A New Compleat Theory for the Highland Bagpipe
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A New Compleat Theory for The Highland Bagpipe By Dr. Matthew Welch KOTEKANSAMPLE EDITION 2020 A New Compleat Theory for The Highland Bagpipe copyright © 2020 Matthew Welch and Kotekan Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without express written permission of the author. All tunes and compositions are copyright and registered at BMI. Cover Portrait Photo by David Welch Photography. First published in 2020 ISBN 978-1-7356906-9-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-7356906-7-4 (PDF ebook) Printed in the United States of America Kotekan Edition 1353 Anita Circle Benicia, California 94510 https://www.matthewwelchmusic.com SAMPLEhttps://kotekanrecords.com This book is dedicated to: my parents for help with my start in piping, my wife and son who support my love for it, and those special mentors who urged me on. SAMPLE CONTENTS Foreward, by James MacHattie, College of Piping, PEI i Preface iii Acknowledgements iv Part I. Treatise Introduction 1 Chapter 1 An Organological Overview of the Highland Bagpipe 6 Chapter 2 Ceol Beag or Light Music 19 Chapter 3 Ceol Mor or Piobaireachd 37 Chapter 4 New Directions in New Millennium Piping 49 Chapter 5 New Directions in Material 63 Chapter 6 New Processes and Textures 73 Conclusion 82 Glossary 87 Bibliography 92 Part II. Music Collection Content and Notes on the Music Collection i Ceol Mor by Matthew WelchSAMPLE 1 Ceol Beag by Matthew Welch 28 Ceol Nua by Matthew Welch 45 FOREWARD by James MacHattie, Director of Education, College of Piping and Celtic Performing Arts of Canada As bandmates and roommates for a time in the 1990s, Matt and I would have appeared to be cut from the same cloth. We played bagpipes at a high level in solos and in the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band. We were dedicated scholars of piping, composed and arranged music, and were immersed in academics. Those similarities, processed by two drastically disparate brains and mindsets, propelled us down two diverging paths. My analytical and all-too literal mind pursued academics as a career, and piping as a hobby. The end result for me was a career in piping as the Director of Education at the College of Piping and Celtic Performing Arts of Canada, and academia is now a wistful memory. Matt’s mind seemed to me to be full of cohesive chaos and inquisitive creativity. Not confined by compartmentalization and boundaries, or a strictly delineated path, his professional career unfurled naturally, entwined with his passion. He was told by Jack Lee, his piobaireachd instructor in the ‘90s, not to take liberties with the music until he had proven that he could play it conventionally. I suspect Matt interpreted this as a dare. He can deliver an achingly beautiful piobaireachd on a brilliant instrument, preserving that vein of tradition, but in this book he has also now contributed to the evolution of piping music in its standard forms, and certainly in previously undiscovered possibilities. Matt’s work puts piping into a broader context. The theoretical component appeals to a wide-ranging musical audience, without excluding traditionalist pipers and composers. The modern compositions provide glimpses into that cohesively chaotic musical brain with catchy simple melodies published alongside complicated rhythmic pieces. The modern piobaireachds are inspiringSAMPLE and cleverly accessible, and most of the Ceol Nua is devastatingly beyond my immediate comprehension, but the intrigue is impossible to resist. The diversity of this collection has inspired me to wander outside my self-imposed musical limits. This book is a significant contribution to piping, to the progression of traditional music, to composition, and to the exploration of entangling musical philosophies. It is brilliant, baffling, obscure, obvious, and quite simply wonderful! – August, 2020 i PREFACE I am pleased to finally present a publication that reflects my best thoughts on the instrument I fell in love with: The Highland Bagpipe. It has been a journey driven by an obsessive passion to learn all I can about the pipes through literature, and through hands- on tutelage from the best pipers. Early on, my curiosity for the pipes beckoned me to look beyond the music that was already there in the traditional repertoire, and so I decided to write new music for myself to play. I wrote everything from music that mirrored the tradition to other works that brought in trends from other areas of the music world. Composition eventually drove my musical ambitions towards the environments of contemporary classical, experimental jazz, cross-cultural composition and indie-rock. Music scenes as far-ranging as Downtown New York City, to Bern, Switzerland, to Ubud, Bali were surprisingly welcome to me for similar reasons: we all were re-examining various traditional musical languages in order to express new statements. As experimental classical, avant-garde jazz, and art-rock started to grow in the mid 20th century into their own distinct areas, away from their antecedents, many musicians were re-embracing older ideas in tonality and timbre, and many were looking across their own culture to do that. Ravi Shankar paved the way for drones in popular music, and John Coltrane’s move to the soprano saxophone called to ancient worlds to bring something back that music had lost: an overwhelming sonic-emotional impact bordering on the spiritual. Philip Glass’s amplified ensemble of electronic keyboards and winds coupled new timbre with new extended structures requiring new listening skills, and the effect of percussion and rhythmic cycles from Indonesian gamelan and African ensemble music were changing the sonic landscape of classical music. The world of art music was ready for the bagpipe. SAMPLE This book includes my doctoral thesis, which dissects piping’s traditional music, and features modern works I’ve premiered that build on or transgress these patterns. It won top-prize at Yale University’s School of Music. It should prepare the reader for Part II: a collection of my original works for the bagpipe. The Ceol Mor, Ceol Beag and Ceol Nua complement the topics of the treatise. I chose to primarily include solo music that is also functional for groups. My bagpipe concerti and other large works are on Kotekan Edition for those whose appetite is merely whetted by all here. – Matthew Welch, 2020 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend deep gratitude to my professors at the Yale School of Music and Yale University Department of Music, especially Dr. Sarah Weiss, with whom I primarily worked on the treatise, along with Martin Bresnick, Dr. Christopher Theofanidis, Michael Friedmann, Dr. Robert Holzer, and Dr. Paul Berry, who guided me through my both my Yale Doctor of Musical Arts and preceding Master of Musical Arts degrees. Special thanks to Dr. Rona Johnston Gordon, a native Scot and English scholar at Yale, for her tremendous copyediting and help with my creating an English tone suitable for piping’s wide reach. Special thanks to my piping colleagues James MacHattie for writing a wonderful foreward and Alan Bevan, Michael Grey and Mark Saul for contributing their supportive voices to this publication. Thank you to Chaz Stuart for valuable proofing and formatting thoughts in the Music Collection. Extra special gratitude to my wife, Ellen Jean Lueck, PhD, for the helpful tips in writing, editing and global music-scholarship. Thank you to my brother David Welch for his photo and Jonathan Johansen for the cover design. Special thanks to Lisa Bielawa, Anthony Braxton, Neely Bruce, Philip Glass, I.M. Harjito, Alvin Lucier, Michael O’Neill, Zeena Parkins, I Made Subandi, Julia Wolfe, and John Zorn for creating incredible musical opportunities for me and my bagpipe. I’m deeply indebted to all of the musicians of my New York City ensemble Blarvuster, who helped me develop much of this music and play it out in classical halls, jazz venues and rock clubs around the world from 2002 to 2020. Blarvuster is the centerpiece ensemble for five of my professional music album releases, and available on Tzadik Records and Kotekan Records. Thank you to these music groups for their enormous support in commissioning work from me repeatedly and performing it extensively: Flux String Quartet (NYC), Experiments in Opera (NYC), JazzwerkstattSAMPLE Bern (Switzerland), Music at the Anthology (NYC), Clocks in Motion Percussion Quartet (WI), Schwob School of Music/CSU Percussion Ensemble with Paul Vaillancourt (GA), Cantata Profana (NYC), Quartet Metadata (NYC) and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Work with these groups is featured on Orange Mountain Music, Tzadik Records and Kotekan Records. Thanks to the pipers of many bands around the North America, for following me in the countless lessons, rehearsals, workshops, street gigs, and competitions. It is through nearly 30 years of teaching bagpipe music that I have refined my ideas about traditional music structure, and started experimenting pushing the envelope of the traditional music from within. iv INTRODUCTION Joseph MacDonald’s Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe, written in 1760 and published in 1803, is the seminal writing on the Highland Bagpipe, covering organology, fingering technique, ornamentation, a vast number of genres, and compositional technique. MacDonald was a Scottish prodigy trained in both Highland piping repertoire and classical music: he played violin, flute, and oboe and studied composition, but also traveled in Scotland studying with piping masters.1 MacDonald’s book, the first of its kind, is marked by his ability to both analyze and notate orally transmitted tunes. With his foot in two musical worlds, his analytical perspective was broad, and he had a sensitivity that allowed him to find fine examples of Highland repertoire to illustrate his points. MacDonald employed a wealth of vocabulary that includes Gaelic and Italian musical terms to categorize genres by both the general and specific features of their affects.