Wild Salmon: Bagpiping as 'Flow,' 144th Pleasanton Highland Games in California, Great Bagpiping

Bagpiping can be rich 'flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences, for both the bagpiper and the listener.


And great piping - Piobaireachd {classical bagpipe music} - can be also a liminal ('betwixt and between') experience.


Appreciation for bagpiping music is something one has a taste for. Some love it and others don't.


And Scots have developed bagpiping competitions in very far-reaching ways in a little over 100 years, to give form to these musical expressions. Highland Games, which have occurred since the Highland Clearances, focus on competitions, and bagpiping is central to this.


In a curious way, I see see playing the bagpipe (which I do) as the the output of computer code. I don't think Scots would have thought this throughout Scots' history of listening to bagpiping, or that many Bagpiping listeners do these days, but I'm amused to think that Scots have long been finding 'flow' experiences listening to bagpipe computer code, as music.



Highland Games are also gatherings where Scots' identity is affirmed and produced, in a sense. Scots' culture carries on through these expressions, and taste plays a role here. For example, bagpiping has many different expressions, some quite idiosyncratic, yet taste comes to define what good piping is. For example, the piping which is played at the summertime World Competitions in Scotland can come to define a key aspect of the current piping tradition. And this is subject to a somewhat unflexible view of what Scottish Highland Piping is.


Bagpipng is a very 'forward' music. There's nothing quiet about it, and while great subtlety exists in note duration and expressivity, for example, there's nothing subtle about the sound of the great Scottish Highland Bagpipe.


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The 144th Calendonian Club of San Francisco's Highland Games occur this weekend at the Pleasanton Highland Games just east of the Bay Area. When

What a long tradition on the west coast of the United States.

When I saw yesterday the '144th' printed on the Pleasanton Highland Games' program, I wondered what photos exist from that time, which I'd like to see.

Besides looking at the archives of the Calendonian Club, if they exist, I saw on the internet that the S.F. Public Library has Calendonian Club archival material.


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Here are the winners in the aggregate in the Pleasanton Highland Games' open and professional bagpiping competition yesterday at the Marriott hotel in San Ramon:

Ian Whitelaw
Ken Sutherland
Ryan Murray
Colin Armstrong


in these 3 different competitions

1 Piobaireachd

2 March, Strathspey & Reel

3 Hornpipe & Jig




Here's Ian Whitelaw:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGhaM8LpRNk)





(So the above pipers' bodyminds, as computers, produce or output the most skillfully expressed baggiping series of notes, or code, vis-a-vis many other pipes, according to the judges at the Pleasanton Highland Games. And many of us who were listening found perhaps the richest 'flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences listening to these pipers. I did.).


(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/09/wild-salmon-bagpiping-as-flow-144th.html - September 4, 2009)