The editors of the suite of the Alt Pibroch Club thought it may be of interest to our Club Members to listen in on a conversation wherein we discuss the past, present and future of our project.

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BB - Let’s return to some concrete Phase Two consultation actions and think, “What sort of people would we like to get feedback from? Who is this site for?”

Obviously we have students of pibroch. But that group is a wide spectrum. At one end we have the non-competing amateurs who simply love the music. At the other end we have the professionals who don’t want to risk anything. Every minute of their investment in the busy, hectic lives we lead could be towards getting a first prize, a gold medal. I totally respect that.

So we have a wide spectrum of pibroch players.

Then there are the fiddle players, the harp players, the lyre players - practical musicians, some of whom don’t have any repertoire for the instrument they want to play. In order to fill a vacuum or broaden their musical horizons, they are looking to pibroch. So, that’s a smaller group, but nevertheless an important one.

What other users do we want to get feedback from?

JDH - In my biggest, “blue sky” thinking, what I imagine is to continue to move out of the ghetto and expand our audience and opportunities even more broadly so that we get this music out there to the everyday audience.

And we can do that in a variety of ways: Whether through schools and school systems, or through local arts and music organizations, or even what one person (I won’t say who, but only say this brilliant idea was not mine) referred to as “Pibroch in the Pub”.

I want to see our audience expand, and, so, look for feedback from a more general music-appreciative audience.

After all, from everything you’ve said, and from what I have read and heard from others say, when they play pibroch at a recital of multiple musical genres, it is the pibroch that is the most memorable to members of the audience.

BB - Yes. It has a very special effect on people. I can say that from personal experience.

I think we need to recognise that there is a deep lack of confidence to address in our pibroch-playing community. And part of that is communication. Unfortunately, our existing institution - the competition system as we have inherited it - isn’t doing the service of training pipers to communicate with an audience.

I think that is one of the real dangers we need to address. I have regularly witnessed leading, successful competing pipers in front of audiences at festivals or conference events where there is barely a single expert piper in the audience (at conferences, they are all non-pipers from international backgrounds and have no clue about pibroch) and I hear the piper spend 10 minutes playing really dull tuning notes getting his pipes from 99.8% perfect to 99.9% perfect. And I’m sorry: what is the point?

And during that time, it is as though they are in a tuning room. The audience doesn’t know if they are allowed to talk. And they are sitting there listening very carefully to these tuning notes.

Now, I find that very sad. And if we are serious about reaching another audience, pipers have to be trained in a different game, one which complements what we have. It doesn’t need to replace it.

It is just another game - like our existing competitions, but the rules and rewards are slightly different. I feel we need to nurture this complementary game where tomorrow’s great pipers can cut their teeth in front of the general public. At the moment, this is not happening. Players are unfit, punching far below their weight.

JDH - I think that’s a good point. The game of competitions has its own rules and audience expectations. It’s a very constrained and limited set of rules and expectations, and people who attend and compete know what they are getting themselves into. But those rules simply do not apply to any other context, much less to a general audience. They are completely inappropriate for every other venue: a pub, a recital, a concert with other instruments, an assembly of school students.

If we’re training students to be competitors, we’re not training them to be the full musicians and ambassadors of the music they could be.

BB - Part of this is being a good raconteur.

There are three ways in which the story-telling scene could rub off positively on piping.

One is the fascination of the stories. The sheer interest factor of the stories themselves. It’s a wonderful pull. Two is the mind-broadening effect of reconnecting with such a rich cultural inheritance. It opens up ways of thinking different to our own and stimulates critical and creative thinking, deciding what story to tell and how to tell it. Three is reconnecting with the capacity to improvise and adapt on the fly.

We should get hold of a recording of Willie MacDonald, Benbecula. He was a wonderful raconteur. Let’s get a page or whole section on the site where we can hear superlative models of highland storytelling. Audio recordings! We also want written sources, but to help us bring those to life we need to hear exemplary performances. Without learning how to tell them well, practising the craft, this tradition of highland storytelling will become a museum item, stuffed and dead. Few pipers are practising it as a professional skill and it is something very precious.

It’s not just about the content of the stories, it’s also the delivery. A good storyteller responds to the audience. It is that capacity to adapt your tale to suit the moment - that is what we are not doing in pibroch. Instead, we are rigidly stuck to the score in a way that is out of tune with the spirit displayed by the source material. The evidence shouts loudly, “I am something flexible and fluid, alive”.

What we see in the notations is many different settings. You know, I feel quite strongly that - not in every case, but in many - the best explanation for the differences between settings is that the pipers were good storytellers. Their artistry and tradition compelled them to give different versions in different contexts, responding to the audience and refreshing their material, having fun playing with the expectations of an expert audience. What the transcribers were doing, what we see in our sources, is that they were capturing a particular telling of the story: one rendition. It’s not a style. It’s not that the notator couldn’t do it in a another way. They simply give us a snapshot of what happened that particular time, or what the notator thought happened, or what he thought would be better - his version of events. We see the music through lenses that may have more to do with the skills of the notator than with the music they are notating. Often, settings looks different because the photographers use different lenses, or take their photograph on another day, not because the bird is different.

JDH - It doesn’t surprise me that we hear about tunes that Bob Nicol played one way at one time, and a different way at another time. They were just excellent musicians and storytellers.

BB - Yes. Coming back to why I think we should lay emphasis on the story-telling dimension of this music, first of all, a story is interesting. It captures the imagination. I propose that the primary goal of the History & Imagination site would be to make it easy for pipers to prepare their own stories, accessing primary source materials and latest scholarship with pleasure - finding answers to questions. To this end, I’d like to complement the primary source facsimiles and transcriptions with inspiring audio and video materials.

It is fascinating getting back to discover what people were believing in the distant past. Because the versions of these stories from the 1700s, 1600s and, in a few cases, 1500s are very different and often contradict what became accepted as historical fact in the second half of the 19th century, when the tidying up momentum reached its peak. Exactly what we see happening in the musical settings was also happening in the stories. I’d like our online resource for the stories to push back beyond the sanitised texts to expose the untidy reality of what different people believed at earlier times. That’s why Imagination has to be in the title - we are not trying to tidy things up, we are bringing to light earlier evidence, much of which cannot be ‘true’. Making this evidence more accessible will give historians, ethnographers and story tellers a richer and more solid basis for their professional work.

So, our job is not to regurgitate the anglicised 19th century stories, but to push back to the contradictory versions found in earlier sources, identifying and listening again to the primary witnesses, gathering a stronger line-up of evidence than was available to previous historians. Perhaps posting some wonderful, inspiring stories that have been told more recently by going through Tobar an Dulchais, finding recordings that aren’t yet online, and filming some leading tradition bearers who grew up hearing these stories so we can see the whole embodied performance.

The third reason I think story-telling is vital to our endeavour is the most contentious and potentially the most significant. It is reconnecting with the capacity to improvise and adapt on the fly. Making that an essential competency. If you can’t adapt your musical material on the fly, then you are a lesser musician - wow, that’s a change of mindset! Currently, if you adapt on the fly, you are off the prize list.

JDH - In ancient Greece and Rome, the poets and the orators and the singers competed at Olympic games and were judged upon their competency to perform (yes, oration and the performative arts were part of the games), which also meant doing so extemporaneously, meeting their audiences expectations and reactions during the course of the performance. It was a valued competency.

BB - That’s why we need it in the judging criteria. Pipers would benefit from training and reward systems to help develop these competencies, both the telling of the story and the story-telling qualities in their pibroch. I mean, good heavens, the number of times I’ve heard pipers mumbling to a crowd. You actually need the telling of the story to be part of the assessed performance.

Fred Morrison and Gordon Walker do it beautifully. Likewise, Allan MacDonald - he wins the heart of the audience with the story beforehand.

Being able to tell a story in public is part of it, and I’m quite sure the great pipers of the past told good stories, that’s how they were remembered. Stories are part of this tradition and a key ingredient in its healthy revitalisation.

JDH - That should be part of the tuition, yes. Engaging the audience, competency in adapting to different environments, ability to explain the art, perhaps tell the stories. This will improve the ability of the musicians to meet the challenges of broadening the audience.

BB - We’re touching on lots of things: competition criteria, story telling, competency in one’s playing to improvise on the fly or work up a personal version.

Maybe the word “improvise” has too much negative baggage. The ability to respond…? I’m not sure how best to word it. But to produce fluidity - where we are getting away from the detail of notation while at the same time staying anchored to authoritative traditional evidence - we need to be trained to know where is an appropriate place to do something slightly different, and what time-honoured techniques we might use in order to rise above the competition, delighting modern pibroch aficionados who are bored of hearing predictable, stereotypical, unimaginative playing.

We have so many examples in the notations of ways in which you might do something different.

So, I think we need a section where we gather together evidence so that these departures are authoritative, evidence based. And a safe learning environment that cultivates experimentation, developing our competency creating something a little bit different in rehearsal or on the fly, producing a unique rendition. This might involve adding an extra variation, or not playing quite so many. Or it might be expanding a phrase from having 4 beats to having 5, or from 4 beats to 9…

JDH - I agree. These are competencies that can be taught. They are competencies that can be received. These are competencies that can be judged.

This is something we can write more of on the sites, and start lifting up this aspects of the interpreter’s responsibility to explore the music and present it for a live audience in an engaging way.

Because I believe there is an obligation on the part of performers and interpreters to explore the music and not just mimic the notes.

BB - Well, yes. I’d be more relaxed about it. I wouldn’t say there’s an obligation. I’d say it’s an opportunity.

JDH - I disagree, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s an obligation in this way: the choices that you make as a musician are choices that you must defend. It’s fine if the choice you made is that your teacher taught you to play it in this way. That’s fine. But it is one choice among many that you have.

We are part of a folk tradition that likes maintaining an interpretive tradition history (and we pretend we can do so with true fidelity - a very problematic idea). But the rest of the musical world likes exploring the inventiveness that exists in the white spaces between the notes. And I want to bring some of that into our world, because our folk history is clearly also that.

BB - Well I disagree with you, and I’ll try to be succinct in why I disagree.

I think that equal rigidity is found in other musical traditions. I don’t think pibroch is unique there. I think it is about mentality. And I think that what we want is to encourage the growth and development within pibroch of plurality.

And I don’t think we should be too negative about the existence of people who prefer to play safe. There will always be, and always have been, such people, people who don’t want to take risks, who don’t want to do the dangerous thing.

Now, you and I may be risk takers, we like breaking boundaries. But I don’t think it is an obligation upon every soul to be like us. I think we should be explicitly welcoming of all sorts of different people of all sorts of different backgrounds.

I think the point we agree on is that in other musical traditions people are inventive, and the people who are more inventive are uplifted as superstars - they are the ones who enter the hall of fame. We have that within piping but it lies outside pibroch, and that is the problem. Now, I think that superstar status given to the creative musician is what we want to welcome back into pibroch.

If we only have in the pibroch community the stereotypical people who are too frightened to bring that musicality - that spontaneous, rhapsodic, unpredictable musicality (and I think “unpredictable” is a key word: if it’s predictable, it’s boring) - then pibroch is a poorer place.

What we need is to encourage is the broadening out from a singular context a pluralistic world that will attract more people.

At the end of the day, it will benefit everyone. I do think serious pibroch players enjoy and will find more satisfying putting a bit more of themselves into the music. And of course, we don’t just pay lip service to that: good pipers are putting themselves into the music. But what we’re suggesting is a little bit more dangerous: that the extent to which you make the music your own would be far greater if you connected with the 18th-century spirit of this tradition rather than its 20th-century spirit. In the latter, departing from the score is taboo. In the former, there is no score; making things refreshingly different was part of the game.

But that competency takes time to develop. We can’t expect things to change overnight.

JDH - Yes, but it’s inevitable. The tide is turning, because what I am suggesting and advocating is that players feel safe in doing so, because it represents a return to a tradition that was at the root of our music, but was not available until now.

Having these scores and notations is going to find the curious souls, and these souls will go in there and begin to explore. And the results of their exploration will make its way out. Because there is no longer a question of a lack of access.

BB - I think you are right and am very excited by the way I’ve seen the ice melt over the last 20 years. I salute the people who worked in a climate much less welcoming than we do: for example, David Murray and Peter Cooke. In the 70s, what we are doing now would have been unthinkable. Just like the idea of studying the bagpipe at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama: it was laughable.

So, we’ve come a long way and I think we should be thankful for where we’ve got to. A lot of people have suffered, have put energy, commitment and enthusiasm and their life work into getting us here. We are not just doing this ourselves. We are part of a larger movement.

JDH - Exactly.

To be very concrete regarding our roadmap:

• Musical Materials: a refresh of the PDFs much along the lines of what we did with the Joseph MacDonald manuscript. Get everything into high resolution, full color reproductions of the primary materials.
• Eventually, I want to expand the historical scope as far into the present as copyright laws will allow. I want original scores from after 1840 in the later collections (Thomason, Glen, others) to be included. And I would love to work out a way where today’s composers could find a home in which to make their work available.
• Learning Living Pibroch: expanding the contributions, emphasizing performances and
• Bibliography: we both agree we need to find specialists for whom this is a passionate interest, or at least more volunteers to maintain and update this site.
• History & Imagination: tell us more about what you are thinking about with respect to this new and exciting site.

BB - I think this is the best way to reach out to schools and non-pipers. The many, many links pibroch has with Scottish history, geography and folktales is a powerful draw - everyone can find something engaging. As well as having a deep impact on attracting new blood, it will also nourish what the old blood does, thus making the future brighter in multiple ways.

More to follow…