Competition

Coming up this week is the Dublin Irish Festival and the Columbus Feis.

Lori and I have 3 girls, and the 2 older ones take Irish Step Dancing lessons. They love to dance and they take lessons with some other girls in the neighborhood. Our family room on occasion becomes an Irish dance studio when the girls get out their music CD and practice. It's one of the reasons we got the house we did - plenty of room for this sort of thing. (We've had as many as 3 girls dancing simultaneously...)

They will be competing in their first Feis this coming Saturday of course we'll be there to cheer them on.

Part of my heritage is Irish, and playing the uilleann pipes is one way how I express and live out who I am.

So, I've entered the Columbus Feis this year in the "Miscellaneous Irish Musical Instrument" category.

I won the Gold Medal in the category in 2001.

Competition consists of playing one Air and one Jig or Reel, so a total of two tunes.

The Airs are slower tunes that usually have lyrics that go with them, and they are derived from Irish "Sean Nos" singing. Sean Nos is a capella singing, usually in Gaelic. The songs will tell the story of love, tragedy, turmoil or skullduggery. It's the piper's job to imitate the singer.

It does help to know Gaelic and hear the song actually sung but that's not always easy to do.

The next best thing is to hear another piper play it, and learn it that way.

Airs provide a way for the musician to express themselves in the Irish musical tradition, and that's because the Air is in itself a tune that is more free-form than the Jigs and Reels.

Jigs and Reels are, well, Jigs and Reels.

Jigs are in 6/8 or 12/8 time, and the reels are in 4/4. There are a couple other types of tunes in the tradition - hornpipes, polkas, slip jigs, slides.

With the dance tunes there is opportunity for variation, but it's all within the format of the tune. The melody is set, but it's in the ornamentation of the melody where the expression and variation comes in to play. Lots of different types of ornaments in Irish Trad.

That's in contrast to much of our modern music where there is free-form expression throughout the song (you may not be aware of it).

So, right.

Looks like the tunes I'll be playing will be the slow air "Ned of the Hill" and the dance tune will be a jig, "The Trip to Athlone".

I learned the air from a recording of Seamus Ennis, a master piper of this past century. The jig is from a recording by Neil Mulligan, one of my favorite pipers.