do you uilleann players use canntaireachd, or ever play piobaireachds?
is there any weird form of it for uilleann pipers?
Cheers
Finn
I don’t think I have heard anything remotely like piobaireachds for UPs - just slow airs. Canntaireachd is called lilting, and I have heard that some UP teachers used to use this method of instruction in the past, but I don’t know how common it is today.
djm
true i’ve only used canntaireachd when learning a piobaireachd
pardon my ignorance . . . Could you tell me what those mean and what the differences are?
nope its cool.
a piobaireachd is the ‘traditonal’ or ‘classical’ form of piping (GHB) and has no time signature and is not ‘mathmaticly’ correct.
see here for a better definition: http://www.piobaireachd.com/welcome.htm
canntaireachd: long ago, before pipers used music they used something called canntaireachd. and this was ‘sung’ with differnt types of embelisments (or somthing like them). in almost like a chanting voice.
click this for someone singing a piobaireachd (lady doyles salute) in canntaireachd
http://www.piperanddrummer.com/features/donaldson/2005/ladydoylessalute.mp3 give it a second to d/l
cheers!
Finn
Those websites were interesting. So, if a person was not playing a piobaireachd would s/he then be playing dance music? I am trying to understand what other categories of music would be played on GHB since it said something about piobaireachd being an important part of the competition—what would the other parts be?
they also play reels. jigs. slip jig. hornpipes. marches. srathbeys. retreats. etc. etc. (all things varign in time) it depends waht grde lvl your competing at. all grade (except mabey grde 5) want piobs. done, but it all depends on what you sign up for.
for parades you play mostly Marches and reatrets. (2/4 4/4)
piobs are also known as “Ceol Mor” which basicly means “big Music”
then other tunes such as jigs and hornpipes would be known as “Ceol Beag” or “little music” before people had written down pipe music on paper almost no Ceol Beag/little music was played. it was only after pipe music was on paper did pipers begin to play songs tradtional played on the fiddle of squeese box (E.G. Kesh Jig)
Piobs are not often played for leuiseur as ‘dance’ music would, mainly because there horribly long and can last any were from 8-25 min. and anyone who’s played the GHB (not sure about UPs) can say thats a long time to play striat for.
the whole point of a piob is to be able to ‘change’ the tune to express your self; whislt of course keeping its orgininal compstion.
rite i could talk about piobs all night, but i’m going on a holiday this weekend. so i’ll be off for the week end
Cheers
Finn
Thank you Finn for that piobaireachd (lady doyles salute)
It’s very interesting to listen to this before starting the pipes
Carel
One of the big starts for light music/ceol beag was Angus MacKay who wrote or was the first to write the dots for The Highland Wedding march(late 18th century). If you look at pre-Scots Guards settings(mid to late 19th century) for tunes, I think there is actually more common ground between Scottish and Irish pipe gracenotes than usually admitted. I would think there were light music tunes beforehand that were not the sole provence of fiddlers and box players, but played on pipes and taught by oral tradition. If you ever hear Bruce Burt(my favorite highland piper) sing a hornpipe or jig, he uses much the same syllables as canntaireachd and it flows quite easily. It sounds like mouth music, but more formal.
Marc
they proably did play light music before the concept of written music, but as i understand it it startyed to become popular around the time that this happend. my current teacher uses a canntaireachd-like form. its a mix of what sounds like canntaireachd and a bit of somthing he made up. making it easier so he didnt have ot actually learn it.
Carrel. if you like that try looking at the left side of this web page where it syas ‘the set tunes’ and ‘this years set tunes’ there should be more music there.
Note: the tunes that actually are sound files have “MP3” written next to them
Cheers i’ll be off for bout 2 days now
Finn
Canntaireachd (cantarac) to quote Seamus MacNiell (quote)“…memorising the tunes was by a method of chanting, called canntaireachd. This was a unique and wonderful system in which the tunes were sung by the master to the pupil, in words which were invented to represent the sounds to be produced by the fingers” (unquote). MacNiell, Seamus. Tutor for Piobaireachd 1990 page 5.
Another example from MacNiell is a simple bagpipe scale with a G gracenote on each note. him (him) hin (hin) hio (hyo) ho (ho) ha (ha) che (chay, as in chair) he (hay) hi (hee). pronunciations in brackets. Of course it gets much more complicated for example the Ground (basic tune) for The Company’s Lament is Hindorodin cherede heodroo cherede. hiotra odin herere heche dili herere dilie heo cherede heodroo herere. (ibid page 96).
I found learning pibroch very difficult until I located a teacher who guided me through those initial frutrating stages. I’m still no expert or ever likely to be of course but I now have a couple of decent tunes under my belt and it’s very enjoyable.
If you are thinking about giving it a go, get yourself a teacher. In any case, it doesn’t require a great deal of expense initially as most of your time with a teacher will be spent on ‘voice’ and a ‘decent quality practice chanter’
Joseph (the UK one) 
My simplistic understanding of piobrochs is that they start with motif called the urlar (sp?) or base, and develop from that. Is it all improvised, or is it set in stone the way so much of GHB playing seems to be?
For canterach, it should be noted that the vocables not only tell you the tune, but tell you how it is to be played, and what ornaments to use.
djm
There is one UP tune that may well be an old piobaireachd - Alasdrum’s March, traditionally composed following the battle of Cnoc na nDos in 1647. It is a piece of program music, with successive variations telling of the gathering of the armies, the batte, the death of Alasdrum, and the laments of his mother and nurse.
There used to be a number of such descriptive pieces in the repertoire but the only one played regularly nowadays is the Fox Chase. Alasdrum isn’t entirely forgotten; Pat Mitchell recorded it in the 1970s. There has been interest in it from historians of piobaireachd such as Allan MacDonald. Alasdrum’s main thematic content can fit easily within nine notes and might thus have been originally composed for the highland pipe or the warpipe. On the other hand, the phrasing is much more reminiscent of UP - the battle variation is almost the same as the cry of the hounds in the Fox Chase. Or maybe the Fox Chase was influenced by Alasdrum.
Up until, and during, the Cromwellian wars, there seems to have been pretty free exchange of pipers and instruments between Scotland and Ireland. One of the MacCrimmons (Donald Mor) is said to have gone over with a MacLeod chief during that period. Well, there was the same language, and the same culture, and the wars divided both countries.
So maybe Alasdrum is an Irish adaptation of a piobaireachd written by a Scots piper in ireland. Or perhaps Scots piobaireachd and the surviving Irish descriptive pieces are descended from a common tradition, now lost - which might also have spawned the Northumbrian/lowland variational style. Or maybe variational playing styles developed independently in many places. Certainly there were other such styles around in the late middle ages
Ross
Piobaireachd simply means “piping” in Scottish Gaelic (the Irish term is “piobaireacht”). “Ceol Mor” is probably a better term for describing the music usually referred to as piobaireachd/pibroch.
Canntaireachd is a system of vocal notation analogous to Western sol-fa or Indian sargam. A number of pipers still use canntaireachd for teaching both light music and ceol mor. When I was taking lessons with Allan MacDonald in Glasgow, all the tunes I learned–both ceol mor and ceol beag–were taught in canntaireachd, although particularly for the dance music, Allan essentially made up his own and didn’t adhere to any sort of strict system. Fred Morrison learnt many tunes early on from his father in canntaireachd.
There was a ceol mor tradition in Ireland, but it died out along with the Irish piob mhor tradtion at the end of the 18th century. A number of Irish tunes, particularly old jigs, display obvious ceol mor attributes. “The March of the King of Laois” is the same tune as “Cumha Donnchadh Mac Rath” (“Duncan MacRae of Kintail’s Lament”), a very old Scottish ceol mor tune. Jigs like “Fraher’s” and “Humours of Ballyloughlin” have a very distinct ceol mor feel to them owing to their repetative cadences and strong use of a flattened 7th.
listen Fred Morrisons “Sound of Sun” two scottish march JMc Coll march to Killbow cottage and D McLeans farewell to Oban, these are played as canntaireachd way, so smooth and impressive. LIke songs, not “marches” .
(Yes, he is playing with borderpipes, tonality is sa bit different than GHB)
As far as canntaireachd goes, most folk musicians with a developed tradition end up using something similar - an onomatapoeic (no, I can’t find the dictionary) sung representation of what is played. Scottish pipers have an unusually developed version, because we developed a highly formal approach to the music unusual in traditional music in general - this still persists today. As Paddy notes, most teachers of piping use a highly stylised system of sung vocables when singing the music to a pupil, or indeed to anyone.
As for early light music on the pipes, there seems to have always been, as there are today, two categories of light music - light music which is for listening, and light music for dancing. Joseph MacDonald’s Compleat Theory (c.1760) includes reels and jigs in his discussion, and notably gives prominence to tunes, like John MacKechnie’s, that are still considered big tunes today.
Random point - squeeze boxes of any type are relatively recent innovations, certainly post-dating the early modern explosion of ceol beag on the GHB. Random point 2 - ceol mor and ceol beag are late nineteenth / early twentieth century expressions, they didn’t appear to be used by earlier pipers. They appear to have come in almost as a slang description of the differences, when piobaireachd was elevated by its importance in competition.
On a totally different note, it would be really nice if the people who continually describe GHB music (and Scottish music in general) as rigid / set in stone / whatever would actually take the time to gain some understaning of the Scottish music scene, as I have to say I wouldn’t recognise it from their descriptions. I dare say I would find a group of eleven-year olds in Henrietta Street grinding through Kitty Got a Clinking just as unbearable.
Cheers,
Calum
We just refer to her as Mrs. Lennon. 
djm
Calum, from this discussion I was getting the impression that the “Ceol Mor”, big music, was set in stone since it was written down in the special notation in order to transmit it to other generations. Are you then saying that players of that particular music would be free to add their own ornamentation (not sure this is appropriate word)? If this music
then would individuals be free to hold notes longer, etc.? Was it written down because the pieces were very long rather than to have them played the same way by everyone?
piobs (ceol mor) is not set in stone, as in accordance to the music thats written on paper. the oral tradtion of passing piobs down by mouth is very important, this is because you pull out and hold in (etc.) certain notes as the oral form would sujest. Unlike ceol beag which is most definatly set in stone.
for piobs you dont want to remove or change the embelishments, mainly because it has differnt types of embelishments compared to ceol beag, and as you get furhter and further into the tune it gets more complex, and tward the very end (for most all piobs) you get to somthing called a craunlauth. which is the hell of all ordimetations.
you would start out a piob with a simple ground,
then you would have the Leumluith (grip) variation
then the Tauraluith (grips with and E grace notes at the end)
the the Craunaluth (grips with E & F grace notes at the end)—which proves to be very difficult, considering you’ve been playing stairt for 20 minets then have 5 minets of some of the hardest ordimentation known to the GHBer
so no, dont mess witht he ordimentation on a piob. you can make some of the timing your own. the whole reason why i like them is b/c you can express your self in the tune, make it your own but keep the orginal still alive. my most recent piob is “Too Long in This Condition” fits me perfectly 