FINALLY: GETTIN' MY SMALLPIPES ON

Yesterday, I had my first lesson in more than a month. Given that I'm working at home as a consultant for a time, I was able to go in the afternoon and hang out with my instructor, Lynne Miller (proprietor of The House of Bagpipes) and Jek Cunningham (as I posted yesterday on Eisentgeiste, the "piper down" from So I Married an Axe Murderer) as they talked about wierd piping gigs, band competition judging (and how it's changed in the last 50 years), piping bands that suck, bad students who quit, obsessed students who can't stop, and the growth in the popularity of piping in Scotland. Jek is the elder of the two; born in Scotland, served in the RAF (which had no pipe band), and moved to New Zealand in the '50s, where he seriously got into piping. He said at the time that piping was basically dead in Scotland, except for the British Army, and was much, much more popular in New Zealand. (I've think it's kind of cool how Commonwealth nations are often better at carrying on British traditions than Britain, itself. Another example is cricket.)

Scottish interest in piping, according to Jek, started to rekindle in '70s, and is now stronger than ever. Lynne told of his first visit to the College of Piping in Glasgow (didn't say what year), and said that the place was a dump in a really bad neighborhood. Since then, the neighborhood has cleaned up, and countless contributions have refurbished the College.

After Jek left, I finished my lesson, hammering out all 4 parts of The 79th's Farewell to Gibraltar, and told Lynne that I wanted to get the smallpipes, now. He said that he agrees that now is probably the time, and that, despite the times I've neglected my piping in the past 10 months, that shown willingness and ability to stick with it. (I got the impression from his conversation with Jek about bad students that most who quit either do so after the first couple of lessons, or after six months. ) Besides my desire to now play a real instrument, I'm also motivated by the fact that my practice habits tend towards fewer longer sessions than more frequent shorter sessions (which if probably worse, but that's just the way it is), and the limiting factor for my being able to carry on longer sessions is that the muscles around my mouth get too tired to blow directly into the reed, and I start emitting involuntary raspberries in the corners of my mouth. If only I had a reservoir or air, perhaps a bag of air, that I could use to blow through the chanter -- maybe I could play these "air-reservoir-pipes."

So Lynne is ordering up a set of John Walsh A-2000 smallpipes. I also considered the John Walsh shuttle pipes, but Lynne swears up and down that the sound of the smallpipes is vastly superior. They may arrive as early as next week, we'll see.