Pipers from every other tradition must wonder, what’s with the Highland pipers? Northumbrian pipers huddle under a pitched tarp at the Bellingham Show wearing anoraks and wellies, having a friendly tune. In Macedonia the gajda propels the dancers around in a circle. At St. Chartier a large stone barn is filled with pipers, accordion players, hurdy gurdy players and dancers in a tightening gyre. The world of Highland piping must look weird from that perspective.
I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. We used to play in a pipe band together when we were in our twenties, thirty years ago. It surprised him to find out I’ve been piping all along for the last thirty years. “What band do you play in?” It surprised him again to find out I don’t play in a band. Shocked and pained, he asked, hoping against hope, “You aren’t still competing, are you?” I said, “No, I might go to one or two Highland Games a year, but just to hear the music. I play mostly smallpipes these days.” That wasn’t much of an explanation for my profligate behavior, and he shook his head in a gesture of something between condolence and amusement.
So why keep piping? More than one friend of mine has wondered if “the other pipers” are “the bad pipers”, that is, pipers who don’t win competitions. Competition is restrictive and authoritarian by definition, especially when something as arbitrary as music is the sport. There is a lot more to piping and that’s what efforts like the APNA web site seek to address. As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The answer to the question should be obvious: we keep piping because we love it.
Competition culture has a unique code of ethics. We pick them up while learning to make a proper doubling. About fifteen years ago students started coming to me for lessons who couldn’t relate to the code or the assumptions they are based on. Most of them were kids, and the kids I teach today find these assumptions as unappealing and incomprehensible as ever. The idea of playing music in a competition just doesn’t make sense to them. When I loan them CDs they find the band and competition piper recordings boring, but they like Gordon Duncan, Anna Murray, Gary West, and Martyn Bennett to name just a few.
The first assumption is a piper must play in a pipe band. The second is that a piper must compete. Then we move quickly on to the best pipers win contests. It then follows, as surely as teaching gigs at summer schools follow winning the Gold Medal, competitions enforce and engender the best pipe music. It is taken for granted that piping will die or be overrun by tinkers if not for the competition system. Eyes tear up when we discuss the dangerous threats to the always feeble condition of pibroch. We joke about it, but the idea “if isn’t Scottish its crap” is pervasive. Other kinds of bagpipes and piping traditions are acknowledged in passing, if at all. Even indigenous Scottish piping traditions are sometimes disparaged as “Lowland,” “tinker” or “Irish.” Discussions about style, technique and taste revolve around the prize lists. It’s not good for your career to form opinions. This is sport with all the trappings, uniforms, institutions, corporate sponsors, and all the expectations of sport. So when you stop winning you might as well quit, and turn your hard won prestige to some profit.
Even when a bright star like Gordon Duncan breaks ranks, inspiring a whole new generation of pipers, engendering a new level of respect for piping for its own sake, challenging the old ways of thinking about pipe music, the authorities attempt to associate themselves with him after his death by naming a competition after him. You might as well name a shopping mall “the wilderness.” Just like in the old Border ballad, the corbies dine on the newly slain knight who lies dead in the forest, known only to his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair who betrayed him.
This will, no doubt, sound like sour grapes to some readers. If I am disappointed at all in my career as a competition piper it is that I didn’t realize sooner that I do not possess the resources and disposition for the game. In fact, I admire and appreciate competition pipers, their faultless technique and determination. But the monoculture fosters the unimaginative, arbitrary and expensive. When the surprising happens, like SLOT winning the Worlds, I jump up and down with the rest of them. But in the end, as Plato wrote, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
There are more pipers fitting into the “other” category every day. Learning about each other and what we’re up to, sharing tunes and ideas, giving and receiving encouragement and direction, these are their own rewards, just like playing jigs and reels, or munieras and polkas, an dros and clogs. Playing music is like taking a hike in the mountains, doing your best work on the job, or cooking a wonderful meal. You don’t expect a medal for it. It’s enough in itself.
John Dally of Burton, Washington has been playing bagpipes since the age of 11. Equally comfortable with Highland. Lowland and Northumbrian pipes and repertoire, in 2010 John published his book “The Northwest Collection of Music for the Scottish Highland Bagpipe. A Collection of Music, Photographs and Essays.”