Well the tapping season is just about here. I plan to start drilling and putting out buckets this week. I've got five people signed up for the Palouse Maple Syrup Cooperative, all with big old silver maples, one norway maple, and one box elder- most of which are big enough to be double tapped. My goal was to put in at least six taps. That would give me enough to make a worthwhile amount of syrup, enough to at least supply the co-op members, but now it seems that I have 12 taps to manage. Great!
If at some point I can get 50 or more taps in around town the Palouse Maple Syrup Cooperative will be chugging right along.
The Palouse Folkore Society has also been kind enough to include my advertisement for the co-op in thier monthly newsletter. I got a chance to take a look at it during thier concert series last night. Dick Hensold, an amazing smallpipe player, was performing and bagpipes are an instrument I love to chat about with other bagpipe nerds but I ended up talking about maple syruping far more. Seems that there is a lot of interest in this subject around town, hopefully this will translate into more co-op members.
Going back to Dick Hensold's performance... WOW. He was an absolute virtuoso on the Northumbrian Smallpipes, Reel Pipes, Swedish Transverce Flute, Swedish Smallpipes, and the Pib Gorn (horn pipe). What a rare treat it was to see him perform here in Moscow. I'd never heard Piobaireached style performed on smallpipes either. Piobaireached is a highly stylized form of playing were a melody is cumulatively embellished and variated upon untill at last it becomes an absolutely stunning virtuoso rendition of an otherwise simple two or three part tune.
Now I know I'll probably never get into Piobaireached style playing- it's just too complicated for me, but hearing it performed so incredibly well and on the Northumbrian and Reel Smallpipes nonetheless, made me really want to break out my own sets of Smallpipes and Highland Pipes again. I've been ignoring them a bit for the last year or so. The reeds I have in my Dunfion Smallpipes and Highland Pipes have been more than shot for a long time and I postponed getting new ones for even longer. Finally I ordered some new reeds from Chris Apps in Missouri, and it feels like I'm playing completely new instruments. The reeds I got from Chris especially make my Smallpipes play like something that cost far more money than I originally paid for them. Very good investment. So now I just need some extra time and some warm weather to get out of the house and get back into practice.
hmmm... I wonder if bagpipes sound vibration effect maple sap flow? Sounds like a good graduate project... or maybe I'd better stick with underwater bagpipe weaving.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Music That Gives Us a "Sense of Place."
You know it when you hear it. The kind of song that brings forth visions of the landscape and the lifeway that created it. These are the songs and tunes that seem to grow right out of the dirt. This is the music that I love. I used to think that it had to be an old crusty ballad or a dance tune from somewhere way back in time, but it doesn't have to be. I heard a great quote on a radio interview recently from a group of musicians who were finishing some of Hank William's uncompleted songs. One of them said he loved a hank williams tune, that it seemed so natural, like it was something that was planted and just grew up out of the soil. Something that belonged there.
I hear bits and pieces of modern songs that have that feel. Like when I was driving through the wheat country outside of Walla Walla and Susan Werner's "Barbed Wire Boys" came on the radio. That song and the land that I drove through became one and visions of vast cornfields, river valleys, and crusty old ball-caped men in greasy midwestern diners flashed through my head. Like my friend Jimmy who I knew back in wisconsin who had hands like sides of beef from milking cows and pounding fences for thirty years. The palouse is not all that different a place than many parts of the midwestern landscape that I grew up in and that song helped me connect my old home with the new, helped me sink my roots a little deeper.
I think learning songs that can connect us with land and culture are some of the most important ways we can find a sense of place. I think that's one of the biggest problems we face as a country that we feel so disconnected even to the point that disconnection itself has become a way of life. Everyone is plugged in, online, and yes connected but to who? To where? Where are we, who are we? Have we sacrified connection to land and culture for connection to a virtual world? Do we really derive more satisfaction from virtual connection then we can from connection to a landscape and a lifeway?
There are many many benefits to the new technologies that constantly surround us, and I'm not saying we shouldn't have it both ways. I am, after all, writing a blog post for god's sake. I just think that knowing and learning music that grew up out of the land, out of the culture you find yourself surrounded by, out of the people who made the place you live the way it is today can help give us that connection, help feed our roots, our sense of history and continuity, and give us a reason to love the land we live on.
I recently had the pleasure and priveledge to take part in the Gary Eller's smithsonian's instute project "The Way We Worked in Idaho."(more about him below). I helped in recording the song Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks, an old union logging song recorded in St. Maries not far from here around 1917. The wonderful Shayne Watkins of the band "Beargrass" asked me to accompany him on this tune. Recording was great fun and an important experience for me since learning that song helped me to feel more connected to and more a part of this region on the very edge of the bitter root mountains where timber holds as much importance as wheat.
Both Shayne and my Wife are foresters as well so along with talk about managing today's forestlands I can now reflect at least a little on what the loggers who shouldered the roots of this industry were thinking and feeling.... and singing.
You can listen to the Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks and learn more Idaho songs at the website and mp3 link below:
http://www.bonafidaho.com
http://www.bonafidaho.com/FiftyThousandLumberjacksVariant.mp3
Much Thanks to Gary Eller, creator of bonafidaho, and without whom these wonderful songs might have been lost to the dustbins of history.
I hear bits and pieces of modern songs that have that feel. Like when I was driving through the wheat country outside of Walla Walla and Susan Werner's "Barbed Wire Boys" came on the radio. That song and the land that I drove through became one and visions of vast cornfields, river valleys, and crusty old ball-caped men in greasy midwestern diners flashed through my head. Like my friend Jimmy who I knew back in wisconsin who had hands like sides of beef from milking cows and pounding fences for thirty years. The palouse is not all that different a place than many parts of the midwestern landscape that I grew up in and that song helped me connect my old home with the new, helped me sink my roots a little deeper.
I think learning songs that can connect us with land and culture are some of the most important ways we can find a sense of place. I think that's one of the biggest problems we face as a country that we feel so disconnected even to the point that disconnection itself has become a way of life. Everyone is plugged in, online, and yes connected but to who? To where? Where are we, who are we? Have we sacrified connection to land and culture for connection to a virtual world? Do we really derive more satisfaction from virtual connection then we can from connection to a landscape and a lifeway?
There are many many benefits to the new technologies that constantly surround us, and I'm not saying we shouldn't have it both ways. I am, after all, writing a blog post for god's sake. I just think that knowing and learning music that grew up out of the land, out of the culture you find yourself surrounded by, out of the people who made the place you live the way it is today can help give us that connection, help feed our roots, our sense of history and continuity, and give us a reason to love the land we live on.
I recently had the pleasure and priveledge to take part in the Gary Eller's smithsonian's instute project "The Way We Worked in Idaho."(more about him below). I helped in recording the song Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks, an old union logging song recorded in St. Maries not far from here around 1917. The wonderful Shayne Watkins of the band "Beargrass" asked me to accompany him on this tune. Recording was great fun and an important experience for me since learning that song helped me to feel more connected to and more a part of this region on the very edge of the bitter root mountains where timber holds as much importance as wheat.
Both Shayne and my Wife are foresters as well so along with talk about managing today's forestlands I can now reflect at least a little on what the loggers who shouldered the roots of this industry were thinking and feeling.... and singing.
You can listen to the Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks and learn more Idaho songs at the website and mp3 link below:
http://www.bonafidaho.com
http://www.bonafidaho.com/FiftyThousandLumberjacksVariant.mp3
Much Thanks to Gary Eller, creator of bonafidaho, and without whom these wonderful songs might have been lost to the dustbins of history.
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