DH - Thank you so much. I really do appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.

For a number of reasons, not least of which is that you were made privy to an email conversation between myself, Barnaby Brown and Jack Taylor, I would like to start our talk by asking you about Jack Taylor, his role in shaping the Piobaireachd Society, and your general impressions of him as pibroch enthusiast.

AB - I know Jack from bumping him into in Scotland. We’ve also had him present via video conference at a couple seminars on the medal tunes out at BCPA events. I know he’s a real student of pibroch, and not just someone who simply parrots what he was taught. He’s always struck me as a thoughtful, open-minded person, and I believe he’s always had that reputation as a judge before becoming president of the Piobaireachd Society.

DH - Barnaby has been really impressed with him. He’s always had nothing but nice things to say about Jack, because Jack has always brought that certain quality of inquiry. It seems to have caused the Society to simmer down with respect to the “wars” that had flared up way back when.

AB - I think Jack has probably been viewed as more acceptable to the traditionalists members of the Piobaireachd Society, because he has an excellent tuition pedigree, a great reputation as a player and has won the big prizes — in other words he has all the orthodox qualifications one could want. He is also very highly respected as a perceptive and fair adjudicator. I think having a president with those qualities probably gives some comfort to those who feel threatened by new ideas. That said, Jack is someone who has kept up with the times, is technologically adept and is a real driving force behind getting a lot of the manuscripts up on the Piobaireachd Society’s web site. He’s also a real gentleman - he’s not a “bull in a china shop” reformer. He filters and carefully considers what gets sent to him. That was apparent in the email exchange you mentioned: he took a well-considered look at the points William Donaldson raised, but wasn’t entirely persuaded by them.

DH - To return specifically to this email exchange - I work with Jori on these old manuscripts. Right now I’m concentrating on Hannay-MacAuslan, and there is a lot of very strange stuff in there: half-grips, open crunluaths-a-mach, taorluaths that don’t look like what we play today. All sorts of stuff. As Jori and I review it, he draws from his experience, I draw from my educational background, and we work away at these songs. But every once in a while, we hit parts of songs that make no sense with respect to our backgrounds and how things are performed today. So, I’ll turn to Barnaby or Donaldson and ask for their input.

In this case, we were reviewing Donald Grummach and the fosgailte taorluaths that don’t look like triplets at all - they are straight-fire 1/8th notes. So, I asked Donaldson about the song and about this part. And he sends back a full 20-minute canntaireachd interpretation. Which is great. I mean, it’s not like this was on his to-do list, and it’s not on the Set List. But he takes the time to send and record it.

The thing is, how Donaldson sings it is also not like what’s written. So, I asked Jack - and he suggested, “If the transcriber did know his rhythms, maybe that’s how it should be tried, no matter how odd it may sound.

So, we tried it. It’s ugly, and weird and boring, and I can see why other performers (including Angus MacKay) would play them differently. But they are there.

Anyway, for the purposes of the readers, let’s shift to you and your background.

How long have you been playing pibroch?

AB - Since I was, probably, 10 years old.

DH - What started you?

AB - The competition system. There was a piobaireachd event coming up at a competition I was going to enter and I had to learn a ground and first variation. My first piping teacher wasn’t particularly enamored of pibroch, but he had some foundation: he was taught for some time by Jimmy MacMillan, who was Jack and Terry Lee’s main mentor. Jimmy was a great teacher and a real student of piobaireachd. He ws also a lifelong student of the music and very much a collector. He had a huge collection of recordings and really kept his head in the music. Interestingly, he became more and more attracted to the so-called ‘Cameron’ school in his later life.

DH - Can you elaborate on those schools a bit?

AB - I think it’s a kind of caricature. It’s minor differences in timing, mostly. What’s interesting is that the farther away from Scotland you get, the more stark the differences become. When I first started going to Scotland I heard all sorts of people playing phrases in what I recognized as ‘Cameron’ style, but they were also playing a mostly ‘MacPherson’ take on the tune. I think it reflects the fact that in North America we’ve largely received our pibroch tuition from a small number of teachers who just happen to have immigrated or were brought out for seminars. Or people from North America went over to Scotland to study. So we’ll get the William or Jim Barrie or Willie Connell representing teaching in the Cameron style, and we’ll have the MacPherson influence mostly from Donald MacLeod in Western Canada (because he was out here teaching a lot and had a connection with guys from the Powell River Pipe Band). I think in North America we have maybe tended to have a narrower range of stylistic variation between performances -or at least we did years ago.

DH - That confirms something Barnaby mentioned to me, how today in Scotland there’s a lot more open mindedness, and that’s something that needs to get out to the rest of the folks. I have often gotten hammered by a different interpretive performance of pieces.

AB - I think that if an interpretation isn’t something the judges recognize, it’s hard to get a fair hearing.

DH - Accepted wisdom is that it is the competition that has created a standardization of performance. What do you think about that? Is that true?

AB - I think that’s a fair general take on things. I don’t know what it was like before, mind you. I imagine competition raised standards in a lot of areas: I’m certain our instruments sound a lot better than they did in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries; I think there has been a bit of an arms race in our technique over the last 100 years or so. You can read about that from the impressions of people who heard GS McLennan playing light music and mention how much he stood out from everybody else. But, go back and listen to a recording of a solo piper from the early part of the 20th century and almost every aspect of the performance sounds completely foreign to our modern ears – sound, technique, even tempo.

There’s an old recording of John McCall on Jim McGillivray’s website and it’s shocking. It doesn’t sound like anything I would have imagined he would sound. It’s wild stuff. But it’s probably a lot like how everybody else played at the time. And he was a great player, one of the fathers of the modern 2/4 competition march and his playing was just so different from what we’re used to hearing. It absolutely shocked me. Even his technique was different: it was way more open, with big grace notes.

DH - I am finding that, in the course of perusing the various manuscripts, what we see as playing very heavy, fast crunluaths, popping off the final E as quickly as possible: these early manuscripts show the movements written completely differently than how we perform them today. They are more up, open and relaxed: we’re not talking 32nd note, but 1/16th note edres with the final E written as an 1/8th. It makes me wonder what it would sound like to play it that way, or, at least, more open, more relaxed. And you know, when I play it, it doesn’t sound bad. Just different.

AB - I’ve seen them written that way, and they don’t have the percussive low-A, but emphasize the Es and F as melody notes. It’s interesting.

DH - Another example is the darado in Pursuit of Glenfrooin, a recording of which I sent you. With the full melody notes written and G grace notes between them. It’s an intriguing thing to confront, and makes you, as a musician, revisit your assumptions.

Where do you go to draw from your interpretation when you pick up a new pibroch? What helps you interpret and shape your performance?

AB - A few years back when the Piobaireachd Society set tunes from the early sources, I actually went back to the Campbell Canntaireachd to figure out where a first line in an urlar was supposed to end. It gave me lots of food for thought. It was fun trying to translate the canntaireachd in order to figure out the rhythms and structure of the tune. Even today, I will go back to the CC to see how the rhythms are put together. You can tell a lot about the structure and where the phrases begin and end from the canntaireachd, and they are not always where the PS decided to put the bar lines. It gives you a clearer understanding of the music you’re trying to play.

Having said that, my usual starting point is the PS books and I also go to the Donald MacLeod tutorial CDs to listen to what he does with the tune. Because that is certainly the style of playing I aspire towards and the teaching tradition I’ve tried to access (first through Jack Lee, then through Andrew Wright and Angus J MacLellan).

DH - They are all very traditionalist, aren’t they? I mean, Jack strikes me as open minded. But I was reading through Andrew Wright’s new book, and he has some very traditionalist things he let drop in there.

AB - Yes, we’ve been talking about the openness with respect to the Piobaireachd Society today, but I saw Andrew’s book as an attempt to state as clearly as possible: “Here’s one stylistic tradition, and here’s exactly how you do it.” I think it succeeds. I really enjoyed the book, in part I’m sure because it basically reflects how I try to play. It brought a lot of clarity to things I was doing, and it’s a good template to start with if you are going to play in that style. Of course there are lots of things in Andrew’s book that will be of assistance to people who might choose to play in a different style. It’s certainly worthy of study by all serious players.

DH - You say you start with the competition milieu, you work through this material: your goal for doing so becomes what? What are you trying to accomplish?

AB - Usually, I’m trying to get the tune to make sense, and sometimes that can be quite challenging. In one case, I was working through an urlar that had been misprinted in the PS book; a later edition fixed the setting. I listened to the Donald MacLeod tutorial, and he was also trying to make sense of it (using the defective setting), because the PS basically put it in the wrong time signature: none of the bars added up properly, the emphasis was on all the wrong notes. And it’s extremely clear when you look in the Canntaireachd and see how and the syllables are all divided up appropriately. The tune suddenly makes sense. So when one has difficulty figuring out what to do, especially when there’s a seeming anomaly in the printed setting (a bar with an extra pulse, for example: is this an extra connecting note, or is this actually switching into compound rhythm, etc.), sometimes looking at other sources can bring some clarity to matters.

I look at Binneas Is Boreraig a lot as well. That’s also written in more-or-less the tradition that I’ve been taught. Binneas certainly makes it clear where phrases begin and end, and what the relative note values are. It has its defects too: Many find it weird not having a full staff, but Binneas is a great resource. And every time they republish it, the editors find and correct more of the unfortunate typographical mistakes that were in the original, which is a good thing, too.

(It’s available online now, and has some sound clips of Malcolm MacPherson demonstrating the tunes.)

DH - It’s interesting the balancing act you’re displaying here, where you are looking at the source materials and when something does not make sense, the musicality kicks in, gives you a kind of warning and you ask yourself, “Okay, what does my musical ear say?” And then you look up other resources that explain the disconnect and may confirm your intuition.

On the other hand, there is a tradition-centric drive that is important. Much of what you mention in our discussion is an appeal to teachers and teacher’s teachers. It aligns you within a constellation and provides a shorthand, of sorts, regarding why you make the interpretive choices you do.

But to provide some perspective: in classical music, there is no such thing. Sure, a soloist’s pedigree is known and advertised: Julliard, Curtis, Peabody. Individual instructors are named. But that’s less to do with interpretive tradition than, say, reputation building. When a classical musician sits down with a sheet of music, they don’t wonder what their teacher or teacher’s teacher taught them. They rely on their musicality.

What classical musicians bring to a piece of music is a belief that there is more in the music to be explored than can possibly be captured by perfecting a particular interpretive tradition. That’s the point expressed by the Glenn Gould quote on the masthead of altpibroch.com: never play the piece the same way twice - there’s more in there that can be unearthed.

It is interesting that there is this tension among competitors I’ve spoken with between tradition and musicality.

AB - As far as tradition and pedigree goes, it’s not always used just to legitimize someone’s playing, but I think it’s more often used as an explanation of stylistic choices. You’ve probably noticed that there are very few first generation pipers out there - most of them have a family history and that’s where the main teaching lines of come down. I’m a first generation player, but I have close friends like Stuart Liddell who comes from a long line of pipers, and I don’t think he even knows how far back his family has been playing. His grandfather, P/M Ronald McCallum taught him. And, of course, Stuart is related to Hugh McCallum and Willie McCallum, and there’s this whole extended family with what I think of as their own kind of ‘house style’ of playing.

DH - You started young, you are first gen: how did you get started?

AB - My parents had lots of LPs of pipe bands. My mom played had started learning recreationally as an adult and was getting to the point where she was about to get on pipes and stopped. But she still had her practice chanter and when I was little I would fish it out and walk around the house with it, a rolled up blanket under my left arm and a plunger on my shoulder. The fellow who had taught her was the pipe major of the local band. Somehow my mother heard that he moved back and was rebuilding the band and taking on students, so she got in touch with him. Once she heard about it, she reached out to him. It’s interesting, because I was not the sort of child who would jump at something new; normally I was too shy. My mom suggested it, and I kinda surprised myself and jumped at the opportunity.

I was very fortunate to be in such a fertile environment. In the band I was around other kids my age and a bit older. The band itself was playing at a very pretty low-level grade three standard when I joined, and was getting back into competing about the time I joined. It continued to improve, so there was this good mix of growth, of relatively experienced adults and young, keen kids pushing we developed into better and stronger as players. The band eventually rose up to grade one. It was a very dynamic environment in which to learn pipes.

DH - What is your favorite pibroch?

AB - It varies with my mood. I love the classics: Lament for the Children, Lament for the Laird of Anapool, the ‘Big’ Nameless tune. I think my favorite ground is Lament for the Union; it’s a lovely thing. (I like the rest of the tune, too, but especially I really like the fact that the variations are short and you are constantly changing tempo and rhythm moving from twos to threes to fours in a cycle.)

DH - Jori likes primary structure pibroch, too. I wonder if the reason for that is, and again I am drawing from classical music as an analog, it affords the musician an opportunity to really dig into the depths of theme and find ways to keep it interesting and engaging. It’s my theory that people who are as good as you and Jori like this kind of primary form, because it gives the chance to be truly musical in the face of a tune that to anyone and everyone else would otherwise be obviously repetitive and potentially very boring.

AB - Like the Red Speckled Bull syndrome? That tune is an acquired taste. At first, I did not like it. It fell completely flat for me the first time I heard it. Then I heard it a few more times, and heard good players competing with it at Inverness, and I began to appreciate it more. It’s very challenging playing a tune like that: it doesn’t play itself the way a more melodic tune would. But it is a real test of a good player, to be able to hold the audience’s attention and interest in such a tune.

DH - This leads to another angle. We’ve been talking about what you as a player bring to a performance. What do audiences bring to a performance? What do audiences want from a pibroch performance?

AB - That’s a pretty good question. Most of the time when we perform piobaireachd in front of audiences it’s at a competition. The audiences are quite passive participants: many are there counting grace notes and waiting for drones to go out of tune. So there’s kind of an interesting tension - it is not always clear that the audience is rooting for you, as they would perhaps at a concert or a recital. But it depends on how confident you are when you walk in: if things are going well, you feel everyone is on your side. If not… you never want to get the “Inverness moan” when you finish your tune!

There is a mix: you may have your own friends and support who are there for you; you have your fellow competitors who may or may not be on your side (though most of us are rooting for each one another, I’m sure there are some of us who are less charitable sometimes).

The worst feeling is to go somewhere to compete or perform and have there be only five people sitting in a big auditorium. It’s very depressing, and doesn’t help bring the best out in a performer.

I probably had the most fun playing a piobaireachd the year when I won the medal at Inverness. I just happened to be last on and they have busloads of people come in, mostly elderly, from places up north and on the west coast to watch the big MSR competition. The MSR competition came on after the Gold Medal, on the same stage, so the crowd was already there early while the last few Gold Medal competitors were playing. I walked on stage and the place was packed! There wasn’t an empty seat in the house. It was great! And I felt really pumped by that. Even though it was pibroch, and even though I was competing, it felt like a real performance.

DH - Isn’t that a shame, though? Why do we play music? It’s obviously a form of communication and therefore a form of energy exchange. I know musicians like to say they “play for themselves”, but I don’t know if that’s actually true. Esp. as loud as bagpipes are, that can’t be true. I realize sometimes a musician has to fall back on that thought, because practicing is such an experience of isolation. But an audience really does bring something.

AB - It brings some energy, certainly. Still, I’ve played some places where there was a low audience turn out and I remember specifically thinking, “I’d be having more fun playing this in shorts in my the basement right now…”

Yes, there is a big rush from putting all this energy and effort into something and finally getting a chance to show people what you’ve been doing. And you tend to play better when there is a little bit of pressure and expectation from a larger audience.

DH - How could we possibly bring more interest to pibroch, or is it a lost cause?

AB - I don’t know. A lot of people have asked that question and I haven’t heard a lot of stimulating answers, to be honest.

DH - It’s not as though the pieces are too long: you know what? I just listened to a 45 minute Shastakovich violin concerto. That piece was both very long, and extremely dense and trying on the audience…

AB - Part of the problem is may be that bagpipes are such a finicky instrument. With a A great-sounding pipe, like Donald MacPherson’s or Roddy MacLeod’s, even if you don’t understand the music, that sound washing over you will keep you interested for 15 or 20 minutes, easily. Things are improving nowadays in terms of the instruments’ reliability (moisture control, synthetic reeds, etc.), so you hear a lot fewer poor bagpipes, but a really great sound of a great instrument is still pretty rare, even now. That may be part of it.

Another thing: You don’t hear recitalists performing 2 or 3 pibroch. Maybe just exposing audiences to more (perhaps contrasting) tunes could help change things.

DH - Maybe. I think people associate bagpipes with dancing and hurdling objects, and pibroch isn’t exactly that kind of music.

AB - The other thing I think is a part of it is that there is this kind of mystique of incomprehensibility about when it comes to pibroch. I think Dr. Donaldson touches on this, where I think he says something like there’s been a real effort to make the music incomprehensible to all but the “educated” ear, in an effort to make it high art. It is a kind of fetish of incomprehensibility. I found this sort of thing in academia: the more impenetrable your writing is, the less chance there is that someone is going to feel confident enough to criticize you, because they aren’t going to admit that they don’t understand you. I think pibroch playing, for a while, may have been going down that road and it masked a lot of sins.

I had a moment of revelation when I was watching the Gold Medal one year. I was probably19 or 20, on one of my first trips overseas. I listened to Rob Wallace play The Blue Ribbon (he won the Gold Medal with the performance), and I remember feeling that I understood everything he was doing. It was an absolutely crystal clear performance. He had my attention all the way through it, and I haven’t heard a lot of people play with that much stylistic clarity, whatever style they are playing. It may be that people are not putting the time in to really study the tunes and what they are trying to achieve musically, and so they free-wheel it and float around. I notice that a lot while judging: I find I myself feeling bored and wondering, “Why isn’t this tune engaging me? There’s nothing wrong with the pipes. The technique is okay. The player is doing a competent job…” But it’s because the player doesn’t really understand what he/she is doing with the tune. You hear that a lot in pibroch playing, unfortunately, even at the big competitions.

DH - I think that’s a fair statement, and let me put it into a broader context.

There is this idea that for pibroch performance to really work, you have to be a mature musician. I think a lot of the writers and instructors who suggest this frame it in terms of time and longevity on the pipes. I’m not sure if that’s really the right frame. I think the real issue is: are you a good enough musician to communicate the sense and style of the song to the audience? You can be a very good musician without having to be on the pipes for 30 years before daring to explore the tradition, to my mind.

AB - I think for a lot of people, though, it takes that long to figure it out, for a variety of reasons.

DH - I think that’s true with all musical instruments: you need the time to develop technique, gain breadth and depth of experience, grow a repertoire. Still, you started pibroch very early. And I wonder if isn’t the case that being introduced to pibroch early isn’t a condition for success? I wonder if we wait too long to introduce the genre to students?

When do you introduce it to your students?

AB - I don’t have a lot of students who are just starting out. I may get students who are just entering grade 4 solos, and the competition cycle introduces pibroch at that stage. I also get students who come just for pibroch lessons, when their regular instructors don’t or can’t teach pibroch.

But I remember when growing up a well-known teacher around here used to say, “You can’t play pibroch until you are at least in your 30s and have been playing for X number of years,” and I would think (as a young kid), “That’s hogwash—I’m playing it now!.”

Having said that, I certainly have a deeper understanding of the music now than I did when I was 10 or 11 years old. There is a lot to learn, and it takes time. Lack of exposure is a problem – very few of my students have ever heard pibroch before they start trying to learn how to play it. I think if we had more good pibroch playing out there to listen to (and we do have access to a lot more good playing now than we did when I was a kid), it would certainly help people get started on the right foot.

DH - There is an explosion of offering available, and I often here folks express concern that so many pibroch videos are now available. But I remember growing up that the only pibroch I heard was from a Donald MacPherson album - it was a good way to be introduced to it, but that’s all I had: a single album. Then I would have to go out and by another album. And those albums were hardly widely available - we didn’t have a large bagpipe community where I was growing up to support record stores stocking up on such things.

While I grant there is a maturity that needs to take place, I suspect there is something more that’s necessary: a better musicality, maybe a wider exposure and familiarity. And that is happening with the new technologies.

AB - Part of it is this culture of incomprehensibility. As a young player, no one really explained to me why we were playing the tunes the way why we were. I was told, “Listen to this tape of so-and-so playing and make it sound like that.” Unless you’re really good at figuring it out, and the guy you are listening to is playing with a high degree of stylistic clarity, it’s really hard to play in a way that isn’t just copy-cat, without truly understanding what you are doing. It really wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I began to work with instructors who would actually explain things to me: structure, scansion of a phrase or line, etc. Before that, I never could feel confident knowing how long to hold a certain note that I wanted to stretch, and so on.

And I was actively discouraged from tapping your foot to a tune. That sends a message that you shouldn’t play a tune with any kind of rhythm.

So when I was growing up, there were a lot of unhelpful influences out there that made it difficult to understand the music. And unless you are lucky enough to live in an environment where excellent piping is widely accessible, those sorts of influences are really difficult to overcome. The good news is that shows such as Pipeline are now widely available internationally, and you can find good instructional recordings such as those of the Bobs of Balmoral and Donald MacLeod. Things are changing for the better in that sense.

I think of my own kids and how lucky they are to have exposure to lots of good piping. All I had growing up were a couple LPs with a handful of tunes on them, like you did. But I notice that my own eldest son who has grown up hearing my wife and me practice and listening to the band and just being around piping all the time and hearing it in the house: it’s interesting how easily he picks up on the idioms of light music (strathspeys, marches). It’s the same thing with pibroch: he’s clued into pibroch very quickly. I find it interesting: there were certain things I thought I would have had to spend lots of time on, but my son made his first tune sound like a pibroch right away. I’ve noticed this with friends who play and whose children have taken up piping. Certain things seem to come easier and more intuitively when you’ve been immersed in the music.

DH - I also couldn’t help but think while you were talking that you were touching upon a potential clue to all of this: if there were ways that could set aside that fog of impenetrability and introduce pibroch very early, its musicality would come more naturally. And, it seems to me, so would the approach: it would no longer be fetishized, standardized. Kids would just know the music and would explore it as any other object nearby and of interest.

I think about my classical music background. There is no way I would have been told not to perform a concerto until I was old enough to understand it. Certainly, I had to have a certain amount of technical acumen before approaching my first one. But given that, concertos were introduced very early, so we could be familiar with their form, their structure, their length, the interplay of movements, the interplay between violin and accompaniment, the differences of styles between classical and romantic and late romantic, and so on. Each new concerto became a way of learning all this, matching your technical ability (or exceeding it and helping you to grow).

All of that was done early. And to my mind, as a result, concertos were music to play with, explore, become more musical. They were certainly not museum pieces to be mimicked or copied. They were natural extension of the path to better musicianship and your own individuality.

I can’t help but think we could bring up a whole new generation of insta-pibroch players by showing them pibroch very early.

AB - Look at some of the piping prodigies who came to notice early in their careers. John D. Burgess: why did he stick out as such a great player at such a young age? Because his father was a piper (and his first teacher), and he had one-on-one tuition with Willie Ross. And GS McLennan was born into a piping family with a father who was a well-regarded authority on pibroch. I think there is a lot of truth in that the assertion that an early introduction to the music is a good idea. But there are a lot teachers who only understand pibroch in a superficial way and that’s kind of destructive because it makes it confusing for the student and can lead some to think that piobaireachd is and must be confusing.

I know from listening to competitions and judging them that there are a lot of performers who are afraid to do anything with the tune. They just play the notes off the page, partly out of ignorance and partly out of fear of doing something wrong. They are not coloring outside the lines at all. You don’t have to do anything radical to make pibroch make musical sense.

DH - Competitions are the primary venue where pibroch gets played, which makes it difficult to imagine how one could create a setting where both judge and performer could spend time exploring a song or a setting or a piece much more musically. I would like to see an environment of competition where musical exploration would be the focal point, not technical perfection.

AB - I don’t know. As a judge you don’t really have a lot of time for to give that kind of feedback. It’s hard to explain big concepts on a sheet of paper when you have a steward breathing down your neck and hauling the next competitor onto the stage. Probably the piping schools and seminars are the venue for that sort of thing.

DH - Ruminate on this for a bit as a musician: One of the things that appeal to me about the older manuscripts is that they reflect a flexibility in the pattern of variations. Today, the patterns are pretty much set along a formula: Urlar, Siubhal or Dithis, Taor and Crun, with doublings and a mach, etc. Abstracted, the formulation is to go from simple to complex, climaxing with the most complex movements. But in the past, the manuscripts seem to show that the performer was allowed the freedom to choose from his the various tools he had available to him. So, in the Hannay-MacAuslan manuscript you see an Urlar, a triplet and doubling, a siubhal and doubling, then an urlar doubling before heading into the crunluath.

AB - I think that’s probably how it was historically. There’s hints in some of the literature, and Dr. Donaldson argues this point well, that pibroch was a much more improvisational form before it began to get written down and published. That’s probably where the idea came from that it takes several years and several generations to make a pibroch player: the pipers weren’t just learning this stuff out of someone’s book, but were being taught how to improvise variations off the theme they were taught. You can read about early competitions where the judges were getting annoyed because they kept hearing the same tunes several times — but played in different ways: one guy takes 20 minutes to finish it, another guy is maybe done in 7. I’m not sure if this is really how it was or not, but my mental image of pre-staff notation pibroch playing is that people would kind of determine on the spot what variations they wanted to play, or perhaps as they were working up a tune for a performance they would decide, “Hey, is this a dithis or a siubhal tune? How am I going to approach this?” and I suspect that skill a big part of being a pibroch player. And I think the traditional audience would have known the basic melody of what you were playing, and the thrill of the performance would be, “Ooo, what’s he going to do with this?” And you see some of these odd-looking crunluath variations in the MacArthur-MacGregor manuscript where the timing is obviously intended to be different than what was played in other tunes (e.g. Lady Margaret MacDonald). Somebody was clearly being very creative, and the result was good enough to have been preserved, first through memory, and then (fortunately) through transcription.

I think there was probably a lot more of that sort of thing happening that has not come down to us. And as you said, the form probably got changed because of the competition system. I don’t think that’s seriously in question – we know the repetition of the ground was dropped for reasons solely related to competition logistics.

DH - Do you think that’s un-doable? Do you think you could mix things up at a competition?

AB - There’s no reason you couldn’t do it. I mean, you’d have to be willing to get slaughtered at a competition because no one would appreciate it. A high-stakes competition where a good number of the competitors have taken weeks off work and paid thousands of dollars for airfare and accommodation is not the best or most likely venue for experimentation. But, as a piper, it’s so hard to find a venue for that.

DH - So, basically, you’re stuck forever.

AB - No. There’s more going on. There are guys like Barnaby Brown and Allan MacDonald who are doing interesting things, grounded in research and good sense, and are stirring things up in a way that I think is very good for pibroch as a whole. I think there are a lot more opportunities to get yourself heard nowadays, and that is making this sort of thing possible.

DH - What would you do for tutelage, among your students, to encourage that kind of play and exploration? I took a class with Alex Gandy and he was trying to get us to do kitchen piping. We were all grade 3 pipers and were scared to death of improvisation. Is that a quality of pibroch that you could introduce to your students?

AB - There are a lot of students that want to swim with the fish and do just enough well enough that they can compete with it. But I have had students who are much more interested in the historical and musicological side of it — usually after they’ve hit a certain standard and are starting to question things. But it’s very rare to run into people who have that kind of interest in the music. Maybe it’s the way it’s taught, maybe it’s the way they’re used to hearing it. We’re also a busy society and few people have the time to devote to the kind of study that would be required.

DH - But if we could introduce a tuition that would encourage exploration and improvisation and musicality. If we could teach a student, “Okay, here’s a theme, here are the things you can do with the theme: have at it!”

AB - I’ve actually thought about doing that. I’d love to throw out a tune, something no one has ever heard of, and just say, “Make some variations on it.” I’ve toyed with the idea of doing that at a piping school. I teach every year at Piping Hot Summer Drummer, and I might do try something like that this year.

DH - Of course, anything you do like that, record it and put it on the website. I am committed to creating a safe place for just this sort of exploration. I am hoping to get Allan MacDonald to place his canntaireachd there. Barnaby is promising recordings of his concerts and research. Of course, I have my couple of mediocre performances…

It occurs to me that the reason there is the da capo returns written in the manuscripts, is that it reflects a practice in improvisation where the performer reminds the audience what the original theme was. It becomes a musical way of orienting the audience.

AB - It makes the tune longer, but we are arguably playing the tune much slower than they did back then.

DH - Have you ever tried playing da capo returns?

AB – No, but I’ve heard Jack Lee play a tune (I think a Donald MacDonald setting) with regular returns to the ground. It was one of the years they put the alternative settings in for the Clasp competition.

DH - Traditional! Traditional settings!

AB -– Sorry, the traditional settings. I remember Jack playing it, at least two times, maybe three times. It was a short enough tune to make prevent it from becoming a day long tune. But it was interesting, because you get this little break and suddenly you hammer into another set of variations. You’re not just building, building, building towards the crunluath doubling.

DH - As an audience member you are given those pauses, certainly. But as a performer, and this is entirely unexpected (you mention the lengthening that occurs as a result of the tune): as a performer, you get a pause. These returns become landing points. It feels good to play that way: greater variability, greater musicality. You should try it. Try Mary’s Praise. I recommend it.

Jack Taylor was asking, when each previous printing of a collection runs out, the PS revisit the typesetting, what changes should be done. The simplest would be to bring back the da capo returns. They make a difference musically.

We’re running out of time now. So, one last question:

What is up for you this year?

AB - With the a demanding new job and having become pipe major of the SFU Pipe Band, I won’t be doing solos this year in Scotland or locally. In a way it’s good to recharge the batteries and not worry about getting the set tunes going. I can play more for my own enjoyment.

DH - Well, Alan: thank you again. I very much appreciate the time and have enjoyed our conversation.

AB - Thank you.