Ed Neigh, the second son of Ed and
Charlotte Neigh, was born on May 22nd, 1945 in Galt, Ontario, which
is now Cambridge, and raised in nearby Stratford. His mother worked
for the Stratford Festival and his father, who was a school teacher
and vice principal, also worked as the Festival reporter for the
local paper. “It was quite exciting,” Ed recalls.
“Theatre people were always around. We never knew, when we came in
from playing, whether it would be just the family for dinner or
whether some high commissioner from some third world country was
going to be there, or some Hollywood movie star. The theatre was a
part of our lives. I probably saw every performance during the first
ten years of the Festival.”
Ed received a degree in History and English from Sir Wilfred Laurier
University and has taught high school for thirty years. Currently,
he’s a secondary teacher/librarian in the small rural town of
Listowel, north of Kitchener. “It’s a great place,” says Ed.
“It’s like going back in time twenty-five years or so, where
kids say please and thank you. It’s a happy place where people
tend to get along. I live in a town called Wellesley, a Mennonite
town, where the horse and buggy is a common sight on the streets,
even today.” A teacher as well, his wife, Margaret was born and
raised in Burnside, Rutherglen, just outside of Glasgow, Scotland
and was at the University of Glasgow when they met. They have four
children.
Geoff, Ed’s older brother, expressed an interest an interest in
learning to play bagpipes first. “When I said I’d like to do
that too, my father said I was too young. The day after Geoff’s
first lesson, there was a picture in the paper of the chanter class
and there was someone from my elementary school class who was
younger than I was. I said that’s it. If he can learn, I can learn
too. I really started more out of thrawnness and stubbornness than
out of any love of bagpipes.”
About a year after they started, the boys went to watch the local
band getting ready to play in a parade. “They struck up and played
the first two tunes we had been given,” says Ed, “The
Brown Haired Maiden and Teribus. I turned to my older brother and
said, ‘That’s really neat. Why don’t they teach us something
like that?’ You see, up to that point, I couldn’t even recognize
the tunes I was learning! It was startling to realize that this
stuff could become music! I was an athlete in school, a hockey
player, football, basketball and so on. In the early days, piping
was just another athletic event which involved a lot of precise
finger movements that had to be performed correctly. It was
something I did because I had success with it. I wasn’t
particularly passionate about it, not back then.”
Ed’s high school had a cadet corps and there were enough
young pipers and drummers to form a cadet pipe band. He went to band
practice two noon hours a week. The guys were from several different
bands and wore different uniforms. “If we were missing a bass
drummer,” Ed recalls, “then I would teach someone to play. It
was the same with the tenor drummers - I learned how to swing and
then taught others how to do it. The last couple of years, I ended
up running the band.”
Ed also played in the Perth Regiment Pipe Band, a militia band that
started up and got a Scottish affiliate during World War II. “The
man who taught us was basically self taught, a man named John
Skinner, and he was not a bad player. Every time he’d run into
someone who knew how to play, he’d ask them how to do something,
so he kept expanding his knowledge that way. He had fairly correct
execution and a good sense of the music. His idea of practicing,
however, was to sit down with the chanter and sight-read every tune
in a music book. He was an excellent sight reader, but I don’t
think his memorized repertoire was ever very large.”
When he was fifteen, Ed went to Gordon Tuck for lessons. “Gordon
was pipe major of the St. Thomas Legion, later to become the St.
Thomas Police and then the MacNish Distillery Pipe Band, a top Grade
I band. He was a man who’s place in piping history, unfortunately,
is very underrated. He was the first person ever to set pipe
chanters together the way we do today. He had this crystal clear
tone in the early sixties that the bands in Scotland weren’t
getting till the middle eighties! He had an amazing ear and was
fanatical about bagpipe tone. I wanted to go to him for lessons but
my parents wouldn’t drive me. John Skinner announced that he
wanted to go for lessons too. He used to drive me every second
Sunday, 120 miles round trip, but he didn’t really want lessons.
He just wanted to make it possible for me to have them. You
couldn’t do more for a kid than this guy did.”
“Gordy Tuck was certainly the best player of light music in
Ontario at that time,” says Ed, “but there was no one in my area
teaching piobaireachd so I didn’t learn it until I was about
twenty-two. When you learn something at twenty-two, you don’t
forget it. It took me years to develop a decent crunluath, but
I’ve never lost it.”
Ed piped at the Stratford Festival and held down another job at the
same time, saving up enough money to go over to Scotland for a year.
“I knew, from reading the Piping Times,” he says, “that the
premier piobaireachd player at that time was John MacFadyen. As soon
as I got there, I went along and introduced myself to the great man
and asked if I could come to him for lessons. He taught me for that
winter. It wasn’t like you had your hour once a week; I went at
least three and sometimes five times and I spent the next fifteen
years going to his summer schools.”
John MacFadyen was an elementary school teacher in Barrhead. Ed and
a Scot named Dugald Murdoch, who had emigrated to New Zealand,
would go along after school for lessons. During the hour, John would
play a piobaireachd, followed by Dugald and Ed. “John would
always play first. He would tell us what he was going to play and we
would sit with the music in front of us and listen. In this way, he
got to play his pipes and play piobaireachd between three and five
times a week, and not only play, but play before an audience of
neophytes who worshipped at his feet! He didn’t want to make a
mistake in front of us; that would be the worst thing he could
imagine! At the end of six months, I had learned only six
piobaireachds, but I could stand up and play any one of those six
piobaireachds today and not worry about making a mistake, I learned
them so completely and so well.”
John MacFadyen came over to the United States and, together with
Sandy Jones, started the North American Academy of Piping. “Unlike
other teachers who came over here and patronized us and told us we
were good when we weren’t, and took our money and patted us on the
head, John never told us it was good until it was as good as he
could play it himself. At that time, he was the best player in the
world, and it was hard to reach that level of performance, but we
tried.
“I can remember the first time I played a tune that he thought was
good. It was when I was in Scotland. It had always been ‘Mr.
Neigh’ or ‘Mr. MacFadyen’, and you wore a tie to the lesson
every day. I remember I played the Battle of Auldearn, setting # 2.
My bagpipe was really good and for the first time I felt I really
played a piobaireachd. I was finished and was putting the pipe in
the box when I heard this voice saying, ‘Tell me Ed,’ and I
didn’t know who was talking to me because it had always been Mr.
Neigh and Mr. MacFadyen before, and this voice said, ‘Which way do
you go home? I thought we might stop for a drink.’ It was John
MacFadyen. That was after two and a half months of lessons and I
realized then that I had made it.
MacFadyen taught many pipers, including Bill Livingstone, Jim
McGillivray, John Goodenow and David Martin. For the first fifteen
years of the Canadian Gold Medal, every person that won it was
either a pupil of John MacFadyen or a pupil of a pupil of his. He
had a tremendous influence on the development of piobaireachd
playing in eastern North America.
Another of the major influences on piping in Ontario at that time
was John Wilson. He inspired a standard of judging that helped Ed
and many others. First and foremost, he insisted that the bagpipe
had to be in tune, and secondly that players couldn’t miss any
execution or they wouldn’t be considered for the prize lists.
“When we started going to compete in Scotland,” says Ed, “we
were amazed that the top players over there missed execution all the
time - not like today; the top players don’t miss execution today.
But back then, that was only a minor detail if you were a Scottish
player. If you were a Canadian, however, and missed even a single
gracenote, you were out of the prizes, but if you were one of the
top Scots and missed them, you could still win the major awards. I
once complained to Michael Grey that there were two sets of rules
and he said, ‘Two? I know of at least ten!’”
Ed competed in Scotland regularly in the ‘70s and had quite a bit
of success. “It has been my fate in life to have missed the major
prizes at Oban and Inverness,” he says, “but I’ve had some
very close calls. Whether or not I’ll ever get them now, I’m not
so sure because I’m not so hungry for them any more. When I was in
what you might call my prime, I was probably putting 75-80% of my
energies into running a Grade I band. Still, I won most of the major
North American prizes including Maxville three times, and some major
Scottish prizes including the Dunvegan Medal, the march at Oban, and
I played in the Silver Chanter on Skye. I was made to feel very
welcome, especially by the other players who went round the games.
There were days when you scratched your head over the prize lists,
but the players themselves - John Burgess, Hugh MacCallum, Iain
MacFadyen, and the others - treated me very well. I used to win
prizes up the east coast in places like Aboyne and Braemar and I
loved going to those contests because you could corner Bob Brown in
the beer tent afterwards and get him to sing you every piobaireachd
you wanted to hear. You just kept asking for them and he’d keep
singing them to you, which was great.”
When Ed came back from his year in Scotland, he played a last season
with St. Thomas and then took over the City of Guelph Pipe
Band. It had been placed 17th in Grade 3 at the World’s the year
before. Under Ed’s leadership, the band moved up to Grade 2 and
played there for three seasons before moving into Grade I. “It was
always a teaching band,” says Ed, “always a band full of
young people, and it was the first Grade I band in our circuit to
have women players. It wasn’t that we had any special liberal
sentiments, but it was a case of let the women play or we wouldn’t
have enough players to compete! Some of the other bands used to
complain about being beaten by women and children. They didn’t
like it. We won at Maxville twice over a period of seven years, and
we were second the other five times. We had major successes against
Scottish bands, winning the CNE one year and placing fifth another.
That was the era before North American bands could reasonably expect
to win prizes in the World Championships, something that is now
common.”
In 1981, Ed’s City of Guelph Pipe Band won first in piping at the
Cowal Games. “That was the year that they dropped either the
highest or the lowest piping score and the two judges wouldn’t
know until after they sent in their sheets which way it would go.
Anyway, they dropped the low score that day and we won the piping. I
met one of the judges in the beer tent afterwards and he said,
‘Ed, I placed you first today, and that likely means I’ll never
get to judge again!’ It wasn’t quite true, what he said, because
he has judged since. The amazing thing about that day that convinced
me that we shouldn’t bother to play in Scotland again, however, is
that we beat the likes of the Glasgow Police in piping, and didn’t
get to walk off the field with the prize!”
Ed taught school in Scotland in 1975-76. “My wife wanted to have
one of our children over there and that mission was accomplished
when our oldest daughter was born. I also wanted the opportunity to
go to someone else for piobaireachd lessons, so I went along to
Donald MacLeod, probably the most famous native of the Isle of
Lewis, who had studied with the great John MacDonald of Inverness. I
took an hour and a half lesson with him every week and during my
year there we went through more than a hundred tunes. We started
slow, but the pace got brutal by the time I was nearing the end of
my stay. I would be getting half a dozen tunes in a lesson by that
time. I was fortunate in that the man I was replacing at school was
able to come back to work for half days starting in January so I had
lots of free time to practice my piobaireachd.
“Donald’s background and knowledge of piobaireachd was the
complete opposite of what I had already had from John MacFadyen.
John would take liberties with the tunes. He found the music in the
long notes, and the short notes, he just threw away. He seemed to
hold the long notes forever and make the most beautiful music.
Donald, on the other hand, played the long notes in balanced lengths
and had the most incredible subtlety with the short notes. It seemed
that the music was all in these little notes and what he could draw
out of them. Needless to say, the early part of my time with him was
extremely frustrating. Eventually, because I was playing so much,
and I had some excellent advice from Captain John MacLellan who was
the head of the Army School of Piping at the time, I sort of put
together what I liked from John and Donald.”
Both John MacFadyen and Donald MacLeod had passed away by the mid
80’s and Ed started going to John MacLellan who had another
completely different approach. “He didn’t try to teach you to
play a tune exactly as he played it. He just tried to open your mind
to other possibilities, and he would do this with rambling stories
about someone who had played the tune somewhere. You had to be
listening or you’d miss the whole point and how the story related
to what you were trying to do. He was extremely knowledgeable,
another man who will be missed by the entire piping world.
“By the end of the 70’s, I was doing everything I could to get
out of band work. I had four children and aging parents, and I
wasn’t hungry enough for the prizes to be mean enough to make the
band play the way I wanted it to. Once I started being nice to
people at band practice, I knew it was time to quit! When I was
fifteen, I decided that someday I would have a band that would win
in Maxville and I did that in 1976 for the first time, but looking
back, I think the times I enjoyed the most were those days on a
Sunday afternoon in the park when the band played exactly the way I
had visualized it perhaps a year before and everyone finally got it
all together and did what I wanted.
“One of the things that has happened to me as a result of being a
player and learning and studying, and being quite analytical about
the music, is that I’ve come up with what some might consider
rather bizzar theories. In fact, I put on someone’s score sheet
today (Antigonish Indoor Meet, May 23, 1998) a little maxim ‘the
rounder you play, the faster you have to play’ and I put a little
footnote at the bottom of the page, ‘Neigh’s Rules of Tempo,
Number 117’! I hope the kid has a sense of humour!
“But, truthfully, I have developed some theories about why we play
bagpipes the way we do. In fact, I’m looking forward to retiring
and being able to put this stuff in print because I’ve been using
it in clinics. It’s a real thrill for me when I explain something
to someone and they say, ‘So that’s how it works!’. For
example, we were discussing how to play the taorluaths before
cadences at the awards ceremony at the ACPBA Piobaireachd Challenge
competition on Friday evening. You have a beat which has four pulses
in it. Normally you start the taorluath and play that to the next
Low A in the next pulse, but if you do it the way Scott MacAulay was
saying, you don’t start the taorluath until the next beat. In
other words, you hold it one quarter of a beat longer and that’s
how it makes sense rhythmically. Then your cadence works because it
becomes a triplet. That’s the sort of thing I had been puzzling
over for years and if I had never gone to Donald MacLeod, I don’t
think I would ever have gotten started in a lot of these directions.
“Another thing that piping gave to me that I never expected is,
when I taught people how to play, taught the band how to play, I
never dreamed that fifteen years later I would be flying all over
North America doing clinics and judging and so on. It never entered
my head that this would happen. We didn’t realize that the
standard was exploding and we were at the forefront of that. When I
was a kid, a competitive career usually ended by the time you were
twenty-five. Now, at fifty-two, I’m still going strong. Piping is
not only for the young and spry!”
Ed is a member of the Music Board for the PPBSO, and was chairman of
the advisory council for a number of years. He judged the World
Championships in 1988 and in 1996 and will be judging there again
this year. He writes articles for piping magazines - The Voice, The
Piping Times and The Piper and Drummer - and he has one of the best
collections of piobaireachd music books in North America. “I have
the manuscripts on microfilm and some of them have been converted
into hard copies so, when I go to play Donald MacDonald’s setting,
I just get out my book because I have the book! I also have Angus
MacKay’s manuscript and the Nether Lorne Canntaireachd and the
MacArthur manuscript, and so on.”
Ed teaches a few private pupils now but plans to teach more when he
retires. He does some composing and plans to release a book of his
own. He has done recitals, solo recordings, and his City of Guelph
band also made a recording. “We’ve been looking at putting cuts
from that and other out-of-print recordings on CDs this winter -
sort of a ‘Great Bands Of The ‘70’s Series’ which would
include Guelph, Clan MacFarlane, St. Thomas and others. You see, we
recorded all the Championship contests during the 70’s and we have
all that material. There’s a lot of piping repertoire that the
bands today never heard of and it will be good to get it out.”
Ed has a head full of projects including a piobaireachd tutor.
“I’m just desperate to get that out because there are areas,
like here in Nova Scotia, where people are struggling to get a
handle on the music. I can give them something that will help. I can
explain how and why certain things work the way they do.”
Advice to young players - “Keep on playing the traditional music.
I think all the current fast, rhythmical stuff is great to get your
hands going, but there is a level of sophistication in 2/4 marches
and so on that will eventually give more satisfaction. Another
important bit of advice - I think every piper should play
piobaireachd. It is the height of the art form, the most difficult,
and develops you as a player. I’m sure that if I had not become a
piobaireachd player I would not have had what is called a
‘piping career’, because jigs and hornpipes only hold so much
interest for so long. You tire of them quickly.”
Advice to teachers - “Try every new way you can, because the
way we’ve been teaching bagpipes up to now is not the only way to
do it. The Suzuki teachers that my kids study violin with, even the
Scottish National Orchestra Choir - their rehearsals are just like
band practices. Go and learn from them.”
Advice to judges - “You don’t get to
a point where you stop piping and start judging. As a judge, you
have the responsibility to grow and change along with the music that
is growing and changing. Judging doesn’t mean retirement from the
piping community.”
Opinion of piping in the Maritimes -
“I think it’s fabulous! You’ve got a lot of people here doing
some great teaching. I think of the Heatherbells and their
performance today, for example. I remember their first trials last
year after many years of not competing. This year, they have nothing
to be ashamed of. They are playing great. They’ve had a real turn
around. They used to be a band that prided themselves in how well
their tenor drummers twirled their sticks and now they are getting
serious about how you play the music. It’s great!
“There are teachers here with knowledge, skill, and dedication to
their pupils that is just phenomenal. In fact, I don’t think
I’ve seen anything to compare with it anywhere else, except
perhaps in Scotland. Here, you have a small piping community but
such a large number with the potential to become world class
players. When you sit and judge amateurs, you’re always looking
for the kid that could be the next Gold Medal winner. Well, I heard
lots of them this weekend. In fact, the Nova Scotian bands and
soloists have done really well at the North American Championships
in the last number of years and that says that you guys are really
doing something right down here in regards to how to bring players
along. I have a suspicion that in Ontario we burn them out with too
many contests. It’s too high pressure. It’s not relaxed enough.
I get the sense down here that it is less competitive, the players
value each other’s friendship. There seems to be a greater respect
down here for each other and for the culture that piping is part of.
You seem to understand that here.”
