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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Those Who Can, Teach

The world’s population is roughly 6,697,254,041. Of those people, I figure, based on what I know, what I’ve read and what I sense to be true (so we’re talking science here) there’s about 100,000 of us Great Highland Bagpipers (GHBs).

And what’s that percentage? GHBs represent about 0.0014931492726393354 of the world’s population. More or less.

Should pipers feel vulnerable? I think I really refer to the pipe and not the piper so, I put it this way: is the playing of the GHB an at-risk art form?
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Halloween

As the night draws in and the knocks of expectant trick-or-treaters loom I pass along an odd and seriously old-fashioned bit of ephemera.
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Strafe Strafferson: What’s with the Crazy Piping Notes?

There’s a crazy phenomenon in the piping world [ok, yes, there’s more than one, but I’m only talking about one of them here]. This phenomenon has to do with what might be described as the crazed strafing of notes on a pipe chanter; the random rat-a-tat-tat of notes on the chanter. This sort of unhinged insanity sounds like this: “upanddownthescaleupanddownthescalerandomtoptobottomnotesrandomtoptobottomnotes”.
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This Day in History

I don’t think many know that on this day, in 1927, Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, made the first trans-Atlantic telephone call to the UK. He apparently chatted with British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Maybe they chatted about King’s séances where he’d talk to his dead mum or maybe, they talked of that year’s Oban gold medal winner, John Wilson – or maybe not [you have to give me points for the segue to the bonus super piping trivia].
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A New Kind of Pipe Band

The last couple of weeks have seen a surprising spike in the disappearance of drum corps leadership around the world. I know it’s a temporary moment of change for all affected bands and a coincidence that so many top bands have experienced big drum corps change but…I wonder.
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What Makes a Good Pipe Band Score Sheet?

Having been around the game a while it sort of stands to reason that I will have seen a whackload of pipe band “score sheets”; you know, those near-impossible to read pages (sometimes due to penmanship) passed to bands following the announcement of results. And yay, reason prevails: I have.

It’s on these pages that bands usually learn what adjudicators thought of their competitive performance – and, by the way, it’s from these pages that pipebandspeople generally judge adjudicators. I’m a sentimental sort, believe it or not, and have, truth be told, quite a few pages dating back to my earliest times with bands laying around the old archives – and some recent artefacts, too.
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Band Travel

A quick note as I sit in a sunny Glasgow cafe digesting the entertaining editorial that was the band’s score sheets from yesterday’s contest in Dunoon (what a great day, by the way – congrats to Boghall! I’ll share more when I have easier access to technology).
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