The Bagpipe Society

Musette: A Passport to Various Worlds?

A question I quite often get asked, particularly by audience members, is ‘what made you take up the musette’? On the one hand, this is quite odd as no-one ever asks me why I took up recorder or violin (both of which I quite often play in the same concert as the musette). But on the other hand, it is a totally understandable question. Why would a classically-trained, performing musicologist take up an extremely niche bagpipe?

And that is just the beginning! At this point I must hold up my hands and admit that this was a hobby that got totally out of hand. In 2010 I finished my PhD (on the creative process of Handel’s Messiah so totally unrelated to musette). And with a bit of time on my hands I thought I would take up a hobby. Given that I hadn’t even read a novel during the time I spent studying for my PhD you might have thought that something light-hearted or relaxing might have been top of my list – maybe craft or baking? But lurking at the back of my mind was a deep-seated regret that I hadn’t learnt Highland pipes at school. This is not as strange as it sounds. I grew up in Aberdeen and my school – Robert Gordon’s College – had its own pipe band. But rehearsals clashed with those of school orchestra. I remember sitting in French lessons, listening to my peers’ piping lessons in the room next door. Come to think of it, maybe the connection between France and piping began right there, as I sat trying to remember past participles and trying not to get distracted by wondering how the pipers played various ornaments?

Once I acknowledged this regret, it was as if something was set in motion. I had to admit that learning Highland pipes was out of the question. I live in a semi-detached brick house with rather thin walls. And while our neighbour says she loves hearing us practice I’m pretty sure there is a line to be drawn somewhere! So I considered Northumbrian pipes instead. I heard them at a friend’s wedding in Alnwick and was captivated by their sound. And Manchester isn’t too far from Northumberland so I’m sure I could have found a teacher nearby.

However, at the time I was working with Paris-based orchestra Les Talens Lyrique and I happened to hear the musette while I was in Paris working on a project. I love French Baroque repertoire and was very fortunate to play a lot of it with Les Talens Lyrique. Their conductor, Christophe Rousset is one of the most talented interpreters of this repertoire and I learned so much about the nuances of French culture and music via projects with Christophe and Les Talens Lyrique.

So without any forethought or planning (remember, this was still an idea for a hobby), I set about trying to find a second-hand instrument. Knowing what I know now, I’m not surprised that this took so long. There are (and always have been) very few modern musette makers, and therefore there are very few instruments on the market. Furthermore, the channels by which information is shared concerning instruments and teachers was at the time quite different to the parallel world of – for example – violins. Internet searches threw up very little beyond a couple of names – Paul van Beekhuizen as a maker, and Jean-Christophe Maillard as a teacher. The former had retired from making musettes by the time I enquired but the latter did reply very promptly to my (very naïve) enquiries.

What did emerge from my searches though, was the hugely friendly and helpful attitude that exists amongst the piping world. And I really mean across the world! Once I sent out an email to one piper enquiring about the possibility of obtaining a second-hand musette, I regularly received helpful and encouraging suggestions from pipers around the world who had heard that someone ‘might’ be selling their musette. In the end, one of these came to fruition and I bought a Daniel de Coudignac musette, with ivory chalumeaux and a bright green bag.

At this point, of course, I hit a brick wall. How could I road-test the instrument? I didn’t have the faintest idea how to even make a sound on it! Fortunately, Jean-Christophe Maillard agreed to test it out for me. And so began my adventure, enabled thanks entirely to the kindness of complete strangers. The eagle-eyed amongst you might have spotted that I was – and still am - based in the UK. And yes, this was another thing that hadn’t crossed my mind at all in my quest up to this point. From whom was I going to learn how to play musette? A violinist colleague had mentioned that she had been at college with a musette player, Jean-Pierre Rasle. By the time of my enquiry, however, he had moved to rural France. And no-one else in the UK appeared to play musette, let alone teach it.

At this point, and certainly before buying an instrument, I should have sat down and thought about the practicalities involved in this ‘hobby’. But practicalities (and forward planning) aren’t really my forté and so I arranged a lesson with Jean-Christophe in Toulouse, which turned out to be one of the few destinations to which you can’t fly direct from Manchester. So, in between concerts and teaching, I would get the train to Birmingham to fly to Toulouse for a lesson with possibly the most generous and kind person I have ever met. I can’t imagine what Jean-Christophe thought when I rocked up, unable to even apply a consistent pressure with both arms at the same time. And there were issues with my instrument too, which can’t have helped. But Jean-Christophe’s patient persistence with me and ‘Kermit’ (as he christened the instrument thanks to its colour) paid off, and after several monthly lessons some improvement was noticeable.

It is worth noting that this was by now 2015. It had taken me almost 5 years to get to this point. And as many of you will know, Jean-Christophe sadly passed away unexpectedly in the Summer of 2015. But having got that far, there was no way I could give up my ‘hobby’. And so I began to make enquiries again, this time with the help of some musette knowledge myself. And I came across Jean-Pierre van Hees, a long-time friend and colleague of Jean-Christophe. A colleague in the Orchestra of the Eighteenth-Century in Amsterdam was able to put me in touch with Jean-Pierre and so I embarked on phase 2 of this ‘hobby’. Once again, I struck lucky, only this time I could actually get a direct flight from Manchester!

Well, almost. Over the next three years I travelled backwards and forwards between Manchester and Leuven, enjoying the immense hospitality of Jean-Pierre and his wife, Bea, who opened their home to me on a monthly basis as I travelled to Belgium for intense lessons over one or two days. Thanks to the amazing education system in Belgium, the fact that I already had three degrees meant that I could enrol for a Masters in Performance at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for very little money (unlike in the UK where you have to pay substantially more for second, third, or fourth degrees). In return, I had not only access to their facilities but I received valuable experience via their system of performance exams. Each year I would perform a chamber and/or solo recital, mostly lasting an hour each, before an expert panel, the last two played whilst pregnant with, and then 5 months after the birth of my first child which added a certain sense of jeopardy to my preparation! These exams were, however, invaluable to me in terms of building up my stamina and being able to analyse my progress against a professional benchmark with which I was familiar, having worked in the world of Historically Informed Performance from where the panel members were drawn.

During the time of my study there, I was also very lucky to be introduced to the network of players and makers based in Belgium, including the maker (of my A=392 musette) and co-founder of the Musette Society, Bart van Troyen. Bart’s work is familiar to readers of the Chanter and it will come as no surprise that the patience he exhibits in his making extends also to the still-regular questions from me regarding how and why various parts of (my) musettes work (or don’t!).

I’m not quite sure at which point I admitted that the hobby had got rather out of hand, but from the outset my relationship with musette seems to have run its own course, with little or no planning from me. When I graduated in 2018 with my masters in musette I had no plans for what I should do next. But the obvious thing was to start including it in chamber programmes toured by my ensemble AB24 Aberdeen Baroque. And from there grew something of a playlist.

In the meantime, I couldn’t stop myself applying my musicological training in a bid to understand more about the instrument, its history, the amazing breadth of its repertoire, and why it was rediscovered so much later than many of the other instruments from this period. And so I found my research turning towards musette repertoire. Simple tasks such as making lists of recordings featuring musette, and composers who wrote for the instrument have led to conference papers, radio shows, and invitations to give talks to a variety of audiences.

Along the way, I have thoroughly enjoyed the unexpected bonus of making contact with the piping world, whose members seem to be universally welcoming, curious-minded and generally enthusiastic (as well as hugely talented!). I am currently working on a project to discover what Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie) might have played on the musette at the second Stuart court in exile in Rome. And while the various lockdowns and resulting closure of archives over the last couple of years have slowed the progress of this project, another project grew entirely from the first lockdown.

The sudden disappearance of concerts from my diary in 2020 resulted in two things: some free time, and the need to find different ways of remaining connected in some way with the act of making music. And so I embarked on something that I could do from home (sometimes with a chatty 2 year-old assistant at my feet) that had a sense of purpose beyond just filling in time. I decided to play through all of the musette repertoire that I had acquired since my musette journey began. Nearly all of this had been sourced by others and generously shared with me (thanks must go to Jean-Pierre van Hees, Jean-Christophe Maillard and Dominique Paris).

In order to give myself a structure and sense of purpose, I decided the project needed a regular output, which took the form of a few recorded seconds of each day’s ‘find’ which I shared on Twitter. As social media relies on continuity, this output gave me the push each day to continue in my exploration. Alongside this, I made notes on the repertoire, detailing aspects such as style, form, idiomacy, and instrumentation. While social media is by its nature ephemeral, the second output – the notes – have already proved invaluable in planning concert programmes. And overall I gained a much better understanding of the scope and nature of the repertoire composed for musette.

I was sad to come to the end of this project, and when further lockdowns were introduced I began an extension which was a sort of ‘fantasy programming’ game. Using my notes, I concocted various musette-based programmes suitable for different types of concert, often with variations of instrumentation. These have already been very useful as ‘real’ programmes, as concert-life begins again. But there was another, bigger offshoot from all of this documentation, which was the emergence of (at least) one recording project.

It won’t come as a surprise, I’m sure, that very few recordings exist of musette repertoire, particularly that beyond opera. Works including musette feature on a few discs and there are a few others devoted to collections of works by a single composer. But given the wealth of musette repertoire there is still much to be recorded. Aside from that, though (and acknowledging a huge personal bias!), the quirkiness of the repertoire (even for the period), combined with the alluring tone of the musette is something that I feel driven to share with listeners. My experience playing the musette to a huge variety of audiences across the UK (and indeed the ‘Twitter world’) has shown that musette speaks to people in a way that other instruments don’t. But perhaps this is the bagpipe effect? I remember being told at school that bagpipes were one’s ‘passport to the world’ and perhaps this was a reference not to expat Scottish communities but to the bewitching effects of the bagpipe!

And so, to cut a long story short, and after a few Covid-induced delays, my colleagues (David J Smith, and Claire Babington) and I found ourselves in August 2021, in a Chapel on a hill in Derbyshire, recording an album of works for solo musette. Titled ‘Music for French Kings’, the disc celebrates the unexpected, be that a reference to the music, to the process by which I find myself a musette player, or indeed to the circumstances under which the disc was conceived. The album will be released in August this year, on the Deux-Elles label.

http://Baroqueinthenorth.com