Saturday, November 3, 2007

and a note from Peter MacKenzie, Niagara Falls, Ontario 

...and a note from Bill Peters in Thunder Bay, Ontario:

Hi Ken, quite the recent remarks on the "And the Point is..." commentary.  I have been fortunate enough to be taking instruction now via speakerphone lessons that we talked about in Winnipeg a couple of years ago, but these have been coupled by workshops and seminars along the way over the years.  To attend a school such as the MSA School in Seattle was great, as there was the exposure to a varied bunch of instructors. For the year 2005, all of the piping faculty happened to be Double Gold Medallists that had won both Gold medals from Inverness and Oban sometime in their piping careers.  I'm not sure if this was planned or not, but it shows that even though they were from different areas with different types of instruction, their goal had ultimately been achieved.

As the earlier post from Doug Bruce stated, we can only dream of having access to very high quality piping instruction and contests within a short driving distance. Winnipeg is a mere 7 hour drive away from Thunder Bay and Toronto is only, oh...16 hours away by car.  And to think that i've heard some people scoff at how far of a drive it is to go to Maxville if they're from around the Windsor or Sarnia area...go figure.

Bill Peters

Friday, November 2, 2007

And the Point is....?

The PipesDrums on line this week carried an article in its Blogpipe from Andrew Berthoff in direct response to my whining about the lack of interest for one reason or another in the Stratford Sessions, spinning off to a similar challenge for concert and piping school organizers. The article strongly suggests that interest (and demand) for the piping clinic is on a downward spiral and in fact the medium for instruction has seen its day. That may be so, but my concern was not that of a disgruntled clinician, sorry for the demise of his sole means of income, for this is only one avenue of reaching out to students. My concern was the demographics of the attendees and a repeated scenario that I have seen here in Southern Ontario, creeping over piping like the piobroch-ish variations of Ravel's Bolero.

Andrew is 100% correct in saying that pipers can take online lessons from Bruce Gandy, Roddy MacLeod, Jori Chisholm...and even the Captain...why should they pay similar money to hear the like of Bill Livingstone, Bob Worrall, Ed Neigh ..... Well, dah! the answer is simple...you don't learn an artform with blinkers on. You experience all good things from all sources and if this is what it takes to expand your musical horizons, then so be it. Take for example the budding piobaireachd student siding up to one camp only...what do they learn - you got it - that one style or opinion only. When we were growing up, John Wilson was our primary teacher. But we still attended events by John MacFadyen, Donald MacLeod, Seumas MacNeill and others who came to Canada and the States for summer schools. Speaking of summer schools, the PipesDrums blog does make an error. Schools in Ontario are not flourishing because of Ontario students. On the contrary, it is the out of area piper that is making it all possible. The staff I work with can fill the Milwaukee school to over capacity year in and year out, but try for the same results in this part of the world....I don't think so. It is visitors to the area that make it all possible.

The availability of many good instructors is an interesting case. Drummers can be accused of this. A drummer learns his/her craft under a lead drummer in a given pipe band and is for life endentured as a "percussional slave" to that LD. The LD leaves a band and all corps members follow suit...blind tuition...bring your sticks , bring you blinkers, earplugs necessary when travelling in the company of all other instructors. Well my friends, this could very well be the case developing with Southern Ontario pipers even with all their good instruction and online services.

And finally, the very mention of good instruction starts to make my curlies bristle on the back of my neck! If this instruction is so good, why are the Grade 2 and Grade 3 North American champions from Western Canada ... and most likely Grade 1 would be out west as well if SFU had attended, which was verified on Glasgow Green anyways. The numbers of Grade 1 and 2 bands in the East is less than half now what it was in 1980 .... Yes Grade 3, 4 are doing well in Scotland, but no where near the top ! Niagara Regional Police came within a hair of copping the World's Grade 2 just 7 or 8 years ago (3rd in the final). This year they were last in the final...and the other Ontario Grade 2 band failed to make the cut... and if memory serves me, didn't get to the Grade 3B, let alone 3A, list only 3 years ago.... mark my words, smuggness (or laziness or blindness) or whatever you call it lurks behind all these good instructor's kilt pleats! So mote it be .....

Have I missed the point? Write the Captain.

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