does the average contemporary piper know more tunes than pipers in the ‘old’ days?
i reckon that those professional pipers who play sessions all the time must know many hundreds of tunes - that wouldn’t have been the case for clancy or doran would it? i wonder if their (by comparison) more limited repertoire meant it was easier for them to really get to know tunes inside out?
i imagine there’d be a difference between someone doing a good job of tune they occasionally play in a session, and them really going to town on a tune they know very well, but perhaps that’s just stating the obvious
I am not sure your examples of Clancy and Doran are the best pick. Clancy had an awful lot of tunes by all accounts and he was seeking out people all the time to learn any tune he didn’t have. I know a few of his (more or less) contemporaries/friends (people like Michael Falsey or John Joe Tuttle) and I have yet to see them sit out a tune, they’d play anything at the drop of a hat.
And Doran, apart from the huge amount of hours spent playing to make a living, was expected, as a professional piper, to play anything people asked him to play. And again, by all accounts, he did.
Slightly off topic, but related to Mr Gumby’s comment.
When I was living in north Sligo about 14 years ago I was good friends with an elderly piper who lived nearby in north Co. Leitrim. He used to tell me loads of stories of pipers and other musicians he had known or had seen over the decades. I remember once he told me about seeing Felix Doran busking at a county fair in Sligo (probably in the 40s or 50s). He told me that he had only ever seen one or two pipers before that, and that they could play a few tunes. But Doran, to use his words, ‘He knew all the tunes’.
i’m sure they had a good number of tunes but perhaps what i should have asked was whether sessions today draw on a much broader repertoire given that some professional session are playing 3/4 hours everyday, and need new tunes so as not to repeat themselves, and that there are sources for tunes everywhere - also, because the recorded output of some of the past pipers includes some repetition and doesn’t represent such a vast store of tunes overall - so i think i should have qualified what i aid with the word ‘relative’
I don’t think you can take the recorded repertoire as a measure of the number of tunes a player has. If you listen to recordings of Séamus Ennis you hear him play a core repertoire he will always come back to but almost every recording has him include a few tunes that appear to come into his head that you may never hear him play again.
Something similar I can see happening with some people around here, you may sit in with them regularly, playing a familiar repertoire (it’s very easy to fall into a routine of remembering tunes that worked last time you played together) and then suddenly you get a whole night of tunes hardly anybody has heard because some memory or other gets triggered.
I think saying
i’m sure they had a good number of tunes
would appear to vastly underestimate the number of tunes some players, be they of present or previous generations, carry around in their head. Clancy would, according to those who knew him, have had thousands of tunes. A good number indeed.
Not sure about the concept of a ‘professional’ session player - the only places I know that anyone gets paid to do a session are in tourist areas where presumably they could bash out the same tunes on a continuous one hour loop and most of the punters wouldn’t know the difference. I certainly know regular sessionj players who know a staggering amount of tunes but I don’t think any of them would consider themselves ‘professional’.
I am just under a year relearning the pipes, being at quite a basic stage when I pressed pause 8 yrs ago.
The sheer amount of tunes to learn if I want to join in at sessions is in direct contrast to time needed on technique and, as John says getting inside a tune and finding it’s piping potential.
It seems that the student piper has many lonely years ahead before joining the throng!
Joining the throng is overrated in my opinion. For the vast majority of their history, the pipes have been primarily a solo instrument. All the practice playing for just myself is its own reward.
Something Hamish Moore said to me once about session playing for GHB types playing SSP/borderpipes - misremembered slightly, no doubt - “these are great, great instruments for playing in sessions but by goodness you have to be the best musician in the room”.
It is rather in the nature of the bagpipe that you have to spend longer at it by yourself before you make an agreeable playing partner than most instruments.
Just depends what you want to do with your instrument, what music you want to make.
Some of the best players I know (and you may well have bought some CDs by them) aren’t great session lovers. They see the instrument as a solo instrument mainly, or perhaps teamed with one or two other musicians. They get paid for their music, yes, so they are professionals…but they have dayjobs too and earn their main crusts away from piping.
There is nothing wrong with session playing, its just that we shouldn’t consider it as the pinnacle of piping. The truth is, too much of a din will hide all those lovely pipey nuances that we all like to do
Someone once said that “The essence of good piping is variation”, no doubt a nod to some of the legends (i.e., Ennis, Clancy) whose playing highlighted a masterful deployment of variations and turns on a phrase.
If this is true, than good piping may not be a good fit for the average session.
For myself, I have drifted farther from the local session repertoire…mostly because it is in a somewhat static state presently*, with less interest in learning new tunes or settings among many of the players. Still, I go and trot out my classic pipetunes (plain-jane versions…little variation) just because they are great tunes and used to be common hereabouts.. Sometimes people reach for their recorders, usually not.
There’s more to be said about the nature of the session, often defined as “too many people playing faster than they should”. Pipers who want to keep up should be prepared to jettison those hard-earned piping techniques…or be left by the wayside.
T
*There are a suite of tunes that have been played at every session for the past 20 years that I simply can not/will not play. Kinda of like itching a spot on your arm so often that it starts to do some damage.
“There is nothing wrong with session playing, its just that we shouldn’t consider it as the pinnacle of piping.”
I would say this is true of any instrument. I think the best of recorded music is at most a duet. With a few exceptions, of course.
I’ve just moved to a new city, the few people I have found to play with here think being good enough to play in session is good enough, that is the goal. Fortunately, a drive a bit over an hour away finds a session where several play at a level that makes them enjoyable to just listen to. They have made me want to work even harder to improve.
