Opinion: A New Year’s resolution . . . So little time! So much to know!

Searching “resolution” on pipes|drums, several items come up. Maybe it’s near time to reduce the number of posts on New Year’s resolutions a resolution. Maybe next year.

Piping and drumming is ripe for New Year’s resolutions. Resolve to practice more, stop narking at the pipe-major, quit acquiring so many sporrans, always remember to bring your drum home from competitions . . . there’s no end of possibilities.

As the number of years lived run up, one becomes even more conscious of time running down. We’re determined to travel to those places we always wanted to see, read the books we’ve always planned to absorb, and appreciate the people we love more.

As Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD in the epic hallucinogenic animated Beatles film, Yellow Submarine, says: “Ad hoc, ad loc, and quid pro quo! So little time! So much to know!”

I’ve decided on another piping resolution this year: learn more music. Counterintuitively, solo competition limits the repertoire. Many, if not most, competing pipers and drummers get into the habit of defaulting to the stuff they either have to play (band MSRs, set tunes, etc.) or submit because they feel they’ll have the best shot at pleasing the judge and, thus, winning a prize.

Band medleys change more often than MSRs and smaller set pieces, so playing in a band can broaden one’s scope of tunes with somewhat ephemeral assigned music. You learn the stuff and then repeatedly hammer away at it for at least a few years until you hope never to play or hear it again.

As a competitive musician, learning new music can be a dreary chore rather than the magic it truly is.

Without competition, which ironically can suppress the desire to learn new music, and with the benefit of having more hours (though that’s never guaranteed), time can be prioritized to fill in those musical gaps.

I understand why ultra-competitive pipers will submit the same few tunes for their entire careers. Some of the world’s most award-winning players, when they had the chance, always put in their potboilers. Their strategy was to win, win, win, and I suppose that was their sole objective. More power to them.

When one looks at Jack Lee recording nearly 10,000 tunes – TEN-THOUSAND! – the several hundred I’ve learned is positively paltry.

I liked to shake things up every year, introducing several new pieces of light music, and learning new piobaireachds set for the Gold Medal or other events, though a lot of that ceol mor comprised stuff I would never choose to learn. The repertoire added up.

But still, when one looks at Jack Lee recording nearly 10,000 tunes – TEN-THOUSAND! – the several hundred I’ve learned is positively paltry.

So, my resolution is to learn one good tune every day. I’m scheduling a half-hour, from 4 to 4:30 daily, to sit with my practice chanter and memorize a piece that escaped me over the last 45 years.

I figured Willie Ross Book 1 would be a good place to start. I played the first tune in the collection, “The Abercairney Highlanders” (or, as P-M Angus MacDonald called it, “The Piper’s Graveyard”), for many years, so I turned the page. Lo and behold, there was “The Edinburgh Volunteers,” a tune I’ve listened to at least a thousand times but never memorized on my fingers.

It’s one of those old-style 2/4 marches with a predictable call-and-response structure, unlike today’s compositions that are often determined never to repeat a part identically. That (and because I knew it in my head, if not my hands) made memorizing it a 15-minute deal. By 20 minutes, I could rattle through it without the score. I might have to refer to the music today, but I still learned it (even if I didn’t learn it).

I don’t know what un-memorized good tune follow in Ross Book 1, but I’m resolved to turn the page, memorize it, and the next, and the next, for the next 360 days and beyond.

All things being equal (and they never are), I should be close to Jack Lee’s count by around 2045.

What’s your piping/drumming resolution for 2025? Feel free to share using our Comments tool below.