> Pipers have the advantage that they don't have all those obnoxious
> pseudo-classical crossover players hanging around trying to tell them
> how to play. There are no strathspey and reel "societies" for pipers.
> Just pipe bands/bagpipe playing drinking clubs.
Yep, but the piping world does have its own kind of authoritarianism
that it is only recently, and only partially, managing to shake off.
For years the prevalent culture was that if you weren't playing in the
latest-and-greatest style out of Edinburgh Castle you weren't anywhere;
and a lot of local piping styles have been lost as a result. In some
sort of way, fiddlers have always taken the early-music ethic on board
after a fashion, i.e. even if you aren't playing like Niel Gow did, you
consider the way he played to be worthy of respect and worth knowing
about. Whereas the Army-inspired piping perspective on somebody like
Angus Mackay or Donald MacPhee is that they were irrelevant dusty old
codgers who didn't have the chops to hack it in the modern world, and
consciously trying to play in their style would get you nul points in
any competition.
I would love to hear some of those big nineteenth-century marches
played on the low-pitch pipes of the time, with the relatively
small bands that were the rule in the Crimean war period and using
rope-tensioned drums. Try that at a Highland Games and you'd be
laughed out of town. (Rumour has it that an analogous approach to
piobaireachd could get you duffed up in a Glasgow back street, but
perhaps we should take that to alt.conspiracy...).
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
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