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Where the music beginsARUNDO DONAX

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MUSIC begins with the vibration of air: the human lips or larynx can be the source, a taut string,

a stretched sheet of hide or tough synthetic material, a struck piece of wood or metal will do it. Some rocks will produce a note when they are struck. And a reverberating blade — a reed — will do it.

“For all woodwind players, the reed is the heart of the instrument, and the key to eve-rything,” says pipe maker Hamish Moore of Dunkeld, Scotland.

The sound is just the start. It has to be managed. And the challenge of making music from the sounds produced by several inher-ently unstable, simultaneously vibrating reeds is something bagpipers of all traditions share.

And, as they all know, it is not necessarily easy.

In the Hebridean islands, Highland pipers have used endemic rushes (cuilc) to make their reeds. Elder stems can be turned into durable, strong-sounding compound reeds. In eastern Europe, you can fi nd single-bladed compound reeds fashioned from ballpoint pen tubes with blades cut from plastic yoghurt and ice cream containers. In other parts of Europe, loud, rougher sounding reeds made from bamboo serve some pipers’ needs. And dozens of other materials, synthetic and natural, can be turned into reeds. Boxwood, ebony, heather root, lancewood, teakwood, celluloid, hard rubber, goose quills, synthetic resins, ivory and silver have all been tried… and discarded.

So often has and consistently has the prefer-ence fallen on the bamboo-like Arundo donax reed that its special place has to be acknowl-edged.

Arundo donax is a tall, fast-growing, semi-tropical, perennial grass that grows wild in thick clumps from fl eshy, creeping, drought-resistant rootstocks (rhizomes): it produces more bio-mass per acre per year than any other known biomass plant. Its proposed uses have included papermaking and biofuels production.

It has a reputation for hardiness and thrives in heavy clays and loose sands. It tolerates high salt levels and survives periods of cold or heat,

as well as severe drought on the one hand and fl ooding on the other, in apparently inhospita-ble soils. It fl ourishes beside lakeshores, ditches and canals.

Ancient, long-surviving reed instruments like the Egyptian double pipe, the midjweh — an instrument portrayed on the walls of pharaohs’ tombs — and the Sardinian triple pipes (launeddas}, are to this day fashioned from stems of this plant. The origins of the Armenian duduk, which also uses Arundo donax for its double-bladed reed can be traced back to before the time of Christ, to the Arabic world and to countries along the Silk Road.

In fact, the very existence of this particular

cane, its native range around the shores of the Mediterranean, its appeal as a source of sound and its particular characteristics, seem to have had a hand in shaping Europe’s development of reeded woodwind instruments. The modern woodwind mouthpiece, for example, was de-veloped after Renaissance instrument makers realised that reeds of Arundo donax vibrate well when they are moist and do not crack as they dry out.

Said Hamish Moore: “When I began mak-ing pipes 22 years ago, I was determined to use cane. I knew I had the best chance of produc-ing a good sound from cane and I knew I had to work with it if I was going to convince top

ARUNDO DONAX thrives as hedges along either side of a farm road on the Greek island of Naxos. It is used to make both the reeds and the pipes of the local tsambouna bagpipe … Ancient, long surviving reed instruments like the Egyptian double pipe, the midjweh — an instrument portrayed on the walls of pharaohs’ funeral chambers — and the Sardinian triple pipes, the launeddas, are to this day fashioned from stems of this plant.

A PIECE of wild Sardinian Arundo donax chosen by Barnaby Brown as ideal for a small pipes drone reed … “What you’re looking for is the translucence, feel and large internodal distance. This piece has about 15 cms between the nodes, which is fantastic.”

Phot

o: M

ike

Pate

rson

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professional pipers to take up my instruments. I had to have a sound that was beautiful but also robust, and you just can’t get that from plastic. There have been some great innovations in relation to synthetic drone reeds but a chanter reed just has to be cane.”

If every piece of cane that grew was usable, reeds could be cheap and abundant. In fact, though, professional reed-makers concerned to deliver consistent products are invariably concerned about the amounts of cane — even specially cultivated, carefully harvested and properly seasoned cane — that they have to discard. Ultimately, every single short length of cane is unique.

THE concept of “terroir”, often parodied as a pretension of wine snobs, is all about the particular micro-environment in which a crop grows.

All plants are affected by highly localised characteristics of the soil they grow in: its tex-ture and proportions of clay, sand, gravel and humus, its chemistry and the availabilities of trace elements, nutriment levels, and its sea-sonal light, rain and temperature profiles.

Plants are susceptible in different ways, and some soil characteristics will be more significant than others.

What is good for the crop’s consumer may be less than ideal for the plant as a thriving organ-ism in its own right, and the management of a particular piece of land can be crucial.

Cane’s tough, fibrous roots penetrate deeply into the soil and the woody, hollow stalks rise as high as seven or eight metres and swell out at their bases to as much as four centimetres in circumference. The canes reach their final size by the time they are a year old but often send out branches in their second year of growth.

The outer tissue of the stalk is hard and brittle with a glossy surface that turns pale golden yellow when it is fully mature. Chemi-cal analyses of the leaves and stems of Arundo donax reveal high levels of silica.

And — although Arundo donax thrives wild or as hedgerows in hot areas of poorly drained, sandy, alkaline soil around the shores of the Mediterranean, and has been spread widely around the world — the most highly valued musical cane has long come from southeastern France, from the two small départements of Var and Vaucluse.

When it comes to musical reeds, Arundo donax offers qualities that, not unlike those

of wine, are matters of degree and personal taste. And each planting produces its own set of characteristics. The most important reasons for this can be attributed to local climates and soil composition, as well as the skills of the grower.

Var and Vaucluse enjoy a mild, sunny Mediterranean climate, with the Mistral wind bringing sharp, cold spells, with frosts, in winter. In summer, apart from the occasional local storm, a dry spell of more than six weeks is usual.

The area, though, has come under develop-ment pressure in recent decades and farmers have sold off former cane-growing land.

Said Hamish Moore: “Some years are better than others, it depends on the weather, the min-eral content of the soil, how hard the frost was — it depends on the summer and the ripening phase, and how much sun they’ve had. 2005 was a great year. Frost is important. It’s got to have a frost — but not too hard (severe frost seriously set back cane production in France in the early 1980s).

“And it has to be arid, and that’s the most arid region of France It also depends on what happens once it’s harvested, how it’s seasoned, stored and so on..”

“Given all of these variables, you have to take what is the best for you of the cane that’s available. And I find that particular region of France the best for my purposes.”

While the terroirs of this region are credited with imparting particular, uniquely valued musical qualities to the cane that grows there, Spain, Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Australia, Kenya, South America, Mexico, Cuba, China and the United States have all been known to produce good musical cane.

Reed-maker Andy Ross personally favours Spanish cane. “France and Spain are the best suppliers, and there’s good cane coming out of Australia now. I’ve used it but with little suc-cess. I don’t know why, but the samples I got didn’t lend themselves to the reed I make. I got some cane from northern California but it was inconsistent and pretty hard.

“I’ve also had cane from Argentina but I wasn’t too happy with the colour: it was a very orangey-coloured cane. But I’d be willing to try it again if I could find a source.

“The Spanish cane gives me the reed I want so I’ve stuck with it. All the same, I’d say half of it goes in the bin, unfortunately. You have to select the cane, and it can be frustrating.

“You want this nice, bright white to yellowish look that tells you it’s a good piece of cane. It’s a constant pursuit of quality.

“If you have something that’s working for you, you find it hard to move to a different material. You have to start altering what you do and it can get complicated: I don’t like do-ing that,” he said. “But I’m sure it’s the kind of thing where different reed makers have dif-ferent views.”

For Hamish Moore, the solution has been to personally select cane grown in the south of France. “I worked through years and years of frustration until eventually about 10 years ago I decided the best way to be sure of getting good stuff was to go to the south of France and pick it myself,” he said.

“We have a great relationship with a man in Corcoran near St Tropez who principally makes reeds for saxophones, clarinets, bas-soon slips and oboe slips. He has machines producing thousands of reeds a day and the rejection process comes later. It’s very different for us: we make them all by hand so that, if you spend 10 hour hand-making six reeds, as we do, and five of them are duff because the cane’s bad, the quickest way to improve your proportion of good reeds is to start with a good piece of cane.

“He allows me to go there and pick the cream of what I’m looking for. It depends what you want. And for some people, other sources are better: Spanish cane, Argentinian cane, Californian cane, Italian cane. But I’ve tried all of these and, for my needs, I find that region of France to be the best.

“We take it home and keep it for two or three years, and I have to say it’s fantastic stuff.

“We have to have the right diameter for a start and the right wall thickness. Then we look for a good texture and a nice surface. After that, we choose on instinct more than anything else. It seems to work.”

With other woodwind instruments, the player has some control over the reeds with their embouchure, said Hamish Moore. “In the case of the pipes, the construction of reeds is much more difficult because, if you think about a clarinet or saxophone, the reeds are just a single slip of cane that’s gouged then profiled on the outside to a certain specifica-tion. Bassoon and oboe players buy their reeds pre-gouged and pre-profiled, 10 at a time, whereas we gouge them, profile them, tie them and scrape them.

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“That said, reeds last a long time in our dry-blown pipes. I replaced a chanter reed in Alan MacDonald’s smallpipes late last year: a reed I remember making in 1991.

“It would have cost £30 in 1991 and Allan had played it a lot for more than 16 years. It was black with tobacco tar from pub smoke before the smoking ban. You can imagine the smoking ban might be extending the life of a few smallpipe reeds.”

Piper, triple-pipe player and scholar Barnaby Brown spent a number of years in Sardinia where he learned about selecting wild cane to make triple pipes, or launeddas

“The vagaries affecting a naturally growing plot will not be the same year to year, nor even the conditions that affect one plant a metre or two from its neighbours. To reduce those vari-ations, a triple-piper will endeavour to make all three reeds from the same stem of cane.

“A single stem can give you four, eight, even 10 reed lengths, so it is possible to make three reeds of different sizes from a single stem and, that way, you minimise the differences in response when they are in your mouth and maximise the chance of their staying in tune as long as possible.

“On the other hand, it can be advantageous to have two different sounding tenors to en-rich your spectrum of partials and give you a sweeter sound.

“It’s the nature of mass production is that one boasts about consistency and, if a grower can produce cane that is consistent from year to year, that is something they are going to charge highly for. However, when you’re an artisan reed-maker and spend a little more time on each reed and finish them individually, rather than spitting 500 a day out of a machine, it’s almost a part of the beauty of the process to have a natural material, each piece of which is unique and has its own characteristics you can shape by working on the inside of the reed.

“The Sardinians have special little tools to carve away the underside of the tongue to loosen up the reed or make it vibrate more freely and change its response. That skill of working with reeds is something we’ve largely lost in the great Highland bagpiping tradition, not simply because of the advent of plastic drone reeds but because, I think, not having cane growing beside us, we’re not so closely in touch with the material. It’s more valuable.

“Your wait months for it to arrive, then you have that precious box you depend on, and

there are only 10 pieces left… whereas in Sar-dinia it’s growing in your garden, it’s a weed in the countryside and supply isn’t a problem.

“I loved working with cane in Sardinia: going out on a cold, sunny, winter’s day… the sound of the wind in the cane grove, the rustling of a stream. And reed-making: actually preparing something that really suits your instrument. It is a skill that connects you with a tradition that goes back more than 5,000 years.

“Basically, one harvests cane on the coldest day of the year when it has least moisture in it and that prevents it going crinkly in the drying-out process,” said Barnaby Brown. “You’d never harvest cane when it is the bright green colour. They will always cut the cane at new moon, as the moon is growing. The ideal time to harvest is the first cold day after new moon.

“I suspect it’s to do with the moisture content in the cane and it’s interesting that Irish reed makers, making elder reeds for the uileann pipes had a similar tradition: they harvested elder at full moon. They also would harvest in winter when the sap content is at its lowest.

“They also would never harvest cane within sight of the sea. Why that would be, I don’t know.

“The shoots you harvest for drone reeds are two years’ old. First-year growth is not woody enough. The slightly green cane is harvested because cane that’s already dried out has been exposed to the elements for a year and won’t last as long. The stems to harvest can be mottled and, on wild cane, you find these interesting markings. TTo avoid these natural markings, some commercial growers take off the leaf right down to the node. Personally, I rather like the markings; they help me to distinguish one reed from another.

“In any cane plantation, you find various wall thickness. The further into the cane you go, the more stretched it’s become. The inter-nodal distance is greater where the cane is struggling for light. For drone reeds that’s generally good because the walls are thinner too. In Sardinia, when they cut cane for triple pipe reeds, they hold it up to the sun to see how translucent the cane is. That gives you an idea of the wall thickness.

“For different instruments, with differently sized reeds, there are particular optimal cane diameters and commercial growers use all sorts of tricks and methods to obtain them. In a wild cane grove, you can find a bit of everything, from stems of around four millimetres in di-

ameter suitable for the smallest smallpipe drones — and these are hard to get hold of because very few commercial cane growers can be bothered supplying 4 mm diameter cane; it’s very fiddly to deal with. And it goes through to the very fat cane that you find on wetter, less exposed coastal locations.

“Cut cane needs to be dried: a gentle drying process with lots of air circulation and protected from sunshine, rain and salt wind. That way, it has the greatest stability and longest life in your instrument. Turning helps it to dry evenly. Some people rigorously remove the leaves. That way, although when you harvest it it’s still a yellowy-green, after six months of drying it will have turned to the yellow colour we’re used to. And it gradually gets drier as the years progress.

“Sardinian reed-makers prefer to use cane cut the previous year; they don’t like cane from too many years previously because it hardens. It can still be used but it’s more difficult to make a good, airtight, efficient reed. So, for the greater ease of getting the cut perfect, they would use cane harvested 18 moths previously.”

BAGPIPE reed-making using cane can be only partly mechanised. It has some clear aspects and requirements, and technical boundaries — “but there is still a lot of art and intuition involved,” said Andy Ross, which is why he finds it difficult to specify exactly what it is that gives his chanter reeds their particular quality.

“It’s a craft,” he said. “You have to use your hands and you have to have a feel for it. And a lot of it’s in the finishing; I pare my reeds with a chisel; its dimensions, the thickness of the blade and the staple.

“But two people can work together side by side at the same bench doing the same thing, and what they produce will be different.

“There are so many subtle ways in which a reed-maker can be different — the ways they use the tools, the tightness of the binding, how far the staple goes in, where you start the lay of the reed — so there’s no single reason why one reed is better than the other. Some people simply can’t do it and, though there are degrees between, you’ll find other people who really have the eye, the feel, the passion for it.”

The formulation of a perfect synthetic mate-rial for chanter reeds would change all of that, but Andy Ross isn’t holding his breath. Neither are his customers.

“Look at how the big-name players and bands have been returning to all the natural materials:

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sheepskin bags, cane reeds and so on. I don’t see being able to get a natural chanter sound with synthetic reed materials, unless some new material comes out of industrial or aerospace research.

“There’s nothing there yet, or we’d be seeing it on other woodwind instruments. I wouldn’t say that it’ll never happen, but I wouldn’t count on it yet.”

Finally, there is the player.Reed manipulation and maintenance can

be taught and an experienced player can take fine control over his or her reeds. But a less ex-perienced player can easily ruin a reed because the tolerances involved are so small. Again, a measure of artistry is involved.

Said piper and scholar Dr Simon McKer-rell, piping co-ordinator for the BA (Scottish Music — Piping) degree programme offered by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in association with the National Pip-ing Centre in Glasgow: “a player is looking for

several things.“The cane should be white; yellowness

means it’s been wet and it’s not going to be hard enough. The ellipse on the mouth of the red needs to be completely symmetrical and the sides of the reeds should be well formed and rounded.

“When you blow it in a chanter, it should make the chanter really vibrate,” he said, “and the intonation should be bang-on from the start. It should be not too strong but just a lit-tle bit stronger when you start playing it than you’d feel comfortable with playing, say, a full piobaireachd.

“If it’s too strong, it’s going to affect the pipes and the drone reeds badly. Stability is the key thing. Sometimes you’ll throw away reeds that are great tuning-wise because they won’t last for the duration of a full tune.

“There are a couple of techniques I’ve heard of to enhance a reed’s stability. One is to soak it in water for 10 minutes, then dry it out

completely and do that three or four nights in a row. It expands and contracts the reed and breaks down the sources of instability.

“But, basically, if a reed’s unstable it’s not worth the hemp it’s tied in with.

“There are all sorts of ways of sanding and shaving reeds but if the quality’s not in the reed it’ll never have it. It’s got to have the quality from the start; you can’t fake it. You can only take cane off; you can’t put it back on.

“The way the reed is made, the way it’s tied in and so on make a massive difference to its quality.

“If you buy reeds in batches, you don’t get so many good ones. I usually find I’ll get one or two reeds that I think are good out of a batch of 20-30. Most makers are really good but, if you go to makers in person, they will come to know what you like and make reeds specifically to your requirements.

“They won’t give you any duff reeds and you can just buy three or four reeds from them.” l