Humility and Grace

It seems to me that one of the hardest lessons to learn in the competitive piping game – or life, for that matter – is around winning – and losing. “Win with humility and lose with grace”, goes the old saying. Like just about every other piece of well-kent advice of the proverbial sort, well, it’s all easier said than done. Think of the Golden Rule or “ethic of reciprocity”: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If that simple tenet of human rights was easy-peasy to make happen we’d all be living in a Utopian Shangri-La.
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Every Mile is Two in Winter

“Every mile is two in winter”, wrote the English poet, George Herbert. I couldn’t agree more. And if Georgie had lived in Canada and not England – where winter is pretty much over – he might’ve replaced two with three – or five.

At this point in February I’m fed the eff up with it. Like a lot of you, I’d guess – at least the you in the northern hemisphere. Of course for you lucky Antipodeans, it’s nothing but bonnie summer days.
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Japanese Cinema and Pipe Bands

Now there’s a subject line you probably never imagined.

I always thought those old cheesy Japanese movies from the 1950s might benefit from a little kick, a little something to give them a boost. I’m not talking Seven Samurai or Rashomon here, I’m talking about movies like those from the Godzillaand Mothra franchises (did they call ever call old movie serials “franchises”?).

Anyway, I thought how great it would be for one to snag a pipe band soundtrack, music to go along with the badly dubbed English.
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Plays Like a Flute …

… sounds like a bagpipe.
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Responsibilities of Membership

I came across a note recently where a person was enquiring about membership in a band. They were interested in this band because they wanted to “get better”. This person needed the band “to kick their arse” so that they’d play better, be better.

I thought this strange. I thought this person had the whole thing backwards.
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Borreraig: An Experience Waiting to Happen

After a while, everyone who takes up the Great Highland Bagpipe comes to know of the MacCrimmons.

The MacCrimmons: that fabled sixteenth century piping family of virtuoso geniuses. The MacCrimmons, of course, were [and to a lesser extent, I suppose are] the family that provided piping services to the expansive MacLeod clan.

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Happy New Year!

All the best to you and yours for the best New Year ever!

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Ceci n’est pas une Bagpipe

The world is full of surreal moments. We sometimes catch them, see them, live them and take them in and we’re almost always better for it. And sometimes we’re oblivious to the thought-provoking charms of the surreal around us. The surreal moment: that dream-like, unexpectedly fantastical and completely out of context with what we expect from our usual here-and-now.
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A Healthy Band: It’s About Feeling Good

We’re entering the time of year (in the northern hemisphere, at least) where pipe bands experience a drop in consistently good attendance. For as long as I have played in bands this has been a truth. From January through to March a good whack of the band, a sizable group of people (usually the same), fail to attend, or attend sporadically, due to “busy-ness” – or whatever. Excuses are legion and, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker [she of “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”], they run the gamut from A to B. The reasons may be unique to those “busy” but to core membership – and every band has a hardcore group of members that keep the ship afloat – they bore.
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Bagpipes and Inuit Tradition

People who love bagpipe music also love to deliberate what makes good bagpipe music. It happens in solo piping all the time (“Ooh, did you hear how s/he played the first variation of Mary MacLeod? Rubbish. Clipped to hell…”).

But, really, its when pipe band music is talked about that we most often hear the most intense debates. I guess its due, in part, because there’s more people involved. I think, though, its more the sports-like, hyper-competitive, team elements that characterize the pipe band movement that makes for the fertile ground of relentless pipe band music debate.
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