On a recent trip, I played my pipes on a BC beach. A woman watched and asked me to play Scotland the Brave. She said her late husband’s father played the pipes in the Australian armed forces in the Second World War, and her husband always hummed the tune in memory of his Dad.
When people ask for specific tunes, or tell me personal stories like this, I realize what an honour it is to be a culture bearer for this tradition. Funerals, weddings, honouring those who have died for others, leading people in parades that celebrate an event or community, or just playing fun tunes to lift people’s spirits; the pipes are iconic and important in ways no other instrument is.
The commitment is to make the music for the pleasure of others, and that means playing well. Playing well is not easy and takes years of hard practice to be even minimally competent, because it’s such a complex instrument. There is no equivalent to a guitar-player’s 3-chord folk song on the pipes. Cue the scene from Friends.
The instrument is a crazy system of reeds, tubes, string, and air, all of which must be controlled and each part of which can stop behaving optimally without warning, and often all at the same time. Pipers have to be knowledgeable about the effects of humidity (snow, rain, drought, indoor heat systems), temperature (room, outdoor, sun, shade, wind), and terrain if marching, all while playing complex technique from memory in sets of 6-10 different tunes in a variety of time signatures.
There are a lot of people who like to make fun of the pipes. Most pipers laugh along, because what else are you going to do? But at a wedding, after I piped the bride down the aisle, the guitar player in the house band cracked one of the usual (yes, I promise, I’ve heard them all, and seen all the videos, many, many times) bagpipe jokes to his band buddies, so I offered him my pipes to try. He declined. But he never joked again.
But when someone comes up to you with honest emotion and tells you a bagpipe story about their parent, or teacher, or sibling, or partner, and how pipes played a part in a deeply emotional life transition, it’s a moment of connection that reaches across continents and centuries. And when you play a tune they request, and they smile and applaud and maybe even wipe away a tear, and thank you so effusively, it feels like a uniquely human moment. Two people sharing the impact of music, sound, memory, power, and tradition.
#Music
#Bagpipes
#Scottish
#GreatHighlandBagpipe
Vickie Gray 🍁
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"