January 28, 2010
Living out loud: A life enlarged with the ‘audacity’ of the bagpipes
Let’s say you’re a mother, and your 7-year-old daughter tells you she wants to play the bagpipes. You think of the noise you’ll have to put up with in the house. You think of the expense of lessons and the improbability that she will ever actually play the instrument, which isn’t the easiest one to learn. But if you are Sylvia DeTar’s supportive mother, you say, “If you promise not to complain about going to summer camp, you can have lessons.”
And what a good thing she did, because the bagpipes led DeTar to rich relationships in the world of pipers, a scholarship for her undergraduate work and graduate studies in ethnomusicology at the UW. It also led her to the World Pipe Band Championship in Glasgow, Scotland, which her band — the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band — won last summer.
Why the bagpipes? It was one of those chance occurrences in childhood — seeing pipers in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in her hometown of Salt Lake City — that captured her imagination, DeTar said. She had her first practice chanter at 7, learned to play it at 9 and got her first set of real bagpipes at 11. Her mother might have had occasion to regret her decision during that time, because DeTar says bagpipes in the hands of a beginner sound like a “dying cow.” But DeTar — and her family — persevered. She played in the Salt Lake Scots pipe band until she was 17, when she ventured off to Cleveland, Ohio, to join the North Coast Pipe Band for a year. It was with that pipe band that she first went to the World Pipe Band Championship in 2003. Since then, she’s returned every year but one.
Learning to play bagpipes requires combining disparate elements. DeTar quotes a study from Carnegie Mellon University in which the researchers claimed that bagpipers have the best coordination of any musician they had tested.
“You have the fingering movements, and what they’re characterized by is a lot of articulation, ornamentation, grace notes, things like that that are pretty complicated,” DeTar said. “Then on top of that you have the bag. So you’re blowing and squeezing it in a different rhythm than you’re playing. And if you add marching or walking on top of that, it’s going to be a different rhythm than your blowing and squeezing.”
Oh, and bagpipers also don’t generally perform with music in front of them; it’s all memorized.
Because of these complexities, beginning pipers start out with a practice chanter, an instrument that looks like a recorder and teaches the musician how to produce a melody by fingering. Its sound is mercifully softer than that of the bagpipes, which may be the loudest instrument in the world. Although the bagpipes’ range is narrow — only nine notes — pipers learn to embellish it with the ornamentation DeTar spoke of. Grace notes — short notes inserted in a measure as “extras” — are used extensively.
DeTar learned her lessons well — well enough that when she had completed her year in Cleveland, she received a scholarship to attend Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and play in its program for pipers. One doesn’t major in bagpipes, DeTar explained. The band is a separate activity affiliated with the university. She majored in geography and music composition, and started out in one of the band’s junior groups, called the Robert Malcolm Memorial Band. She was in grade two, a step below the Simon Fraser Pipe Band.
In the world championships, bands compete in different grades, DeTar explained. Her Cleveland band was in grade two, and when she returned to the competition in 2004, 2005 and 2006, it was with a grade two Robert Malcolm Memorial Band. The group won the grade two world championship in 2006.
But her greatest achievement didn’t come until last summer, when she played in the grade one Simon Fraser Pipe Band and it won the competition.
“After winning the worlds, it wasn’t the same sort of elation I felt, winning it with the grade two band,” DeTar said. “It was great, it was amazing. At the same time it was kind of like, what next? This has been my goal for a very long time and I’ve worked very hard for it. Now what do I do?”
She had one answer in the program she was already engaged in at the UW, where she’s been studying different bagpipe traditions in Brittany, Scotland and Canada. Although bagpipes are forever associated with Scotland, DeTar said, they are found in many other countries, and each has its own traditions of playing, as well as variations on the instrument itself. After the world competition last summer, she was able to travel to Brittany to do research, thanks to a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship.
More recently, however, DeTar has found excitement in the prospect of enhancing her instrument electronically. She’s taking a class in sound synthesis from DX Arts, and is working with a musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) system, an industry-standard protocol that enables electronic musical instruments and other electronic equipment to communicate, control and synchronize with each other. She has an electronic chanter that is MIDI-based, and can transfer its output into a computer.
“Then I program something in,” DeTar said. “Maybe when I play a C, I tell the computer to play an E as well so I can harmonize with myself, like you can do on a piano but you can’t do on bagpipes. So there are limitations to bagpipes, but there are ways of getting around them too.”
DeTar will finish her master’s program this year. She plans to go on for a PhD, focusing on electro-acoustic composition. Reflecting on her long journey with bagpipes, DeTar said this:
“There are a lot of reasons to not like bagpipes. They’re loud. They’re limited musically — you don’t have any rests, you have one volume, you have only nine notes. But the people are fantastic. I think I’ve become a much better person socially because of being in pipe bands.
“Where else would I be good friends with a paramedic? Or be good friends with people of all different ages? I really learned a lot about life in the pipe band world. I also kind of like the audacity of the instrument. There’s a lot of power, a lot of stubbornness in it. Then there were people who said, ‘You can’t be a good bagpiper unless your dad’s Scottish,’ or ‘You can’t do it because you’re a girl.’ Or even, ‘I don’t think you’ll make it. You have too many other interests.’ When somebody says something like that to me, I feel sort of challenged and like I have to prove them wrong.”
