In a recent ‘An Piobaire’ it was suggested we come up with piping no-no’s. Seamus Ennis was fond of saying ‘My father wouldn’t have done that’, at anything he didn’t approve of.
Listening to Seamus’ recordings then, we can assume his father thought it acceptable to play way out of tune?
I mean I am in as much awe of his playing as the rest of you, but try playing some of the track from ‘Return from Fingal’ to a non-piper.
I think there are only two 'no-no’s in any type of traditional music.
Not listening to what experienced players say and do when you are a beginner.
Not questioning what experienced players say and do when you aren’t a beginner.
Mukade
Oh bloody hell let’s not start this again.
Laban will have a seizure if he is lurking!!
one big no-no is not to hear Ennis’ playing as out of tune..
Aye… I agree. Nit-picking isn’t very productive, where as practicing might be… 
-Eric
I don’t like the direction where this is headed, but before things get TOO ugly…
It can’t be avoided that there are some recordings of Ennis that are not pleasant to listen to…Same goes for Clancy. Some of those recordings where he had Seán Reid bonking on the out-of-tune regs…I can’t stand them. There. I said it.
Then again, I was very lucky to receive a copy of a private recording of Willie playing “Rakish Paddy” (from an ex-member of this forum who shall remain nameless) that is bar-none one of the most wonderful and exciting examples of Irish piping I have ever heard.
There are some old recordings of Irish trad. musicians that are pleasant to hear; there are some that are not. The “out of tune” complaint is a common one. Fiddle players sometimes have the excuse that in the era before players were exposed to well-tempered standards of tonality, there were other equally valid standards of tonality that were adhered to (just as there are dialects of languages that may differ from the perceived “standard”). Pipers aren’t so lucky: out of tune drones are quite simply out of tune.
Some things to keep in mind, though:
-These guys weren’t heading down to the recording studio to lay down some tracks on ProTools. They were not “professional” musicians (Ennis was a collector and broadcaster; Clancy was a carpenter or something, I think). What got recorded was often recorded in very informal circumstances and musicians weren’t necessarily at the top of their game every time someone just happened to press the red button. A lot of what got released commercially didn’t necessarily represent certain musicians at their very best. There were seldom opportunities for retakes.
With Ennis, there are a few things in particular to consider:
-In his later years, he was apparently in very poor health. This presumably didn’t do much for his playing ability.
-On some tracks (like “Jenny’s Welcome to Charlie” on D & C 1), his drones are really wavering. I wonder if his pipes were leaking or otherwise taking too much air…At the time Ennis was active, it would have been much more difficult to keep pipes in superior running order than it is today, due to the relative unavailability of skilled pipe and reedmakers to service them.
Okay, so there are some recordings of people like Ennis that do suffer from tuning problems, squeaks, faltering in technique, etc. The thing is, Ennis was still thinking like Ennis and at least TRYING to play like Ennis, and he did things with the musicality of his playing that no one has ever quite surpassed, in my opinion. Though Ennis undoubtedly heard other kinds of music, he received a lot of exposure to a dying social millieu of people whose only exposure to music had been Irish traditional music, and this informed his stylistic preferences. So keep listening. You might occasionally wince at what you hear, but it may well be worth it.
My own thoughts are that Ennis’s piping got tighter as he got older. Have a listen to the Return from Fingal which starts in the 1940s and goes to the 1970s. You can clearly hear the change. His pipes also suffered with the passage of time.
One other thing, I think that Ennis, in his later days, concentrated more on getting his technique right than on the musicality of what he was playing. This raises the who argument of “piper” versus “musician”, and we probably don’t want to go there just yet.
I believe that the man who used to reed Ennis’s pipes passed away at some point in his career and they were never subsequently reeded as well as before. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Also I have heard that Seamus’s bellows pipe was so leaky that it blew his fringe upwards with every stroke!!!
I bet that most of us couldn’t play his pipes at all towards the end of his life.
I guess that explains his constant banging on his bellows in the YouTube video of him I saw… Seems tiring.. Yet he still shined like Ennis shined while he played, as if his bellows weren’t leaky at all. One mark of a great piper I would think.
-Eric