Bagpipes Teach a Life Lesson
Bagpipes are thought to be one of the most difficult musical instruments to learn. They also have something to teach us about life, especially when you can hear them from your home.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Recently, commentator Carol Wasserman found out that her neighbor has taken to practicing a new art form.
CAROL WASSERMAN:
At dusk, I hear the distant sound of bagpipes. I stand in the cold yard and listen to what might also be a bunch of foghorns holding a secret meeting in the woods, a disorganized racket as if no one is yet in charge.
I've been told that bagpipes are hellishly difficult to play. I have never mastered any instrument. They have all been impossible to learn. But I understand that bagpipes demand even more than just dexterity and a good memory. It's not enough to know where your fingers are supposed to land. You need wind and stamina adequate to keep the bag inflated. And unless you live alone, you will also need a love of the outdoors, where you will be sent to practice once the snow melts.
It's a brave, ridiculous thing to take up a new instrument midlife, long past the time when it would have come easily. At this age, there are a lot of things you will never learn how to do well unless you do them well already.
I was a lazy, willful child on whom years of piano lessons were wasted. Then for a while, I also did not play the violin. `You'll be sorry later,' my teachers told me, and they were right. But I was a kid with the attention span of a housefly and no interest in extended periods of incompetence. All I wanted was a pretty dress and an audience. It's pretty much all I continue to want.
And hope springs eternal, because I now understand that commitment to a musical instrument is no different from commitment to any other kind of long-term love. If your past relationships ended badly, maybe it was no one's fault. Maybe it was never going to work. It wasn't you. It wasn't the violin. Move on already.
I stand outside at dusk now. At this time of day, the warmth has disappeared, but the light has not. From far across the salt marsh, I hear the pipe drones clearing their throats as the bag inflates, and then I hear the opening wheezes of the only tune my neighbor has yet learned to play. `Oh, Susanna,' a bagpipe keens from somewhere in the undergrowth, `oh, don't you cry for me, 'cause I've come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.'
BLOCK: Carol Wasserman lives in Wareham, Massachusetts.
(Soundbite of "Oh, Susanna")
Unidentified Man: (Singing) I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee, bound for Louisiana, my true love for to see. It rained real hard the day I left, the weather...
MICHELE NORRIS (Host): You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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