So, my lad Jack is at drama school in London, and he hears that someone has to play pipes in a Friel (I think) play. He offers to lend his dog rough practise set, and has it posted down. He (Jack) can’t really play, he’s a flute and whistle sort of a guy.
The chap who it has been lent to has some violin ablilty, but has never played any sort of woodwind instrument. He has been given 2 weeks to learn to the standard of a not particularly good piper.
(He has also been instructed to cough walk on playing them…)
I get the impression that his tutor thinks he is “not trying hard enough”
So, over to you. On the count of three, how long does it take for a complete beginner to be able to play a tune? Any advance on 2 weeks? Being taught by me giving Jack hints to pass on…
I’m pretty certain that you already know the answer to this question, but certainly the expectations are absurd on the face of it. I would be pretty impressed if he could act convincingly as if he were playing the pipes after a couple of weeks practice (with a recording playing in the background). This is theater after all.
Just keeping the reed working well under these challenging situations will be tough, not to mention getting fingering and bellows/bag action onboard.
And he is going to walk as well as play… hope this is for highland pipes not uilleann.
Which Friel play?
I played a piper in Translations once, the text has a fiddler of course, but we switched it, and the cast all did a four-hand reel on stage.
I would not attempt it unless you can play!
I do indeed know the answer, but I thought it would be helpful for the poor bugger to be able to point to a consensus of online opinion along the lines of
“this instrument is at least 4 times harder than a saxophone”
“you’d have more luck getting Eric Pickles to do cartwheels in an afternoon”
“try learning Polish in a weekend”
It might well be Translations. If there’s no piper in the text, then that’s just sadism!
How about “the ‘walk on while playing’ direction means you have the wrong pipes entirely?” Of course, if we disabuse them then they may give the poor kid a week to learn the Highland pipes …
I think I was able to squeeze out “Jim Ward’s” in about a week and a half, but I played flute and whistle for like, 10 years before getting into pipes. I also performed the Ward’s feat while sitting. In this case, it sounds like verité may get in the way of the truth.
On the plus side, if it’s a disaster the play will take on a whole new texture, and the crowd may well be delighted.
Well in that case, I’d say in 2 weeks, it would be impossible to teach someone to play the most basic of tunes on the uilleann pipes and to make it sound the least bit palatable. Most people take several weeks just learning bag pressure and how to hold the chanter correctly, just so that you can play a single steady note.
Someone who is a real musical prodigy might advance more quickly, but if they’re that good, they should forget acting and concentrate on music.
If the director is set on having a performing live piper, then he should pony up for someone with enough experience to do the job, because a two-week beginner is going to sound like a two-week beginner (dreadful, IOW) no matter how much the director believes that a miracle is going to happen just on his lofty say-so from the heights. Would he hand a fiddle to a trumpet player and say, “You’ve got two weeks.”? Somehow I doubt that. Apparently he thinks the uilleann pipes are a toy. Well, news flash: He’d be better off with a comb and paper and hope the player can carry a tune.
Then there’s that walk-on nonsense. I would suggest that someone have the director try out a set of pipes for himself so that he has a possibility of getting in touch with a reality more effective than his own.
Best go with a recording, have the lad on a set of border pipes or highland pipes, with the body positioned such that the audience cannae see the fingers.
He might be able to get the gist of highland pipe fingering in two weeks, but, unless he’s mighty talented, not well enough to do mair than a few fingering exercises.
Two weeks for all that? Looks like a setup for failure. And the ridiculous parody of it all … don’t get me started. Why doesn’t he do it with a violin? At least he knows how to hold one of those.
It just occurred to me that maybe the director is a beginning student too. I can’t imagine how that might explain it, but it might. But surely someone must have informed the director of the doomed future of this caprice by now. I agree that if it’s a fiddler in the script, it should be a fiddler in the production, and they’re easy enough to find. The only groundbreaking that badly played pipes will accomplish is to help bury the corpse. My sympathies go out to the guy who’s supposed to learn them; in his shoes I would be suspicious that the director wanted to make me a laughingstock along with him.
Unless he is playing the part of someone who is a very horrible piper, then no, it is impossible. I highly doubt anyone has been able to play the pipes to a level that is acceptable for public performance in only two weeks. I still sounded like a dying goose that was still putting up a struggle for a time period measured in units of months! I would suggest either dropping it from the script, modifying the script, or having him play on an instrument that is either closer to one he is already proficient in, or one with a much, much shallower learning curve. It’s unbelievably absurd to have anyone perform on uilleann pipes (or any type of bagpipe, for that matter) who has been playing for that period of time.
It actually, really, honestly exists for sure. Or at least it used to exist. I’ve seen it posted at least twice here on C&F, but I fear it may have turned into one of those no-image-available-type-thingums because I can’t track it down any more. If ever you see it, it totally looks as if some grey-market shyster used his mom to pose with the set, and nobody in the room had any idea what to do with the contraption but flip a coin and wing it. IIRC she also held the chanter upside-down. She had this sweet “I’m doing this for my son” smile that suggested she was grateful that at least her boy wasn’t in prison.
I’ve taught someone with no prior experience to play Amazing Grace on GHB in six weeks. The guy in question threw himself into it and worked like a dog to achieve it, and had the budget to throw as many lessons at it as were needed.
