Pipes and Tailors

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 363, 7 June 1946, Page 15

Pipes and Tailors

T is open to doubt whether pipe music sounds as well as it should over the air. A large if incalculable proportion of its exciting quality depends on seeing as well as hearing, while the sound itself only reaches full development in

the open air. Coming out of a set, to the average listener one march sounds rather like another-though the ‘slow march tempo remains impressive. Deprived of some of the impressiveness of the music, one diversifies a pipe band programme by studying the titles of the airs, observing which are described as (trad.) and which not, and which actually are-not always the same thing;

"The Barren Rocks of Aden," for example, must have been composed by somebody. An interesting result was yielded the other night, when the City of Christchurch Pipe Band played a reel with the intriguing title of "The De’il Amang the Tailors." It remains one 2f history’s lesser oddities how the tradition grew up, apparently in the late Middle Ages, that a tailor was to be accounted less than a man. How did this come about? It may be that the physicai attitude and working conditions of the tailor’s craft (which produced examples of sweated labour down to the present century) led to a stunted ‘and hollowchested appearance. At all events, jokes" of a fairly detailed character about the alleged lack of manhood among taiJors persist throughout Elizabethan and subsequent literature,