I'm starting to "get it"...

[Alan H]

.... just "starting", eh?

I have a couple of friends who are pipers and two or three of them are quite good. A couple are Grade Three pipers, one is probably going to move up to Grade Two after this year. I've come to appreciate pipes in a way that I certainly did not, say, seven years ago. However, because of the nature of pipes, you can't articulate notes like a clarinet or flute player can. Instead, there's sophisticated fingerwork that is used to delineate...for example.... repeated notes.

OK, so I listen to my friends and as they develop, I start to notice how more musical, perhaps "lyrical"....certainly "unencumbered" the phrases become. The sound becomes more than an "ambiance of drones and notes" as their skills develop. Now, I certainly enjoy the "ambiance" but as a woodwind player, I want to hear musical phrases. As a very, very GENERAL rule, with the vast majority of pipers I hear, those phrases are "there", but they're chopped up pretty drastically by the necessity of the fast fingerwork needed to provide articulation.

However, at Woodland a couple of weekends ago, OCRichard came by the MacNaughton tent and played a new-to-him set of chamber pipes. THAT was a joy to listen to. Richards fingerwork does NOT get in the way of the phrasing, it CREATES the phrasing.

And now I "get" at least one small part of the difference between a **Really Good Piper** and a Good Piper. I really enjoyed that, it was a bit of a revelation.

Thanks, Richard!