You might think that being in your home all day is ideal for pipers, loads of time to practice, play through music you haven’t played in a long time and with loads of #COVIDCeilidh posts of pipers playing tunes for all of our entertainment, some pipers struggle in this situation with having to work very structured hours from home, maybe their partner is also trying to do the same, and possibly also looking after the kids!!!
My release over the last few weeks has been looking through some music books that I haven’t seen for a long time, recently I’ve also been going through some new ones to build my repertoire or even just to get some ideas, and listening to recordings. While my dad’s collections are always an easy “Go To” to refresh my memory, it amazes me how many tunes you learn in your lifetime and forget just as easily. Gordon Duncan’s book is always good for some new inspiration or for helping to unlock an idea you might have been struggling to finish, while there are plenty of new books to go through from young, up and coming composers all with very differing styles. Here’s two of the books I’ve been going over this week;
· Kyle Rothschild-Mancinelli’s first book “Tunes from the Flight Deck”
· Craig Muirhead's new book – “30 Exactly”
Lots of great music in both of these collections and certainly help me get the creative juices flowing. Now that Write My Music is up and running it’s important for me to keep up to date with new music. The best bands don’t troll previous medley’s to produce their own “New One”, they try to do things nobody has done before, or do something from a long way back and “Make it their own!”. As a result, band medley’s are getting harder and harder to remain new, interesting and creative, ground breaking even, and the more creative bands become, the harder it can be for others to keep up. It can be a struggle each year trying to come up with new ideas and I know from experience and also from speaking to other PM’s of leading G1 bands, it can be extremely challenging to make the next medley better than the last.
One way to do this is by turning to books like the 2 above which helps you develop some new ways of thinking about tunes, some new phrases that you might not have looked at before and most importantly helps new, up and coming composers get their music out into the public domain. Hopefully I’ll be including some of these composers’ tunes in medleys for the 2021 season and I can do my bit to help put these books to good use!!
If you’d like to find out more about Write My Medley, then please get into touch to start talking about your next medley or for help with some ideas you might be struggling with! Also click the subscribe button to keep up to speed with our future article’s.
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