Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

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9 2 25 20130417 21 night with no-one else around, only your sheep, so a shepherd playing a few tunes in the crib doesn’t seem too unusual after all. Anyway, that brings me around to the main pur- pose of my writing, and that is to say that I had a most enjoyable weekend last November at the William Kennedy piping festival in Armagh. This was my third visit to the festival, now running for almost twenty years, and I am surprised that more pipers from Dublin or the republic in general don’t attend it, because the events organised, lec- tures, recitals, exhibitions, concerts and sessions are of such a high quality as to make many of our festivals and other gatherings down south seem quite ‘ordinary’. One of their main features every year is to invite over exponents of a piping tradi- tion that we wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with. One year it was the Sardinian mouth blown pipes, another year they had Bulgarian pipes and another year a band of Arabs from North Africa who were most entertaining. This year we had Eric Montbel from central France who played the French ‘ Chabrette’ with his three piece group ‘Topanga’ who gave a wonderful performance at the Saturday night concert and a very interesting lecture about the instrument on the Sunday after- noon. Eric played on his regular set which has a strong mellow sound akin to our concert pitched sets and also on an oversized set which had a very deep quieter sound. The chanter stock looks like a small box out of which extends one of the drones pointing downwards parallel to the chanter, the second drone extends either out to the side (across his chest) or else backwards over his shoulder(on the larger instrument) . The two other members of the group played accordion and keyboard and produced a lovely sound which greatly enhanced the slightly harsh sound of the pipes. To get a better idea, I recommend that you look up the William Kennedy piping festival on the in- ternet which contains recordings of many of the performances that took place over the week, in- cluding Eric on his Chabrette. In the course of his lecture he also used the term ‘Musette’ to de- scribe the instrument, not to be confused with the ‘Musette de Cour’ which is a smaller, more re- fined and bellows blown version of the instru- ment, intended for indoor use only. As with other folk traditions throughout Europe and beyond, the piping of central France has been gaining an increased following in recent years, but still has a long way to go before it catches up with Brit- tany. Nevertheless, just as I have become aware in re- cent years of the Zampogna in Italy and the Gaita of Northern Spain I would encourage all lovers of the pipes to have a listen to, and learn about some of these wonderful instruments that basically be- long to the same family – filling a leather bag with air and squeezing it through bamboo reeds, down hollowed out wooden tubes, to produce some of the most interesting sounds and exciting music, some of it going back hundreds or thou- sands of years, and maybe the pipes were played in the crib after all. Bill Slattery

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