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 […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #56, 2012. One way psychologists have been known to test how word meanings are stored in a person’s memory is by word association. In a word association test, a person is given a word and asked to respond with the first word that […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #55, 2011. I’ve always thought John D. Burgess came as close as anyone to the title of ‘maestro’. Burgess was surely a true artist of consummate skill and not without a hint of charm and eccentric personal colour thrown in for good measure. […]
