He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune

This story took place in Glasgow, so for practice and also because Inga ordered more English writing, I’ll tell it in English.
I used to play viola in a very good orchestra at Glasgow University. As in Glasgow everything is Kelvin (Don’t walk Kelvin Way!), this was The Kelvin Ensemble. I had to do an audition and I still don’t know why they allowed me in, but it was great playing with them. They performed twice a term and there was a tradition to play one piece in each concert with some sort of link to Scotland. In the first term this was Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, in the second a piece by Peter Maxwell Davies, an English composer who’s been living on the Orkney Island of Hoy for decades now. It was a comical postmodern piece called An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise which made fun of the programme music genre – music with an audible story behind it.

So in An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise you could actually hear the blushing bride walk into the church to the sound of the wedding march, the wedding party arrive in the hall out of violent weather, the musicians tune their instruments, the dancing, how everybody gets more and more drunk, including the band, so that the music finally collapses into cacophonic chaos, and then – ah – the next morning everybody steps outside to watch a beautiful sunrise. This sunrise is personified by the full splendour of highland bagpipes with the piper entering the concert hall from behind the audience and gradually processing on stage as he plays. I’ve never liked bagpipes, they are so horribly out of tune (I know they’re meant to be, still), but they went very well with this piece – truly Scottish but not entirely serious in combination with a classical orchestra.

The piper we had hired wasn’t the brightest guy in the world. Rehearsals with him were a nightmare because he just couldn’t work out when to come in. He was always either too early or too late for the sunrise, and as he was supposed to be waiting outside for his appearance the conductor couldn’t help him with that. Everybody was slightly frightened about the recital – except for the conductor, a cold-blooded professional musician who said to us: He’s definitely going to blow it up (literally), so just remember to watch me when the sunrise is about due.

The piper must have been dead nervous too, because on the night of the concert he managed to lose his car key before taking his pipes and his best kilt out of the car. I don’t know how he fixed that, but he did, and there he was – waiting outside the hall, probably thinking: Shit, why on earth did I ever agree to do this? When he started to play and march towards the stage, it was of course all wrong. But the conductor had a simple solution. Voicelessly, invisibly for the audience, but perfectly readable even for me he mouthed: He is two bars late. Whereupon the whole orchestra jumped back – and that was it. Nobody noticed, certainly not the bloke himself who until the end of his days will be thinking: Ah well, that concert. Tricky piece, but I got it just right.
(In his defence: He looked quite handsome in his kilt, and he made a favourable impression at the Ceilidh dancing after the concert.)