Bagpipes are a calling

By RAFER GUZMAN

RONKONKOMA, N.Y. — In the days following 9/11, Robert Honor watched the funerals on television and had an unusual reaction. Stirred by the steady, sorrowful drone of bagpipe bands paying tribute to fallen citizens who, like him, were of Irish descent, he decided he wanted to learn the ancient instrument.

At the time, he was about 7 years old.

“It just brought something out in me,” said Honor, a thoughtful 13-year-old junior high schooler. “The bagpipes were my calling.”

For bagpipers on New York’s Long Island, Honor and youngsters like him are helping to keep the Irish-Scottish instrument alive. By some accounts the bagpipe’s popularity is on the rise: The Eastern United States Pipe Band Association in Newark, Del., estimates that its membership — approximately 200 bands and 2,200 individuals — has doubled over the past decade, a result of the increase in St. Patrick’s Day parades in towns around the country. On Long Island this year, there are so many parades that some bands are playing multiple events and even splitting up to cover more ground.

“You know there’s no St. Patrick’s Day anymore,” Joseph McGonigal, the association’s president, noted. “It’s a whole St. Patrick’s month.”

Others, however, fear that playing the bagpipe is becoming a lost art. Honor’s father said it took a full year of searching to find a local instructor for his son. “You go to competitions and you see tons of people and you think it’s really big, but it’s a small group,” Christopher Honor, 41, said. “We went to music schools, and one said, ‘If you find someone, let us know.”’

The bagpipes have never been a mainstream instrument, perhaps partly because of their close association with a certain ethnicity: You don’t have to trace your roots to the British Isles to develop an urge to pipe, but it helps. And it’s not a cheap hobby: A basic setup can cost around $1,500. What’s more, it’s a niche instrument to say the least: Bagpipes aren’t usually heard in the rock music that’s popular with kids, nor are they considered a recital instrument of the kind commonly taught in schools.

“It was a village, rustic, peasant’s instrument,” said David Cohen, associate professor of music at Columbia University, “as opposed to the violin or the harpsichord, which were high-class, elitist instruments.”

But bagpipers, like all musicians, strive for a certain purity of tone, said Robert Lynch, an attorney and a member of the Irish fraternal organization the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Though there’s no English word to describe the sound, “It’s the soul of the music, the Irish equivalent of soul,” Lynch said. “It can be very sorrowful, like a lament — the blues don’t hold a candle to it. On the other hand, it can be very joyful.”

The history of the bagpipes is complicated, with roots in both Ireland and Scotland, though music experts believe they may date back to antiquity. The Irish version, known as Uilleann pipes, are on the smaller side and typically used in folk bands, while the larger highland bagpipes — known in Gaelic as “phiob mhor,” or “big pipe” — are the familiar ones usually seen in parades.

With three drone pipes — two tenors and one bass that each sustain one continuous note — plus the recorderlike chanter, whose finger holes generate the melody, the bagpipes aren’t the easiest instrument to learn. Each pipe must be hand-tuned by lengthening or shortening it, and each set of pipes must be tuned to all the others (which explains why you’ll see the players take so much time to warm up). Then there’s the bag itself, which operates something like a third lung: The player must find an equilibrium between blowing air into it and squeezing air out of it to create a steady, unwavering sound.

“It takes a lot of stamina,” said Patricia O’Shaughnessy, 65, a pipe instructor who emigrated from Dublin more than 40 years ago.

O’Shaughnessy, who leads the Thomas O’Shaughnessy Memorial Pipe Band — of which young Robert Honor is a member — has been playing the bagpipes since she was 10, back when girls were often discouraged from joining bands. Now her own band, named after her late husband, consists of nearly 40 pipers of varying ages and both genders. Several of her students, she noted, have entered regional competitions and at least three this year received college scholarships for their playing.

At a recent evening rehearsal at the Lakeland Fire Department in Lake Ronkonkoma, the band practiced for its appearance in two St. Patrick’s Day parades last weekend.

Dressed in full regalia — black gillie shoes, a sporran purse at her waist, wool kilt, navy blazer and two shirt collarpins signifying her position as pipe major — O’Shaughnessy led her group through Irish standards such as “Minstrel Boy” and “Roundtree” while various friends, parents and siblings watched from the sidelines.

All the while, O’Shaughnessy kept an eye on her young charges, the future of her band. “Look at little Timmy’s flashes,” she said in her light Irish accent, noting the slightly skewed red flags tucked into a young boy’s woolen stockings. “Ah, well, he’s learning.”