These small shades of expression cannot be expressed on the written page.
![quaver def quaver def](https://img.haikudeck.com/mg/B657FC10-B490-40A0-8F99-D79125747B4B.jpg)
Some teachers use gestures and “conduct” the pupil, again to emphasise certain notes. What is far more important are the tone and volume, and of course the tempo, of the different tunes. The words used by teachers when they sing are not important, though many use roughly the same words (see below for details of the Campbell Canntaireachd, an example of words which can be used). It may surprise you to work out how few links there are, to bring you right back to the singing of the MacCrimmons. who has sung to whom - which bring you the music transmitted orally down the centuries. If you go to a highly respected teacher, it can be possible to work out the links – i.e. This is known as “the oral tradition” – because in theory, the singing has passed down the music, through the generations of pipers. How do teachers know what to sing to their pupils? Most pipers learn from a teacher, and the teachers themselves have been taught by someone singing to them, many years previously. A good teacher’s singing is remembered long after the lesson, when the piper is playing the tune, and recalling the ebb and flow of the music. A teacher, singing to his/her pupil, uses lots of different tones and volumes, to show which notes need to be emphasised. The piper must instead play them a bit longer, and/or make the most of the gracenotes on these notes, to express their importance. On an oboe or violin, these notes could be played louder. The bagpipe is an instrument which has a constant volume, and yet in some way the player needs to emphasise some notes more than others, to make the music flow. It could actually be a theme note in some cases, which means it should sound as long (or even longer) than the note which follows. So when reading a piobaireachd gracenote, it might be intended to be long or short. But a note written as a gracenote in Piobaireachd is not always short - some are written as quavers (one tail) or semiquavers (2 tails) rather than demisemiquavers (3 tails). The gracenotes or small notes, are rightly played very short indeed in the light music (namely marches, strathspeys, reels and so on). In a single tune (or even a single bar) a quaver could be long, short, or very short, and the next quaver could be an entirely different length. Quavers, crotchets, and semiquavers cannot be used to express the subtlety of the music. Therefore written music, for example in the Piobaireachd Society books, is not played on the bagpipe, in the same way that it appears on the stave. The nuances of expression cannot be conveyed on the stave.
![quaver def quaver def](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ufAR5fuXEjY/maxresdefault.jpg)
The "song" cannot be accurately represented on the stave in metrical form, as time signatures and bar lines can constrain and possibly distort the melody.
#QUAVER DEF FREE#
Why is singing more important than the written music? The traditional ways, or "songs", of the tunes have been taught by singing, because piobaireachd is characterised by free rhythm - particularly in the Urlar of the tune. The word “Canntaireachd” means “singing” in Gaelic, but rather than this general definition, for pipers it has come to mean the singing of Piobaireachd. All good teachers do sing to their pupils, and this document explains the reasons for this, and gives some examples. Although many pipers learn their tunes form a musical score nowadays, this is no substitute for the teacher singing the tune to his/her pupil. Introduction Piobaireachd is a music which is transmitted orally from teacher to pupil - and for hundreds of years this was the only way to learn the music, until it began to be written down on the 5-line stave in the 19th century.