Six Go Piping in Theale

Theale is a village near Reading. It is there that Bill Copland, a player and teacher of highland bagpipes, teaches a group of youngsters (ranging in age from about 10-18) who are learning the great highland pipes. Refreshingly, he is also ready to acknowledge that the GHB (Great Highland Bagpipe) is not the only bagpipe around, and he wants to make sure his students understand that fact too.

So it was that, on a dull Saturday in February, I took six ‘historic’ (reconstruction) bagpipes along with me to meet six young exponents of the GHB. Before COVID that would have been ideal – one pipe each – but regretfully I decided it wasn’t a good idea to pass pipes, and just possibly germs, around.

However, Bill has borrowed a set of pipes from the Bagpipe Society and so there will be the possibility of the students ‘having a go’ at some point.

My audience was good-natured and attentive from the very start, exercising patience while the oldies struggled to connect a laptop to a television.

We thought the problem had been solved by the youngest piper present, but, after only two ‘PowerPoint’ slides, the screen went blank again. After that I had to rely on my ability (?!) to demonstrate some Goodacre Durer pipes and

‘Cornish’ pipes (Altarnun-style), along with some Jim Parr medieval pipes, and a tiny hummelchen. Then came the Bodo Schulz marktpfeiffe in C, and, finally, John Tose’s splendid double-pipes (in elm) in the style of the Davidstow piper.

Trying to change instruments in quick succession was not a recipe (for me, at least) for getting every single one of them to work as well as I would have liked. Jim’s pipes behaved well, and I expected the same of my Durer pipes as they are usually my most reliable workhorse. Of course, on this occasion they were thoroughly unruly. Honesty compels me to admit operator malfunction rather than pipe malfunction: I simply couldn’t get the drones in tune with the chanter. Something had moved in the course of transporting the instrument, and didn’t want to move back! Fortunately, I had primed the students that the occasional difficulty might be encountered. That mishap apart, the students were able to hear the differing timbres of a variety of pipes that, quite possibly, you would have found in England and the near-Continent, from about 1300-1600.

Despite - or because of - my efforts I couldn’t quite dissipate the scepticism on some faces. Some of the students looked rather as if my pipes were no substitute for the full-throated roar of the GHB, and of course they would have a point. But then, many of these youngsters have Scottish ancestry, including Scottish piping ancestry, so it would probably have been a bit much to expect that any of them would too readily admit to the idea that non-highland pipes could have charms of their own.

The students certainly gave every impression of enjoying their own brand of piping as they played a series of tunes with considerable fluency – only the trickier elements of the Scotch snap causing a few rhythmic ripples occasionally. The downside was that the sound of six/seven GHBs in the confines of a smallish hall with a low ceiling meant that I very definitely had to listen with my fingers firmly in my ears. I wasn’t alone: Bill’s wife did the same! Some of the students were wearing earplugs – but I’m not sure all of them were!

Was it worth the 140-mile round trip? Certainly. Whenever young people have the opportunity to pursue a constructive interest then it’s worth encouraging, and this group is part of a well-established, proud musical tradition which is nurturing their talent. I hope that, now at least, they have a sense that bagpipes have a much wider and more varied history than they might have thought. It was good to try to be an ambassador for a rather different world of bagpipes, and I wish Bill and his students all the best with their continuing journeys into piping.