I've never seen anyone's goats playing a shawm - playing the goat, perhaps.
You are perhaps thinking of the Great God Pan, who played another wind 
instrument...

John

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
cwhill
Sent: 24 June 2011 12:24
To: [email protected]
Subject: [NSP] Re: Deaf/dead

I was more thinking along the lines of "look what they've done to my 
song, Ma".

There is, of course, a serious side to it when deciding on which part of 
the tradition one wishes to set as the norm. With the best will in the 
world, how people actually played music before recordings were available 
has to be "best guess". Research can help somewhat but nothing compares 
with the actual "not like that, like this" of a fellow piper.
That's one of the reasons that I tend to be not so pedantic on how to 
play the pipes (within reason) including which came first - the stopped 
chanter or the "one finger off at a time". Lucky accident or careful 
deliberation?.
Of course, one wonders who actually thought of killing a goat and using 
the skin for the bag. Imagine some guy sitting watching his goats 
playing a shawm, getting out of breath (and they do take a lot of puff) 
and thinking "I have a cunning plan".

Colin Hill


On 24/06/2011 09:34, [email protected] wrote:
>
>> If Beethoven were alive
>> today and could hear (:)), would he have recognised his
>> compositions as
>> played
>
> I'm very sure he would have recognised the pieces but he might have thought 
> people had a very funny way of playing them.
>
> Though I did once hear a recording of piece by Palestrina that I had actually 
> sung myself and failed to recognise it.
> This was the choir of the Sistine Chapel around 1935 with masses of vibrato, 
> poor tuning in general and rubato all over the shop.
>
> I also once heard a local choir singing three pieces - one by Haydn, one by 
> Bruckner and one by Britten, and I couldn't tell which was which.
>
> And I once failed to recognise that a rock band had played Little Wing in one 
> of their sets.
>
> But I don't think it's this kind of gross inaccuracy that we're talking about.
> CB
>
>
>
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