Tuesday, November 30, 2010




15 comments:

  1. dammit where are our photos!!! I demand the video of our photos, I am not pleased!!!

    PS Not from you Mimi. From He Who Shall Not Be Named. :-(

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  2. Cathy, If I could make the video, I would. I want our pictures, too!

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  3. "Amazing grace" is an English hymn, Mimi - and "New Britain", the tune to which it is usually sung today, American (US).

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  4. Lapin, that's good to know. The Scots are allowed to play the tune on the pipes, right? If not, they break the rules willy-nilly.

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  5. I think it's US Scots-wanabees who play it on the pipes, Mimi. American bagpipe players have just two tunes - "Amazing Grace" and "Scotland the Brave". A woman asked me, of a kilted bagpiper playing at a street festival, "Can you believe that he's only been playing for four months?" Won't bore you with my answer.

    The French have two smaller, more versatile, far more attractive, traditional instruments called the cornamuse and, smallest, musette.

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  6. Mimi, we took pics of that lighthouse wot appears halfway through.

    "Cornamuse" and "musette" are such pretty words. Is this a legacy of the old attachment between France and Scotland, just out of interest, Lapin? ...

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  7. No, they're both French instruments, Cathy - lovely names, as you note. Wonder if they're still heard in Louisiana.

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  8. Lapin, I used the video for the pictures. "Amazing Grace" was lagniappe.

    I don't recall seeing anything like the musette. The cornamuse looks something like a recorder, but larger.

    Cathy, I thought I recognized the lighthouse.

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  9. The cornamuse is both a reeded Renaissance wind instrument and a smallish French bagpipe,now traditional, as I recall, to the Massif Central. The link I posted is to a beautifully-played bagpipe.

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  10. Cathy, I can't find a picture of the lighthouse in my collection. I thought I had one.

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  11. This never struck me at the time but with my downstairs neighbours maybe what I should have done was taken up the bagpipes.

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  12. Cathy, my sister had a good friend whose husband played the bagpipes. She claimed she lived with a constant headache. Finally, she convinced her husband to build an outbuilding for practicing the pipes, but they got divorced anyway.

    If you get noisy neighbors again, you can give the pipes a try.

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  13. Lapin, I finally watched the videos, and I see the cornamuse is nothing like a recorder. The two performances are quite good. Thanks for the links.

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  14. "Amazing Grace" was written by a one-time slave trader. There's someone who might need a pile of grace! I first heard this from an evangelist of some stripe on a Sunday morning at Hyde Park Corner

    Before mentioning this I had to take a quick look to see if I had the facts more or less right, and his story turns out more interesting than I knew. It's easily found in Wikipedia, of course.

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  15. Porlock, Newton led an interesting life, indeed. He influenced William Wilberforce who labored for 26 years before he finally succeeded in getting the slave trade abolished in England. I have the movie titled "Amazing Grace", which is the story of William Wilberforce's efforts, discouragements, and final success in getting the Slave Trade Act passed in 1807. Oh, that the US had done the same! We'd not only have done right, but we'd have saved ourselves a heap of trouble and tragedy.

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