Jori Chisholm is a champion professional piper, owner of the site BagpipeLessons.com (the first internet-based lesson site for bagpipe tuition).
JDH - Jori Chisholm. Thank you for taking the time out to chat with me.
Let’s just jump right into it:
Competition becomes the primary vehicle and venue where pibroch tunes are played regularly for connoisseurs, for people who “get it.” And yet, consistently from Bruce Gandy to Alan Bevan, a competitor will say, “Hey, David! These ideas you have about extending the interpretative repertoire sound exciting, but competition is not the proper venue.” My question is: if not at competitions, where?
JC - Recitals are an alternative. Many pipers eventually get to a stage in their piping career where people want to hear you play in recitals. So, that’s a place where you could do it.
JDH - Is that the only venue where traditional (not “alternative”) interpretive performances should be played? Because, if you look at the thread between Taylor, Brown and myself, there was a consensus that things are opening up, and it really seems to be the competitors who are hesitant to explore.
JC - There’s a lot at stake in top competitions. When you enter a competition, you want to have a chance at winning. As a result, there are things you do that are smart from a strategic point of view. In addition, you want to be respectful to the traditions of the competition itself. There are many elements of competing that aren’t so much rules as they are traditions, and you want to be respectful of these traditions. The way I look at is, these things have been going on for a very long time. It might be tempting to complain or get grumpy about how you think things ought be run, but my attitude is that these competitions have been established for generations and I’m not at the stage of my piping career where I want to focus on changing the system.
Oban is Oban and Inverness is Inverness. I’m not going to go to any competition organizers and tell them how they need to run things. Of course, any experienced competitor certainly has their favorite competitions – often due to the details of the venue or how they feel the players are treated. But these events have been around for a long time, and I try to focus on my own playing on not getting worked up about the details and habits of these competitions.
JDH - I get that. But let’s think a bit more broadly. As musician, you’ve been working with me through these manuscripts and we puzzle through them together, we see things like del capo returns everywhere that are just gone: they don’t exist in the Piobaireachd Society collection. I’ve never met any competitor who, even after having looked at the manuscripts, actually attempts to play the del capo returns. Why not? Have you? They are in the canon. They are traditional. It’s not like you are playing electronic bagpipes through a Moog synthesizer.
Is it so revolutionary to consider something as simple, and yet well based, as an urlar return?
JC - What would be revolutionary would be doing it at a competition.
JDH - But why? I’d call it “traditional”.
JC - Yes, you could say, “I’m playing this setting of this tune.” If it’s an established setting. There’s always the risk they won’t like it.
Consider the pitch of your pipes: there’s no rule that says your A has to be at the high 470s or low 480s. But a smart competitor doesn’t want to be the player who’s really super sharp or really super flat. That’s how competitions work. After putting in months of detailed preparation, I wouldn’t want to be eliminated from the prize list for something that means much less to me (like the absolute pitch of my instrument).
JDH - Here’s one constraining principle, then: The competitors say to themselves, “I want to win.” So they work in ways, which they believe, are the safest and most assured ways of winning. They draw from the past…
JC - Maybe. It’s not just doing the safest thing. People take calculated risks, but I certainly wouldn’t want to intentionally make a choice that keeps me out of in the running.
JDH - What would knock you out of the running by playing the del capo return?
JC - Because the judges could just say, “No. This is not good. We don’t like this. This is not the way we like to hear it. The versions we have that are the more acceptable and better versions.”
JDH - Have you ever approached a judge after a competition and said, “Hey, what if I had done this…” and learned it was a good thing you didn’t?
JC – I haven’t, but you can get thrown out of the prize list for things so much smaller than introducing an urlar return or a variation in the manuscript. You can get thrown out because the guy doesn’t like the way you perform a single connecting note. Or he doesn’t like the fact that you’re playing a particular setting of the tune in Piobaireachd Society’s notes. Even something as subtle as a slight change in timing of a variation can get you kicked out of the prize list. So, something major like playing an urlar return would be risky, when things even much smaller can get you knocked off the prize list.
There are many things to consider when preparing for competitions. You can say to yourself, “I really like this tune. It’s a really good tune.” But it might also be potentially controversial. It might be close to impossible to get three judges to agree on your interpretation. It can be really hard to get all three judges to agree that you are the best, so you don’t want to intentionally introduce something that would make it even harder.
JDH - So, in fact, competition constrains musicality. Let’s go back to what Barnaby and Jack and Donaldson have said. Jack is no slouch. Alan called him a “student” of pibroch. When you get him, as the president of the Piobaireachd Society, saying, “Yeah, what Barnaby is doing is very interesting.” And when you get Barnaby saying, “The old guard is dying out, things are opening and there’s a sense of fresh air coming in,” does none of that matter until somebody takes a risk, does something bizarre and wins? Does it take someone willing to take a risk before change can take place?
JC - I think the competition would need to call for it. There have been times when they’ve the MacArthur-MacGregor version of a tune or the Donald MacDonald version a tune. The competitors oblige, and learn it. Most pipers are totally not against learning new settings. Even pipers who have signature tunes in their repertoire will a different version when a competition calls for it. They will go through that work of learning another version. Even for one of their signature tunes. That takes a huge amount of work, but they’ll do it. At that point, it becomes a level playing field for us all. If it were specified in the rules that such a version or manuscript was acceptable or even encouraged or required, pipers would do it. Otherwise there’s the risk that a judge could disregard your performance for doing something nobody else is doing.
That’s really what it is.
JDH - You don’t want the capriciousness of a judge who says, “Nope. Hate that!” and - poof - there go your chances.
JC – Absolutely. A very simple example of the calculus that a competitor makes in pibroch is D throws. Are they supposed to be heavy or light? You can find them written our heavy in some scores, but does that mean they should be always played heavy? The current style is to play light D throws. So, my thinking is why spend a year getting prepared just to be disregarded by a judge to playing a heavy D throw. I’m happy to play D throws either way. If they want to require heavy D throws; that’s fine with me. If they want them all light, fine. But what I don’t want to do is give someone an excuse for all this work to be thrown out for something that’s essentially quite minor
JDH - Okay. So, once again I’m going say this: My analog is classical music. I just saw Nadja Solerno-Sonnenburg play the Shashtakovich Violin Concerto. Ever seen her play? She’s like the punk rock of violin performers. For every performance, she will make it unique. She will work and work and work on a piece, and rehearse with an orchestra. And when she goes on stage, she tells the conductor, “Follow me.” There’s something about her musicianship that is not driven by the idea of finding a single perfect interpretation of the song. Each performance becomes an exploration, a moment in which to really dig into the song. Even when the performance requires a whole lot of other musicians to work with her.
In a competition you can’t do that, can you? In a competition you are playing to the taste of 3 particular individuals.
So, what keeps pibroch interesting to you? Why return to it?
JC - For me, I’m always trying to get to the heart of the truth of the piece. For me, that’s what’s interesting. I’m trying to figure out the very best way that this tune can be played. It’s within the parameters of competition, of course, but that’s what drives me: within those parameters, what’s the best I do with this tune?
JDH - Why is competition so important?
JC - We’ve been raised on competition. It’s what we do. People play competitive sports. If you are a competitive athlete, that’s what you do. You don’t play shot put just for fun. You compete. That’s sort of the part of this art form, the competition side of it.
JDH - When you think of that, then the story of Allan MacDonald becomes interesting, right? He was at the top of the field.
JC - Of course. He’s won the Medals and Clasps.
JDH - But then he leaves. What happens then? Does he become irrelevant then? Do his ideas have no influence in competition?
JC - He composes. He has books. He teaches. He has an alternative approach, which is really interesting. But he gives a recital and they can be kind of polarizing. You have people who say, “Oh my, this is so refreshing, this is so different, this is so fun, this is wonderful.” Then you have other people who are like, “What is this?” Either they don’t like it or understand it or it doesn’t fulfill something in them. He’s doing something quite different that what others are doing, but it is rooted in his historical research and personal experience and isn’t different just for the sake of being different.
JDH - What happened with Donald MacPherson? Why do you think he went into classical music? He left competition for 10 years, and it’s as though he disappeared, had no impact on the field at all during that time.
JC - There’s an interview in Pipes Drums magazine that is just baffling. He said, in essence, that he never really liked piping. He said he wouldn’t have kept doing it, except he kept winning. What he really liked was the piano. I think I wasn’t alone among pipers when I read that and thought, “What!”
In Andre Agassi’s autobiography, he wrote that he hates tennis. It was surprising, and sad, and also seemed somehow ungrateful. Tennis made him a multimillionaire and famous around the world. I assume he, like Donald McPherson, was being honest. But it shatters myths about how we think top performers feel about what they do.
Donald McPherson was the most successful competitive piper of all time. It just seems so unlikely that he didn’t really like piping and only continued to play because he won competitions?
JDH - Maybe there’s just a point a in which one takes a gift for granted?
JC - And maybe the thing is, for the rest of us hearing this, is that it doesn’t go with the mythology that we have bought into that success comes because you are following your bliss, following your passion.
You should find the interview, but I remember it quite clearly, he really says, “I wouldn’t have kept doing it, had I not started winning. What I really liked was the piano.”
JDH - Another topic:
We’ve been working through the older manuscripts: what do think about making them available? What have you gotten out of this work you’ve been doing because of my obsession?
As an aside, Jack Taylor is talking about how, with each new revision, the Piobaireachd Society may begin publishing electronically, and doing so in such a way that these manuscripts are immediately available and are no longer just footnotes on a page.
JC - I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. I think these tunes are really interesting. It might be like finding the lost director’s cut to a great movie: new plot twists, new footage, maybe new ending. Going back to how we started this, the only venue for top pibroch players to perform to an audience with any kind of reach is competition. Competition is where the top players focus their energy and focus. Competitions are often recorded, so those performances (particularly the winning ones) live on. So, competition is where these alternative settings have to be played.
Most pipers have never heard of the Hannay-MacAuslan manuscript. Few will ever play from it. Unless it is explicitly required to be a part of a competition. It doesn’t have to be Inverness; it could be you, David! You could start an alternative piobaireachd competition and require that the tunes are from the Hannay-MacAuslan manuscript. You can provide links to the music, find some open-minded judges, and go for it.
Another challenge for pipers is that many of us aren’t really used to taking a manuscript and just going entirely from that. We’re used to getting tunes from our teachers, listening to recordings of other pipers, listening to our colleagues play live. We like to know, how does it go? We like to know the various ways that pipers have played the tune. When there are no source recordings, and no known performance tradition, there’s much more work to be done to figure out the best way to play the tune.
JDH - Don’t you find that exciting, though?
JC – Absolutely. It’s a exciting and little more than a little bit daunting. There’s a lot of uncertainty, too.
JDH - Clearly. Because I’ll go and play it, and one judge will reject outright without a chance, and another judge will give kudos and spend a lot of time on his or her notes. I just never know.
Another example: Old Men of the Shells and the fosgailte taorluath. Donaldson suggests one thing; Taylor suggests something else; you and work and experiment in yet another direction.
I look at these scary events as the opportunity for musicianship. We know pibroch was improved. Not crazy modern jazz improvisation: there are certain tools sets, certain expectations of the audience. But there was some flexibility. It’s very baroque, like Bach’s performances were flexible.
Why not, as a musician wouldn’t you look at this a go: Wow! What an opportunity?
JC - Yes. It is!
JDH - Next question: What’s your favorite pibroch?
JC - That’s a tricky question. My favorite in what way? There are tunes that I like to hear. And there are tunes that I like to play. There are tunes that I might consider to be great tunes and there are tunes that are great for playing in competition.
Lament for Patrick Og MacCrimmon is probably on the list of many pipers as one of the greatest tunes ever composed. It’s unique. It has the haunting low and high Gs. It has so many wonderful opportunities rhythmic subtly and boldness, especially in the ground and variation 1 (which is mostly in 6/8 time). It’s a wonderful tune and on this year’s list of set tunes for the Gold Medal. I’m not playing it, though.
JDH - Why not?
JC – I’m afraid it might be too hard to find judges that would agree on a single style of playing. Here’s my thinking: You get into the Medal. You work hard all year preparing your tunes. You go all the way to Scotland. You get your pipes and technique perfected and you play the tune of your life. Then you find out later that one or more of the judges rejects your outright because of your musical interpretation.
JDH - Is there ever a point where you can go to a judge and just ask: How do you want me to play this?
JC - You could. I’m sure there are some people who know the various judges well enough to try and play to their taste and teaching pedigree or style. I don’t do that. But I do want to play tunes that I enjoy playing, tunes I can play very well, and tunes that I think three judges might appreciate.
JDH - It’s an interesting thing. There’s this idea that excellence is a tangible and unassailable quality, an obvious essence or fact. Its quality is innate. And when it comes to music, there’s this assumption that good music is universally recognizable, it is essentially always good.
So, if you have a bunch of songs and make them available to groups of people, they would all recognize the good from the bad tunes. Experiments have been done to test this: virtual worlds built, different groups of people, same songs. Will the same songs be recognized as good?
Absolutely not. It was random.
If that’s true: when we live in a world where a particular style of pibroch is dominant, and we now know that what constitutes excellence not innate, but is a byproduct of random historical events, why not pick up a different style and just say, “This is worth listening to.” And play it?
To flog a dead horse: try something simple as the urlar returns. Since no one I’ve spoken with has ever done it, it seems that’s the lowest hanging fruit. There are always objections, like, “It’ll make the piece too long.” Well, you don’t know that until you try it. Musically, you may find a different experience than what you think.
JC - There’s an article in The Voice by Ian K. Murray about Bill Livingstone playing the pibroch “War or Peace”, when the ground was required to be played between every variation.
JDH - To me, after re-introducing this tradition, I found it breaks up the music quite nicely. Because, frankly, many of these pibroch begin to sound like finger exercises, etudes of increasing complexity. Even if you are a good musician, the very structure of the way we play means you are fighting against something that, by design, is a pretty set pattern of etudes.
If pibroch were, in fact, an improvisation-based art form, it would only make sense that a musician would re-introduce the ground after riffing through a set of variations, just to re-orient himself and his audience.
Can I encourage you to record something like that? You record yourself regularly during the course of preparing for competition. Would you be willing to record, one time, a practice session where you reintroduce the ground at points indicated in an early manuscript version of the piece?
JC - For the site?
JDH - Yes. Just for the site. Just so you have an experience of playing these songs, and maybe you can then provide commentary on what you feel musically comes out of that experience.
JC - It would depend on the tune, of course. I attended a workshop near Seattle where Bill Livingstone mentioned the Voice article and about his experience with this tune, and I asked him how he treated the ground each time. I’ve heard the recording of him playing the tune. He creates a nice effect, by increasing the pace of the ground each time.
War or Peace you have
ground and doubling
lemluath and doubling
ground
taorluath and doubling
ground
crunluath and doubling
ground
crunluath a mach
stop (no return)
JDH - Did you know Mary’s Praise ends without an urlar return as well?
JC - I think that as a musician what you would get out of the urlar return would depend specifically on the piece, on the rhythms specifically in the ground if it suits playing it faster with each return depending on where you are at in the tune.
JDH - But what I’m learning as you go back to these old manuscripts is that there is some real intelligence in them, real beautiful musicianship in them. So, there are some things that I’m looking at right now (like Old Men of the Shells, Sister’s Lament, Aged Warrior’s Sorrow [which doesn’t really count, as it’s a two-parter in the manuscript]) that don’t have any returns, and there’s some stuff that has many returns (Too Long in This Condition, Mary’s Praise, Pursuit of Glenfrooin, End of the Great Bridge, Lock on Fingers). That suggests to me that the musicians kind of knew when it would be the right thing to do an urlar return.
It would be interesting to see what you would get out of trying it, just as part of the regular process of self-recording in your preparation.
JC - I’m game. I’ll do that.
I do find it interesting: I have a two and a half year-old, and I hope he wants to be a musician. And occasionally I think about the various forms of music that don’t have this competitive aspect that we have in piping.
Competitive piping, both solo and in bands, can be incredibly fun: the camaraderie, many great experiences. It’s mostly based on merit, but there’s a lot of other stuff that comes with it later on when you’re hooked into this lifestyle.
JDH - Those are good questions. You know, part of my motive in interviewing folks like yourself, who are the best competitors in the world, is to speak with the inner musician inside of you that may or may not find everything he wants in and through the world of competition.
JC - You know, things would change and could change if the organizers of competitions simply announced the change. If The Northern Meeting announced that, “The Gold Medal this year is no longer awarded to pibroch, but to slow airs,” I’m sure most pipers would do it. We would. Because we accept the conditions that are set for us. We all know, going into it, that this is game.
Competition isn’t everything, though. Bruce writes tunes, Alan leads the band. Even the band is about more than just the World Pipe Band Championships. We play concerts, we explore new material and arranging traditional tunes to give them freshness. In the band there is a whole social aspect, too.
Even in light music, there are many tunes that I play for fun: on recordings, at recitals -tunes I don’t compete with. And the question comes up, “Why don’t you play them at competition? Why don’t you play a tune you composed at Inverness?” And for me, it’s not really the appropriate venue. For me, those are venues that are for traditional tunes. The newest tunes might be something composed by Donald MacLeod in the past 50 years, by the time it becomes established.
JDH - That’s one of the questions I have: modern pibroch. Who are the good modern pibroch composers?
JC - Donald MacLeod wrote pibroch. I’ve heard some people criticize his ceol mor for being too melodic and very accessible. I like his tunes, but they are often very straightforward, almost formulaic. They are mostly quite pretty, but maybe perhaps for some people it’s almost not weird enough?
Captain John MacLellan composed some very interesting tunes: The Phantom Piper, for example. Or the Edinburgh Piobaireachd is interesting: It has a crunluath brebach variation, but instead of the normal two passing notes, it has three passing notes. The first time I heard the tune, I thought, “Amazing that nobody’s done that before! It’s really interesting and wonderful.”
JDH - Do those get played?
JC - If they get set. And they do from time to time set modern tunes. And that’s the time people do play them.
JDH - What about 2015. There is no set tune list. Are you all going to go really conservative and be safe?
JC - I don’t know. You don’t get to play in the Gold Medal by not caring how you play in competition – and I mean playing well and getting results. Every year you have to apply for your spot and they accept 25 people based on their recent competitive track record.
JDH - So, in order for modern pibroch to be played, the Piobaireachd Society would have to say, “Pick any pibroch written from 1950 on…
JC - And everyone would do it.
JDH - In sum: They would have to be really clear about the rules regarding how they would break things open (assuming they would). They couldn’t rely on competitors to take risks. The Piobaireachd Society would tell you what to do, so there is a level playing field and the rules are understood.
But, even though the intention behind 2015 might just be, “let’s bring some fresh air into the competitions by not releasing a set tune,” it might not end up that way at all.
JC - That’s true. I don’t expect that there will be much, if any, fresh air. People will be playing the classics. People will be playing the tunes they have used with success in the past, so I will probably put in the tunes that have done well for me in the past. Why not? You play them well. People like how you play it. It’s been proven. They like what you do.
In past years, when we picked out own tunes, I put in a bunch of classics that I felt I could do a good job with, then I picked a couple of tunes that I always wanted to learn. I think I picked Donald Ban MacCrimmon because it was 24 minutes long and I always wanted to learn it. Nobody ever picked it.
DH - Because it’s 24 minutes long.
JC - Perhaps it was too long. It’s a great practice tune. It makes other tunes feel short and like almost nothing. When you play Donald Ban it almost feels like the seasons are changing. But it’s fun. Is it a great tune? I don’t know; it’s quite repetitive. It very impressive to hear somebody play it well. You asked my favorite tune: When Willie MacCallum plays Donald Ban and his pipes are locked after 24 minutes - it is tour de force. And to see it live. It’s not something you really appreciate on a recording. But to see it done well, live, is impressive.
What I expect many pipers to do is play it safe on the safe side. “First do no harm.” The risk in playing an obscure tune, is that it only takes one judge to think, “What is this?” And they don’t really have the time to figure out what you are doing with the tune that you’ve handed them. It’s easy for them to say “Forget it.”
You are getting to the heart of subjective judging.
JDH - Maybe it’s just a matter of developing a strategy in which the competitors feel safe. If people like Jack, and he’s well positioned to this, were to say, “This is what we mean. Let’s try this new thing, but here are the rules.”
JC - We’re just the pipers. We’ll do whatever you tell us. And it doesn’t have to be Oban and Inverness. It could be between Oban and Inverness, and it could be held at the Piping Centre, and they could say, “This is what it is…” We’ll all do it.
The Dan Reid Memorial invitational in San Francisco used to have some very interesting and different competition tune requirements, and we all did it.
JDH - What would incentivize you?
JC - The competition. That’s what we’re all into.
But it would need to be set up in way where we know what’s expected, and we would need to feel that we will be rewarded for all the effort.
JDH - In my own way, I’ve confronted that situation. Where all my effort was simply dismissed out of hand.
JC - I would hope that the top priority for a judge is to get the right result. But I’ve got to assume a judge also wants to maintain their reputation. As a judge, you don’t want to make an error and give somebody a prize who made a major mistake. That’s why, as a judge, you are reluctant to pick a tune you don’t know. An unfamiliar tune puts you at greater risk of not picking up a mistake by the player. Also, you can argue that the judge is more credible to judge a tune that he knows well – a tune he’s played and of which he’s studied the minutiae.
When I’m judging, I’m quite reluctant to pick a tune I haven’t heard before. I’d be judging blind. The player could transpose the parts and I wouldn’t know. He could make a mistake, which I’d miss, or he could play something perfectly and I might not appreciate it, either way.
When it comes down to piobaireachd, the judges are going to have to do a lot of study if you want things to change. They are going to have to be as familiar and comfortable about knowing these other traditions as the competitors.
As a judge, you are invited to judge these competitions because you have a certain track record, but it doesn’t include Hannay-MacAuslan.
JDH - Probably not.
Okay. Thank you very much for you time!