
Several of the Peacock tunes, most obviously Meggy's Foot, explicitly require
staccatissimo in places,
and passages of other tunes - especially pedal passages |GgBg GgBg| etc,
absolutely need to be played tight on NSP.
It's worth pointing out that you get analogous passages to these in Dixon, /for
an open ended chanter/,
but BP respond differently to NSP; these strains just don't work legato on NSP.
The Clough tradition went back to the early days of the instrument,
and they certainly placed great stress on this stylistic point.
I wonder what they played UP like when they still had a set?
They must surely have been nearer the closed end of the UP stylistic spectrum.
I think the issue is not that staccato is musically the only way the NSP can be
played,
but that the instrument has always been played this way (with important
exceptions - Billy Pigg, Richard Mowat),
and, importantly, that the oldest tunes work best this way on the instrument.
So a legato style can be musical, but isn't much represented in the tradition
of the instrument, particularly in southern Northumberland.
John
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