Piping Live! review: 'everything from piobaireachd to avant garde piping'

The opening Monday of Piping Live! – Glasgow’s week-long countdown to this weekend’s World Pipe Band Championships – kicked off with a question: how to bring piobaireachd, the “classical music” of the Highland bagpipe, to a wider audience. It was posed by piper and scholar Barnaby Brown of the Pibroch Network, chairing a small but intense conversation bent on widening appreciation of what is often perceived as an arcane music form.

As the debate continued in the Street Café outside the National Piping Centre, the hub of the festival, upstairs piobaireachd was indeed being put through its paces, albeit on the competition platform, as 22 top competing pipers strove to win the RG Hardie & Co Masters Solo Piping Competition. Their stately, drone-sustained cadences generated a near-immersive sound world for an intent audience, albeit largely of a certain demographic characteristic of piobaireachd cognoscenti. The overall competition, which also involved march, strathspey and reel playing, was ultimately won by Alan Bevan from Vancouver.

Down the road in Buchanan Street, meanwhile, the first band of the day, Durham Regional Police Pipes and Drums – Durham, Ontario, that is – was attracting an appreciative ring of spectators. The initially dreich morning had suddenly brightened, reinforcing the suspicion that pipe bands generate their own sonic microclimate.

Back at the Street Café, an engaging set from the Swedish duo Dråm pointed up the wider folk roots of piping, Jonas Åkerlund and Anna Rynefors between them playing Swedish bagpipes, fiddle and cittern. Åkerlund’s fiddling and cittern work provided effective harmonies with the chirping tone of the Swedish pipes, while a couple of oddly timed polskas he played on pipes sounded positively Middle-Eastern over Rynefors’s tambourine.

A descent into the dim precincts of Sauchiehall Street’s Nice N Sleazy club found a packed, largely younger audience for the festival’s Ceol Nua “avant garde” piping night. It certainly manifested the festival’s commitment to broadening the scope of piping, featuring two adventurous young players.

The Sòlás Collective, led by Fionnlagh Mac A’ Phiocair from Uist on smallpipes, saw him accompanied by viola and electronics, creating what could better be described as sometimes bemusing episodes rather than tunes, free-form piping and snatches of song from Mac A’ Phiocair emerging through waves of electronica, sampled speech and complemented by bowed or pizzicato viola. The traditional song Go Dig My Grave took shape, fitfully, while the closing Tullochgorm propelled crisp strathspey time through the electronica before morphing into a speedily fingered reel.

Following on, the Nexus Project saw Australian Bede Patterson on Highland pipes, initially playing solo, with piobaireachd-like phrases swooping, chattering and looped electronically. Then his piece titled Sword, based on the piobaireachd The Lament for the Old Sword, gradually took shape, bolstered mightily by soprano saxophone, keyboard and drums. Although citing influences as diverse as Martyn Bennett and the Penguin Café Orchestra, Patterson’s at times epic creations clearly looked to piobaireachd as a basis, and were greeted enthusiastically by a largely young audience, perhaps at least partly responding to that morning debate.