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‘Creativity needs emptiness’
The mental health of professional musicians is clearly not in good shape. As reputable studies show, around a third suffer from clinically relevant depression, anxiety disorders or burnout. Suicidal thoughts and attempts are more common than in the general population, and up to half of all musicians suffer from performance anxiety. What is going on…
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Playing Across Borders
No one knows what sounds were played on originally bone flutes, or in which everyday practices and imaginary worlds what we now take for granted as ‘music’ was embedded. Life in the Palaeolithic Age? An existence marked by excessive cruelty. Occasionally a bright note. Otherwise hunger, fear, pain. Perhaps. Perhaps not. One of the few…
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Dissecting Heritage
Traditions are a tricky thing. Some people want to preserve them – perhaps because they offer them orientation, a sense of belonging and stability. Others see them as unwelcome, possibly even discredited burdens that should be thrown overboard sooner rather than later. The middle ground is where things get difficult. Finding a way of dealing…
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If It Was Easy
Playing the bagpipes is exhausting. You just have to fight with the instrument long enough to be able to tame it at some point and make music with it. It happens that such and similar ideas of one’s own instrument as an opponent to be conquered are cultivated by fellow players and confirmed by individual…
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‘Heard Above Gunfire’
It must have been around the year 2000 when I saw the film documentary The Powerful Story of the Great Highland Bagpipe for the first time, played on a VHS player. The media revolution was in full swing, and so the two-part documentary was released a short time later on DVD, the medium of the…
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Music from the Barrel
The photograph conveys an impression of pleasing informality. I came across it in The Book of the Bagpipe by Hugh Cheape, p. 36. Showing a robustly dressed middle-aged gentleman sitting on the wooden post of a gate, his boots placed on a barrel lid. He is playing a chabrette, a tobacco pipe hangs from the…