By Dick Hensold
I see from the definition of “alternative” on the APNA website that this can mean a couple different things, and my work fits this description in various ways. So I wanted to share some of the concepts with which I approach alternative piping.
The first involves having a clear distinction between what is “traditional” and what is not. Traditional literally means “handed down”, usually implying an aural tradition passed down for generations. In other words, it’s what you’ve heard somewhere before. Often, it’s a sound or interpretation that you’ve grown up with.
As well as the music itself, instruments can have a continuous tradition, or not. There are, for example, 3 different traditional pipes from the British Isles, ones that have been played continuously for generations, and can trace their lineage back for a long ways: Highland pipes, uilleann pipes, and Northumbrian smallpipes. These three have been in continuous use for many generations. The other pipes from the British Isles (Scottish smallpipes, Border pipes, reel pipes, Montgomery smallpipes, etc.) could be called “revival” or “historical” instruments, since their use has been revived after a break in tradition. We don’t really have an aural tradition that informs us of the playing of old traditional border pipers and Scottish smallpipers, unless their playing was identical to the playing of the highland pipers (and there certainly seems to be some controversy on that point!). I am not aware of any early recordings of Border pipers or Scottish smallpipers, so this puts them unambiguously in the “revival” category, and they need help in figuring out what to do with them.
An obvious grey area in this distinction between traditional and revival is where a tradition has died out, and the teacher/student connection is broken, but not before a recording is made. This is a pretty big grey area, since in this case, like any historical documentation, much depends on the quality and extent of the recording, the condition of the pipes at the time of recording, the readiness of the piper, the goals and influence of the recordist, how representative is the piper, etc. This is the case with the Swedish pipes. The last player with an inherited tradition died in 1949, but not before he was discovered and a short field recording made. But in this case, the music from this player was not old traditional music, but more contemporary popular music. So when the Swedish pipes were revived by Leif Eriksson and Per Gudmundson in the 1980’s, they based their revival mostly on pipes in museum collections, and traditional fiddle music that fit on the pipes, which had a tradition of being associated with the pipes or pipers.
When playing a traditional instrument, we always have the option of playing traditionally, this is, playing the way our teachers taught us, or by listening to any other aural model, of which there are usually many available. But when playing a revivalist instrument, we often need a couple more tools to decide what and how to play. I usually refer to these concepts as the “3 factors of interpretation.”
The first factor is tradition, as explained above. For some types of music, especially ones from a very conservative tradition, this is the only factor that is really accepted. In these traditions, if you don’t play it the way your teacher told you, it’s wrong.
The second factor is imagination. You can play something in a way no one has ever played before, or you can play it differently every time. For some types of music (jazz comes to mind), this is the most highly prized factor, regardless of what other factors come into play. This factor is obviously necessary in figuring out what to do with revival bagpipes, and is used in conjunction with tradition.
The third factor is historical evidence. Historical materials included written music (both published and in MS), old instructional manuals, books on music, music theory, and descriptions of instruments, descriptions of performances and their musical, social, and economic contexts, the measurement, analysis, and reconstruction of instruments in museums, iconography (analysis of old paintings, woodcuts, engravings of instruments and performances), and perhaps a number of other things I can’t think of offhand. Each of these things requires careful analysis and interpretation, much like that mentioned above regarding traditional field recordings.
An example of the application of historical documentation in my own playing is in my interpretation of the Dixon repertoire tunes. Many of the tunes in the Dixon MS collection are notated in 6/4 or 9/4, and if notated as a jig in 6/8 or 9/8, the shortest note value would be a 16th note, of which there are many. When many people look at the busy variations in the Dixon repertoire, they do not think this is dance music, but the historical descriptions of the performance contexts of 18th-century Border piping indicates an emphasis on dance piping. So I try to play it so it functions as dance music, regardless of the difficulty of doing so. (See my quote on pg 53 of Matt Seattles’s most recent edition of “The Master Piper”.)
Another example of the application of historical documentation to interpretation of this same repertoire is in tempo markings in 18th-century fiddle tunes. This type of tune is still played traditionally in the Northumbrian tradition, but usually pretty slowly (e.g., Fenwick o’ Bywell). Tunes like this, when they appear in 18th-century fiddle collections with tempo markings, are sometimes described as “brisk”, or “lively”, contradicting the current Northumbrian tradition. So one has to make a conscious decision whether to follow the tempos indicated in contemporaneous written music, or in traditional practice 200-some years later.
I think this kind of observation above is how the early music movement started in the mid-20th century. People had been playing Bach and Handel and other early composers for generations, and when they began to read the old music treatises, they noticed that the descriptions of the phrasing, articulation, ornamentation, and instrumentation did not match contemporary practice. But since there were no 18th-century recordings of Bach and Handel, interpreters had to use their imagination to flesh out musically this skeletal documentary evidence. Early music is therefore something of a repudiation of tradition, even though it draws on it heavily in other ways.
Which brings us back to tradition in a kind of sideways way–the most interesting thing about these concepts is how they interact in novel ways. In working with revivalist pipes, imagination is often influenced by tradition, but often different traditions than you would normally assume! I read an article by Benjamin Bagby about the apparent parallels between medieval harp playing and traditional African Mbira playing, based on descriptions of medieval harp performances and contemporary traditional Mbira performances. The big difference between these two, is that nobody living will ever get a chance to hear a medieval harp performance, and there are still traditional Mbira players out there working their magic, and we can get ideas about interpretation from listening to them and understanding their performance contexts.
In reviving extinct bagpipe styles, I also feel it advisable to consult traditional styles in order to get a feel for the overall range of what might be called “ornamentation density”. Without having done an exhaustive study of it, I have the impression that most traditional styles use a lot more ornamentation than is often used by players of revival pipes, and I think this may be a mistake. My impression is that the bagpipes in general, by its very nature, needs a fair amount of doodling to make an optimal musical statement. We needn’t copy the ornamentation of traditional repertoires exactly in order to approximate the general activity of ornamentation models.
This statement probably sounds odd coming from a Northumbrian smallpiper, since NSP traditionally uses very few ornaments. But I think the NSP is the exception to the rule, since the closed fingering gives the NSP an articulation rarely found in other piping traditions, and makes much ornamentation unnecessary. Also, though, if we compare modern NSP ornamentation practice with the ornamentation notated in “Peacock’s Tunes” (an early NSP collection), we get the impression that NSP ornamentation may not always have been so spare. And if we look at another pipe that is able to articulate–the French baroque musette de cour–we see that ornamentation on the musette was lavish by any standards. But I digress. The musette is not a traditional pipe, and the lavish ornamentation mentioned above is described in great detail in Hotteterre’s 1738 treatise for that instrument. In other words, this is a historical source, not a traditional one. But you get the idea.
Historical evidence can be used to justify extravagant extrapolations into other traditions (such as the Ben Bagby example above), which then, coupled with imagination, can be used to create or interpret effective new repertoires for “extinct” instrumental traditions. The three factors of interpretation come to the rescue!
Dick Hensold is a leading Northumbrian smallpiper in North America, and for the past 20 years has performed and taught in England, Scotland, Japan, Canada, and across the United States. He also plays reel pipes (an indoor version of the Scottish Highland pipes intended for Scottish dance music), seljefløyte (Norwegian willow-flute), säckpipa (Swedish bagpipes), pibgorn (Welsh hornpipe), and several other instruments. http://www.dickhensold.com/index.html