Uilleann pipes.

A few years ago, I was browsing music videos on YouTube when I was dumbstruck by this:

When he had finished playing, I was wiping tears from my cheeks.  But why?  What was it about the tune, or the player that brought forth this strong emotional response?
It was as if the tune and the instrument transported me back to some primitive dim past--as if it touched something in my Irish DNA--flipped a switch that turned on the music gene.
From that day forth, I was done.  And from Thanksgiving of 2009, I've been struggling to learn the craft so expertly and effortlessly delivered by this heroic piper, Seamus Ennis.

It is not easy.

Ennis himself said that it took 21 years to become a master of the uilleann (formerly called the "Union Pipes", which has to do with pipe construction rather than politics) pipes.  "Seven years of learning, seven years of practice and seven years of playing" to become a master piper.

It is my task to do it all simultaneously, and I only have five years left.  But today, mastering such an arcane instrument is, I feel, easier than it was in the 1930 Ireland of Ennis' time.

Today, we have the benefit of devices like computers, which can play digitized music and different speeds without changing the pitch.  And we have YouTube, with its global transmission of video clips of interest to the piping community.  And in Dublin, there is NPU, Na Piobairi Uilleann, The Piper's Club, which is ground zero for Irish uilleann piping.  Through this organization, one can learn to play the pipes remotely via the internet, or personally by visiting the Henrietta St. offices and classrooms.  They also have a pipemaking shop available for instruction in pipe and reed making.


Still, piping is not without its challenges.

I have played with mixed results in public venues.  As a novice, it's not always known what note the pipes will produce next.  That makes for an exciting adventure in music.  These are reed instruments, and you can't go to a music store and buy a new reed for a set of pipes.  They don't even know what uilleann pipes are in a music store.  My spelling checker doesn't even recognize the word "uilleann".  It is an Irish word meaning "elbow".

I have been taught how to make my own reeds by a pipe-maker in San Anselmo, California.  Luckily, the very material used to make the reeds--a species of the cane plant grows wild at a couple of locations near my home.  Cane doesn't even grow in Ireland.  They have to import it from Spain.