A forward from the UP Forum of general interest after the “moderator” expunged a post that suggested pipers should respect other Irish Traditional musicians in a session:
Interesting. I didn’t in fact mention allude to or respond to the original post at all. I in fact replied as a separate comment very very late into the thread. And isn’t it interesting that our “moderator” who personally attacked the notion of “polite” sessions based on his own experience–didn’t even stop to consider my point. I suggest this might be due to my observations hitting too close to the root of the tree.
1 Pipes are often very loud, often the loudest instrument, and often by specific design.
2 Pipers are often not that good, certainly not often as good as they think they are, and often should not be taking over sessions simply because they have the enthusiasm to do so or have the loudest instrument in the session. Even “tuned” pipes present “tuning” problems for other instruments.
3 Pipers do not in fact need to be running drones, drones which everyone in the thread has admitted will not be very well in tune with the session anyway, and possibly not even in tune the the piper him/herself. A set of wowing drones can only ad noise and unclarity to anyone attempting to hear the rest of the assembly, especially those unfortunate enough to be right next to the drones/regulators. This can in fact make it simply impossible to hear and play along with the session and create a dead zone well around the piper or perhaps across most of the room.
4 I am in fact the only concise post so far to offer specific and neutral comentary on the subject, and to offer a plausible and objective explanation for the comment received by the original poster. If said party asks for explanation of this comment, a comment somebody went well out of the way to phone in to him before the session, and seems so befuddled as to any possible reason for it, one would have to question a moderator or the poster himself regarding his real motivation for opening it up to the community for analysis when the moderator and poster alike have such a hostile reaction to the only specific, neutral, and pertinent, not to mention logical, train of thought on the matter. The entire rest of the thread consists almost soley of back-slapping fellow pipers encouraging the party in question to tell the session to fook off and continue to ignore someone or some group of people in the session who felt strongly enough to bring up what they (not I) consider to be a serious problem with the poster himself in his own session. I would suggest that it is the original poster, and most of the rest of the thread who have been playing by a strictly anti-social set of rules of behavior and discourse. It has been our “moderator” who in fact has shown a complete distain and contempt for the entire rest of the Irish Traditional community, and who has only encouraged this original poster to heap more and stronger distain and contempt upon this person’s local session in the name of, and on behalf of the Chiff and Fipple Forums.
5 We have since learned if I’ve followed it correctly, that another piper in the thread is ganging up with his box playing wife, doubling any effect of session-hijacking or session-hogging and in cases of several pipers or such unholy combinations, even if the piper is indeed the “host” of this session, and he’s been asked to leave the pipes at home, ostensibly his primary means of insuring he has the power to “lead” the session, one might suppose he’s really being asked to back off the entire notion of “hosting” “leading” or “running” the session at all.
6 At the risk of having to move onto one of the remaining six or seven hundred available identities available to access this forum, I’d like to propose that pipers can and often are just as annoying and unaccomplished and intolerable in session or otherwise as sometimes alluded to. Sometimes, when a well-meaning subject of your own session calls you at home and asks you to leave the pipes behind next time, it really is your fault and they’re trying to be polite about it, rather than tell you to piss off the session entirely. They’re trying to tone down your presence enough so they can at least get their own music in. It’s not my concern whether or not this applies personally to this or that piper. It is however entirely valid advice and I see no reason why this “moderator” or the original poster should be exempt from statements of universal truth. No one here would of course question my assessment or postulating were the “leader” of this session a box or banjo player. What I put to this forum now, is the claim that my response is indeed being censored for purely editorial or political reasons, because of an assumed universal brotherhood and goodness of “piping” that has made our wise and neutral “moderator” and the so-called “brother” he feins to defend, unable, unwilling, or just too arrogant to submit themselves and ourselves to the same sort of community-wide social and personal criticism to which we would subject any other Irish Traditional musician.
In fact, the original poster only flatters himself if he thinks my observations were somehow narrowed and specific to him and his personal abilities because it only further diminishes his own mindset, the mindset of the moderator, or perhaps most of the forum, to pretend that the pipes and most pipers are so commonly respected and accomplished as great musicians, that a “personal attack” could be the only reason I’d be making the suggestion that a piper in a session has to be considerate of those quieter, lesser beings around him.
It’s the sheerest of hypocrisy, as betrayed by our “moderator’s” own response, to lecture me about objectivity, when it seems his entire point in my censure was to punish me for suggesting that other Irish Traditional musicians and the session community in general, deserved any degree of respect or consideration from we, God’s Own piping community.
Some kind of home-style Southern Cooking sounds mighty good right now. We had some things called beignets in New Orleans—oh man, I just go into shivers thinking about them. And the shrimp, mercy! Well, we do have some good food here----but not like that.