Alan Forbes is Secretary of the Music Committee of the Piobaireachd Society, Convener of the Northern Meeting piping competitions and a director of the National Piping Center. He has played the pipes since he was seven, and has been an adjudicator for over 35 years.
JDH — What do you love about pibroch?
AF — I think there’s lots of things to love about pibroch.
I love piping, in general. I took to immediately. The first time I heard bagpipes as a small boy, I immediately wanted to become a piper. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
I knew nothing about pibroch until I was 17 or 18 years old. At that point I went for some lessons to an old piper who lived in a small town I was brought up in and he was a very old man at that time. He was in the First World War. I don’t really know who he learned pibroch from, because he died not long after. But he infected me with enthusiasm for it.
I couldn’t believe I could ever play a crunluath. They look so complicated! But they sounded so good. And this old man took me through Books 5 and 7 of the Piobarieachd Society’s collection (that’s all I could afford at the time) and infected me with enthusiasm with what are basically, I think, quite simple melodies. Simple, but very beautiful melodies, developed through this succession of variations which get more and more complicated.
So, I like the lovely simplicity of the melodies, the impressiveness of the technique as well, and I just became an enthusiast.
JDH — Do you hear echoes of an earlier era? These tunes are remnants of another time and place.
AF — I think they are. I think that’s almost been proven in that, despite people’s attempts to compose pibroch, they can’t really replicate the feel of the ancient tunes.
There are some wonderful new tunes. I have to say: the evolution of pibroch is interesting and well and continues to the present day.
But none of these composers can really evoke the same sort of feeling you get from the ancient tunes.
There’s a big change of state, or something which just cannot be replicated, but which we are very lucky to have.
JDH — The thing that appeals to me about pibroch, having come from a classical music background, is that the theme and variation structure is universal. It connects all musical forms across geography and history.
AF — Yes it does.
JDH — That, and the easy format and expression that gave the performer a chance to bring his own interpretive style. That came across in the first album I ever bought, one by Donald MacPherson. It reminded me of an almost jazz-like improvisational quality, a freedom and musicality that was very appealing.
AF _ I think that’s a good way to express it. And I think Donald MacPherson was an absolute master at bringing his own expression into the tunes, as well. Very difficult to replicate actually.
JDH — You are deeply involved in pibroch. What excites you and keeps you involved? What hooks you in and doesn’t let you go?
AF — Basically, the love of the music in the first place. No doubt about that at all.
And…you learn more about it all the time. There’s a huge amount to learn and understand about it that just goes on and on.
I’m very friendly with Roderick Cannon. He and I discuss things on the phone time after time. There’s a huge amount in Roderick’s brain to tease out!
And interesting discussions on the evolution of pibroch are a part of it.
But the basic thing that keeps me hooked, though, is hearing something that is really good playing these tunes on the bagpipes.
One of the things I do, is I’m one of the conveners of the Northern Meeting piping competitions. And it’s great to do that, because you’r in contact all of the time with people who are the best modern exponents of the music. To hear them play that and interpreting it, is just wonderful.
JDH — You’re in the cat-bird seat, aren’t you? These people come and play, and to be surrounded by the quality has got be a very exciting thing.
AF — The same is true of the Music Committee of the Piobaireachd Society. The people who are on that (Andrew Wright, Jack Taylor, Malcolm MacRae) - all have very interesting views on pibroch, and it is something that you can just relax into and enjoy discussing with them.
JDH — What topics pop up when you chat? Are they about music? Are they about interpretation? What causes excitement and brings you together?
AF — One of the principle reasons for the Music Committee is choosing set tunes for the big competitions. And that is always an interesting challenge, in the sense that we have a number of principles upon which we operate. These include: Setting appropriate tunes for appropriate levels within the competition structure, and within that, setting tunes that are broadly well balanced but nevertheless provide a challenge to the pipers, but also provide interesting listening for judges and audiences, which is a very important aspect.
We’ve tried over the years to vary our approach to some extent, to expand it, to see how they work and how they work with the public and competitors themselves.
For example, we set modern tunes a few years ago. And we set tunes which were from Donald MacDonald settings, and from McArthur-McGregor settings. We set small tunes at one time, set them in pairs.
All was done just to see how people liked it.
So we’ve tried a whole range of things just to see what works and doesn’t work.
Oddly enough, what seems to work is the very tradition tunes set in a very traditional way. There is a reluctance to take on all the settings and different interpretations of tunes. And I think it’s partly because we are operating within a competitive system. And, well, the pipers themselves have broader interest than the music: when they are playing in a competition, they are in it to win a prize. And to some extent, they tend to second guess what the judges will approve of.
So it’s quite difficult to get pipers, and indeed judges, I suppose, to think outside of the box of how tunes are played nowadays. When we set these different types of tunes in the past, the kind of comments we get back are, “It would be nice to hear these in recitals and, from time to time, as curiosities, but for the competitions, keep the traditional settings of the tunes.”
I’m not convinced about that, though…
Nevertheless, I think that is a feature and function of the competition.
JDH — You absolutely confirm every discussion we’ve had on the site with competitors. The competitors are the most conservative group of pibroch players that we encounter.
New competitors, new generation of pibroch players are interested in the other settings, but as they go through their system, the judges shape their expectations and eventually the competitors fall into line.
AF — And, of course, most of the judges are or were competitors themselves. So they’ve evolved in that same sort of environment. So, I think, in many cases, despite wishing to be open minded about it, they tend to be conservative as well.
JDH — In my experience, the response by judges to presenting a tune based on primary source manuscripts is one of two extremes: it is either, “Wow, this is interesting!” or “Get off the boards!”
It can be tough being a determined pibroch competitor wanting to explore these settings.
AF — I know that when we set the Donald MacDonald and McArthur-McGregor tunes a few years ago, we also ran judges seminars. (We have two seminars a year in order to discuss the Set Tunes.) We had the most difficult discussions we’ve ever had in discussing these tunes. Because, quite rightly, competitors wanted to know what the rules were: do you have to play a redundant low A, or can you do a conventional crunluath? What are the limits here? It became really quite difficult to pin down precise rules.
But, of course, we NOT to be too prescriptive. That’s the thing.
But within the competition system, people want you to be prescriptive.
JDH — It’s like any other competition environment: if the rules are too open, you feel like someone is going to take advantage of the situation.
It’s hard to get the competitors to be courageous.
AF — It is hard, and I can perfectly understand that.
For example, I judge a bit myself. And there are certain tunes which I’ve played for years and years and which I like very much indeed and I’ve decided how I would like to hear them played. So, by definition I’m biased. So when someone comes along and plays them differently, I’m not too sure about it.
If someone comes along and plays a tune I’m not familiar with at all, they can do anything they like with it.
JDH — Isn’t that harder to judge, though?
AF — I think is some ways it’s easier to judge, because you are judging without any baggage whatsoever.
Now, of course, most tunes, over the years of judging and listening, you get to know most of the tunes. It’s difficult coming up with anything new or different.
JDH — It’s frighteningly small, the number of tunes we have. Pre-1840, there are only 312 or 313 tunes.
Occasionally I look at Campbell Canntaireachd and when I come across a tune whose sole existence is due only to him having captured it in this unique form of notation, I think: what an amazing stroke of luck. But for this one hand-written manuscript, itself nearly forgotten and misplaced, this tune would have been lost forever.
It’s precious, these older materials.
Which is my motivation to bring them to light. The Highland Societies did such a remarkable job undertaking a kind of a field anthropological study to save what they could of the remnants of this art form. But canonization was always going to take place: people just like cleaning up messes, particularly on subjects that are important to them.
But the New Secondary Orality of the Internet age has and will allow several things to take place:
It lets everybody with a connected device have easy access to materials that had otherwise been sequestered away in libraries.
It also relieves the caretakers of tradition from the burden that they have carried out of the fear of the loss of that tradition. Now that audio/visual recordings are ubiquitous and digitally eternal, they no longer have to worry that their tradition will be forgotten. The obligation to retain a tradition at all costs has been lifted by the new digital world.
So, it seems to me that we can begin again exploring the old materials, learn from them, bring them into the present, explore them not as museum artifacts, but to bring them alive into the future.
AF — That’s interesting. I don’t doubt that sound recording has made a huge difference in understanding how other people have played in the past. Everything the Internet offers broadens the scope hugely.
But I’m not quite clear about what you’re saying here. Are you saying that the traditional way of playing pibroch, as it’s seen at the moment, will disappear? Or are you saying that because it is so widely available, it will become engrained and will become the way to do it?
JDH — I think what I’m saying was that there was a fundamental motivating factor at work that brought people to capture pibroch to begin with, standardize pibroch, and then reinforce pibroch interpretation in a particular fashion, out of the fear that, something would otherwise would have been lost.
I am saying that this fear, as a context for maintaining a kind of orthodoxy of interpretation, is now gone. There is no fear of loss.
AF — But what is that might have been lost? Because the way that pibroch is played nowadays probably became thoroughly established really around the beginning of the 20th century. So, it’s not the ancient tradition. We can’t get at that. We’ve got ideas, and the research that you and other people do are very helpful in throwing up possibilities.
But what we are talking about losing, really, is something only established about 100 years ago.
JDH — It’s interesting that in the competition system and for the competitors, that’s the de facto standard by which to judge pibroch performance.
I’m arguing: we may wish to discuss this as a standard, whether it is a good one or not (and it may very well be), but the reason this is happening even today is because it came out of context of a fear that something was going to be lost.
And I don’t believe anything, from now on, will ever be lost again.
So, what are we losing by trying something else?
AF — I think that’s an interesting idea, but the thing that might set (what we do today) in stone is the competition system itself. Unless we get away from this approach that says that you can’t try anything different, because it will not be acceptable in the context of the competition, you will need some other outlet for it, some other way to get people playing with a more open mind and more experimentally than they do in competitions.
Much more to follow…
