GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #66, 2013. Winning isn’t everything, but it beats anything in second place, said the American poet, William Cullen Bryant. Competing pipers and pipe bands might swear by Bryant’s words. The driven need to compete is firmly soldered very near the heart of the […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #65, 2013. Summertime and the livin’ is easy; fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high. Great words; in fact, great lyrics from George and Ira Gershwin. And while it’s our standard holiday season, with weather that’s light on the back, summer isn’t […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #64, 2013. It’s an uncomfortable truth that any sentence that starts with “One of my earliest memories…” will induce in any person — outside of maybe a Freudian psychoanalyst — a vacant stare, a droop of the eye lids and just enough open-mouthed […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #63, 2013. It’s said that every day we each make thousands of decisions. Starting from the moment we wake up: do we get out of our chariots or roll over? And then: if we decide we want to eat, what’s for brekkie, what […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #62, 2013. I was at lunch with a work friend the other day when the subject came up: just how old is the general public’s idea of the stereotypical pipe band? You know, Scotland the Brave, Black Bear, Green Hills and yards and […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #61, 2012. The pipes, and maybe along with the accordion, are the poor bullied souls of the music world. So often the butt of jokes, especially in the world of “classical” music — and, by the way, that’s only from my own experience. […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #60, 2012. We live in the most documented world there ever was: everyone has a digital camera and everyone uses it. Not just that, almost everyone leaves their easily-seen fingerprints all over the internet for their friends to see, for their families to […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #59, 2012. What makes us do what we do? Cross a street with the red man aglow, hold the door open for someone, jump the queue at an airport check-in? We might be in a rush, we might just love people — or […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #58, 2012. There’s one sure thing about being involved in the piping game: there’s never a shortage of memory-making material. The bagpipe seems to have a way of finding the centre of the most percolating social action. Or maybe it’s the pipes that […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #57, 2012. It seems to me that the more we visit a place and the more we get to know it, the stronger are our feelings for that place. It dovetails, maybe, that the deeper our memories connect with a place then the […]
