Pipers' club

Brace yourselves for an onslaught of the uilleann pipes: the William Kennedy Piping Festival kicks off today in Armagh city, and the music it features is about as far from the clichés of noisy, tuneless, eardrum-crushing instruments as John Kerry is from the White House. The 11th William Kennedy Piping Festival, which begins today in Armagh, celebrates a shared musical heritage, writes Siobhán Long.

Brian Vallely, the Armagh piper and artist, is responsible for the 11-year-old festival, which has captured the imaginations not only of the piping fraternity (and fast-growing sorority) but also of other traditional musicians, lovers of the kind of creative energy born of a glorious five-day collision of artists and music.

"Eithne Vallely must be credited with coming up with the idea of celebrating the life and work of the blind 18th-century piper, pipemaker, inventor, clockmaker and cabinetmaker that William Kennedy was," says Vallely, crediting his wife and partner in music. "Piping was one branch of music that transcended all the real or imagined divisions in society here. Everyone could subscribe to piping; piping, moreover, was a universal music, appearing in wonderfully diverse forms right around the globe."

Armagh seems considerably better versed than the rest of the island in the subtle nuances of piping. Even Liam O'Flynn has been known to recount the looks of incomprehension and disbelief that greeted him when Planxty started out. Piping may be a language that's native to Armagh but to few other pockets of the island.

"The original format was built around a celebration of the shared cultural inheritance of Ireland and Scotland represented by the piping tradition," says Vallely. "Then each year we brought in various European pipers, from countries such as Spain, Italy, Hungary, Brittany, Belarus, Bulgaria and France, plus English pipers playing ancient reconstructed bellows-blown pipes, Northumbrian pipes, even Welsh pipes, brought back after having been extinct for over 100 years. And then all the various Scottish pipes: great Highland pipes, small pipes and border pipes. Finally, of course, we have had uilleann pipers from all over the world."

This year the Dublin piper Mick O'Brien returns to the fray, having wet his whistle in Armagh five years ago. Finding himself in the belly of the beast, surrounded by pipers, is hardly an alien experience, he says. "I've just come back from a week playing in the States, where we travelled right over from California to upstate New York and the Catskills. There are so many tionóls there - piping festivals where you'd fall over the number of pipers who come to share a tune."

O'Brien's Dublin roots saw to it that he was on intimate terms with the pipes long before he was out of short trousers. His father, Dinny, was an accordionist and whistle player and a man who was no stranger to sharing tunes with Seamus Ennis, Leo Rowsome and the countless musicians who frequented the Pipers' Club, then on Thomas Street.

"I remember Daddy getting a set of pipes on loan, from the loan scheme that the Pipers' Club ran," says O'Brien, "and I tried them, and I could get a few notes out of them, so that's where it started. For me the attraction of the William Kennedy festival is the chance it gives me to meet other pipers. When pipers get together they don't only talk about the music; they talk about the reeds, the pipemakers, the chanters, everything and anything to do with the pipes. If you're a fiddle player there's not a whole lot to say about one string or another, but pipers could talk all day long about the pipes."

O'Brien learned much of his repertoire from the piper and pipemaker Dan Dowd. His extensive travels have since taken him all over, and his instrument hasn't always thrived. The weather might make the pipes soar or sink - the latter is always a distinct possibility in drier climates, he says.

"In North America, and in southern Europe, too, where it gets very dry, Irish pipes aren't mouth-blown, so they suffer from the dryness of those places, unlike the Scottish bagpipes. Irish pipes need a certain amount of moisture in the air, about 50 per cent humidity, and if the humidity drops to 40 per cent then the reed dries up, and you can't play.

"Once I was over in Toronto, teaching at a festival, and it was minus 36 degrees outside. That night, at the concert, my pipes simply would not work. It was as if the reeds had shrunk. I hadn't heard about that before, but nowadays pipers go around with hydrometers, to read humidity levels, and humidifiers, to keep the pipes in good shape."

Paidrigín Ní Uallacháin, a sean-nós singer and songwriter, is making her first trip to the piping festival, and as one of the few songwriters writing in the traditional idiom in Irish she brings a repertoire that straddles past and present, one she sees as highly compatible with the pipes. Being one of the few singers amid so many pipers is not a concern, she says.

"This festival is a celebration of the art of the solo performer, and my repertoire will include sean-nós, accompanied song and some of the new material that I have been composing myself. Pipes are very compatible with the voice. They're probably the oldest of instruments, along with percussion. In Ireland the pipes would have reflected the style of singing anyway, and I remember Liam O'Flynn crediting Seamus Ennis, who told him always to go back to the source before he played the airs: listen to the nuance, to the feeling and the soul of the song, before playing it. In Scotland, too, the mouth music, or porta béal, would have been very closely related to the pipes, and the pipes would have reflected the style of singing, of portaireacht."

With her next album, Phóg, due out in the spring, Ní Uallacháin sees her music as giving her a chance to both "mend the tradition" and air new compositions."I think it's very important for the language, as a living language, that new songs are written," she says, "and I write new songs very much in the traditional genre, but ones which offer me a chance to write and sing about things which are relevant to our experience here and now."

The 11th William Kennedy Piping Festival runs in Armagh from today until Sunday. See www.wkpf.org or call 048- 37521821