Glad they didn't want kilts

[OC Richard]

I'm a piper and wearing Highland Dress is part of the gig. On the very rare occasions I've been asked to play Highland pipes in trousers, it feels strange and out of place.

But I also play uilleann pipes, and I prefer playing those in trousers, both because uilleann pipers have always worn trousers, and because the uilleann pipes are played seated, and kilts and being seated doesn't always go well

Quite often, though, the person doing the hiring thinks "pipes = kilts" and wants me to play the uilleann pipes in kilts. This wouldn't be such a horrible thing, except that the people doing the hiring also, in many cases, wants everybody to see the piper, and put the piper's chair up on a stage, or even worse on top of a riser on top of a stage, so that the whole audience is looking straight up my kilt



There's a piece of music out the last couple of years called Season of Joy which is a suite of modern Christmas songs with a quasi-Celtic sound, and there are uilleann pipe parts written in the score.
http://wordmusic.com/season-of-joy-a...lebration.html
Every Christmas now I get hired to play this at some church. This year it was a series of three concerts at a certain church, and when I showed up at the rehearsal they said "that's where you will sit" and sure enough it was a chair in the middle of the stage, on a riser, on top of another riser, on top of a third riser, a virtual pyramid. Four chairs, for the fiddle, whistle, bodhran, and pipes, actually, but mine was in front.

I was greatly relieved when I found that I was expected to dress like everyone else up on stage, the choir and folk musicians, in trousers, country check shirts, tweed vests, and tweed caps.

[ASinclair]

Richard,

Glad you escaped a potentially embarrassing situation.

And thanks for the link to that nice music.