Hills Are Alive With Sound of . . . : Bagpipe Expert Conducts Summer Classes at Idyllwild

On most summer days this San Jacinto mountain resort is a quiet, cool getaway from the heat and smog. Here, a mile above the hot desert town of Banning, the sound you hear is that of the wind blowing gently through towering pines. But last week and this, there came an unusual wail.

Was it really the sound of bagpipes?

Indeed it was. Forty-four bagpipes, to be exact, because Idyllwild has become the August campsite for the Seumas MacNeill California Summer School for Pipers.

Started School 15 Years Ago

“I do more teaching on this side of the Atlantic than I do in Scotland,” said MacNeill, a Glasgow-born Scot who started his California bagpipe school 15 years ago as an extension of Scotland’s College of Piping, which he founded in 1945.

After previous summer stints in Pebble Beach, Sequoia National Park and Santa Cruz, MacNeill moved his piper camp to the Elliott-Pope Preparatory School, a private boarding school in Idyllwild, last year.

“There was a tennis summer school at the University of Santa Cruz at the same time, and the kids threw bread across the dining room,” MacNeill said. “I wouldn’t put up with that. There’s a limit to what I’ll do for piping.”

What MacNeill has done for piping internationally is put it on the map.

MacNeill said that there are more than 2,000 pipe bands throughout the world. In the United States, there is at least one in each state. In California, there are about 30 pipe bands. In addition to his California school, MacNeill has conducted bagpipe schools in Dallas, New York, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Anchorage, two in Canada and one in Tokyo. He has lectured at major universities throughout the United States and abroad and supervises nine bagpipe summer schools in Scotland. There is a College of Piping in both Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Four years ago, MacNeill interested British Caledonian Airways in sponsoring his California bagpipe camp. The airline has its own pipe band, based in London. Because of British Caledonian’s support, MacNeill said he is able to keep the school tuition at $200 for the two-week period, plus room and board at $35 a day.

The airline also flew MacNeill and piper John MacAskill, another instructor, to California for the school. MacAskill, a player-composer-teacher who lists his address as “somewhere in the Western Highlands,” has taught at MacNeill’s California school for several years. He has a fan club here that calls itself the “I Survived MacAskill Society.”

“Do you know until 10 years ago, kids in schools in Scotland could get a certificate of music for any kind of instrument, but not the bagpipe,” MacNeill said, angered at the thought of such a thing. He and other pipers, he explained, talked the public school administrators into trying an experimental piping program in the Scottish schools.

“Now piping is taught as a school subject,” he said proudly. “Thousands of kids are now learning it. We won the battle.”

Students at the California summer school have come from all over the country and from Canada, western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil.

“This school inspired the school in Tokyo,” MacNeill explained. “For two years, two or three pipers came from Tokyo and now there are enough of them to have their own school. We started it last year.”

Not only have the Japanese taken a real interest in learning to pipe, MacNeill said, they have invented an electronic device to tune a bagpipe. It is called the Korg Bagpipe Tuner and sells for about $150. “Everyone in Scotland has one now,” MacNeill said. “I have two at home.”

MacNeill also has made several trips to Arab countries to give piping demonstrations and instruction. “The Arabs have about 20 pipe bands now,” he said. There also are flourishing pipe bands in Pakistan, Africa and Asia.

‘Play a Bit, Talk a Bit’

“I do about a dozen lecture-recitals a year,” MacNeill added. “I play a bit and talk a bit. I like to go places where people don’t know about piping. . . .

“I always like to begin saying, ‘people meet a man wearing a kilt and they always want to know what is worn under it. I say nothing is worn under it. Everything under it is in perfect working order.’ ”

MacNeill also has composed many pipe tunes, judges piping competitions, cuts records, produces radio and TV shows on piping and edits the monthly magazine, Piping Times, which he started in 1948. He is a master piper and holds the gold medal for Piobaireachd (pronounced Pee brook), the classical music of bagpiping.

When Seumas (pronounced Shamus) MacNeill was 10, he began learning the bagpipe from his uncle, Archie MacNeill the Blind Piper, a famous Scottish piper.

“He was not born blind,” MacNeill said of his uncle. “But he had detached retinas when he was 20. They didn’t know how to fix them then. But he was a full-time piper all his life. He was a very good composer, as he was a player and teacher.”

MacNeill, in his 60s and now retired as a physics professor at Glasgow University, admitted that he didn’t want to start his musical career as a piper.

Played Violin

“I wanted to learn the fiddle. Archie played the violin, but he wanted me to learn the pipes. By the time I was old enough to make a decision, I had such an investment in the pipes, I didn’t change. I’m very glad, because I wouldn’t have reached the heights with the violin that I have with the pipes.”

Early this warm afternoon, MacNeill, dressed in white shirt and his MacNeill tartan kilt (a plaid of green, blue, black and yellow), finished his lunch in the spacious lodge at the Elliott-Pope school and strolled out to the rolling green lawn where he would teach an advanced pipers class.

Classes at the Idyllwild summer school range from beginners to advanced pipers. Pipers attending this year’s school are mostly from the Western states, and range in age from 10 to 65. Among them are a housewife, engineers, a dentist, an air traffic controller, educators, a librarian and a helicopter pilot. About half the students are women, among them Nancy Kuhn, a cancer research scientist from Buffalo, N.Y., and Thelma Gordon, a Santa Barbara housewife.

“I’ve been playing with the Gordon Highlands Pipe Band for about two years,” said Kuhn, 31. “Ever since I was in Glencoe, Scotland, and I heard two pipers playing by the side of the road, I wanted to learn to play. They were so wonderful. I said ‘I wish I was a guy, so I could do that.’ I thought it was a man’s instrument. Then I came home and saw women in the local pipe band. So, I bought a used set of pipes from someone in the band and started lessons.”

“There are more women here playing the pipes than in Scotland,” MacNeill said. When he taught piping in Nova Scotia in 1954, he said, the pipe band there was all women. “It was all girls. The boys thought because you wore a skirt, it was a girls’ thing.”

“I’m on my own. We don’t have a band,” said Gordon, who took up the pipes three years ago. “I had a friend who was learning and he said it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He gave me a practice chanter (which looks like a recorder and is quieter and easier to blow) and a book. I tried it, and I really loved it.”

As soon as MacNeill finished his class, Kuhn wanted to talk with him about pipe maintenance.

‘Altitude Is a Problem’

“I think my reeds are drying out up here,” Kuhn said. “Because of the heat and dryness, and the altitude is a problem. There are different kinds of seasonings for the bags. Here we use a special bag seasoning, a kind of goop you put in the bag. In Scotland they use honey to season the bag.”

Seasoning, Kuhn explained, seals the seams in the bag and keeps it flexible.

MacNeill, too, said he was bothered by the altitude in Idyllwild, and didn’t think his pipes were working as well as they did when he played them in Scotland, because of the lack of humidity. “It’s a bit harder up here because of the altitude,” he said. “I feel it when I blow. I can’t blow as long. And the pipes are used to more dampness at home.”

MacNeill talked about the history of bagpiping, just as he does to students at the beginning of summer school, which runs from Aug. 3 though Aug. 15.

How and when the bagpipe originated is not documented, but it is believed they were developed in the Middle East. Two thousand years ago, the Roman legions used them when marching to battle, and it is said by pipers that Nero was playing the pipes, not the violin, when Rome burned.

In the Middle Ages, bagpipes fell out of fashion in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Russia and France, but survived in Scotland because of the inaccessibility of the Western Highlands.

“In 1746, a law was passed by England making it illegal to play the pipe,” MacNeill said. “It also was illegal to wear the tartan or speak Gaelic or bear arms. That lasted for 30 years. . . . There was an attitude in Scotland that the bagpipe was not quite respectable. It was looked on as an instrument of war that incites people to fight. A guy was hanged in 1746 because he had a bagpipe. So that didn’t do much for people wanting to play the pipe. But the Highlands are inaccessible. They still make their own whiskey there and play the pipes.”

Scottish regiments in the British army were responsible for bringing interest in the pipes to all parts of the British Empire, especially to India, in the 19th Century.

A set of bagpipes ranges in price from about $200 to $3,000 for the best.

“This is a crash course here,” said Don Kittner, who had just finished a beginners’ class. Kittner, a manufacturers’ representative for electronic firms who lives in San Marcos, has been playing the pipes for only nine months. “Seumas says I’m a late beginner. But I’ve learned more in five days here than in the nine months. We start about 7 a.m. . . . Classes go from 9 to 6 p.m. Then at night we practice in the dorm and outside during the day.”

“I think this is a very worthwhile way to learn the pipes,” said Bob Hollingsworth, a 44-year-old nuclear engineer from Carmel who has been piping for seven years. “If you start here, you don’t develop bad habits. And if you have them when you come, you break them here.”

Hollingsworth has just returned to the States from taking a year’s bicycle tour of Australia and New Zealand. “I took my practice chanter with me,” he said. “Now I’m back trying to get back on the pipes again.”

One of the Best

Evidently, Hollingsworth picked up where he left off with the pipes. This year at Idyllwild, he is a member of the “green class,” the one for the best pipers at the school.

“I feel if I had started when I was young, maybe 12 or 14, I would really be a good piper,” he said. “It takes longer to get there when you’re older.”

The youngest student at Idyllwild is Mark McLane, 10, from San Luis Obispo. He has been playing the pipes for 1 1/2 years.

After his afternoon novice class, McLane rested a minute on the steps of the school lodge before going out by the pond to practice on his chanter. He wore a T-shirt with his Black Watch kilt.

At home, McLane takes a lesson each week and practices before and after school and at night.

“My family went to the Scottish Society and one of the people there was playing the pipes,” he said. “I always liked the sound. I’d like to end up playing in a pipe band and also go into competition. I am going to compete in the Santa Rosa Highland Games on Labor Day.

“My parents like the sound,” McLane said. “My mom wanted to do it, too, but she couldn’t find the time, so I’m the only one in my family right now. My brother plays the drums.”

McLane’s teacher in San Luis Obispo is Scott Field, a 17-year-old high school student who became a piper at age 8.

“This is my ninth year here,” he said of MacNeill’s summer piping camp. “I started piping because my father didn’t want me to get an electric guitar.”

Field has been teaching piping for five years, and this year is his first as an instructor at MacNeill’s school.

“It takes a weird mind to do this,” Field said with a grin. “It’s not the norm; it stands out. Like Jimi Hendrix 20 years ago. He made a million dollars. I’ll never make a million dollars playing bagpipes, but I teach and I compete internationally and I like that.”