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An hour with Charlie Piggott, traditional accordianist

This is a case where my memory just isn’t going to capture it all. We talked of music and tradition and the old masters who are gone that no one ever heard of. Of spirituality and music, Jungian collective unconscious and the role of that in the transmission of tradition. Of playing in deep connection, a time that scared him actually, where the woman he’s playing with is performing complex reels he’s never heard before, and he’s playing along, note by note, without a clue how he’s doing it. Of how it’s really wrong that the music nearly died out in Ireland, as I had thought, and had to be revived from outside, that the deep music never left the land and the people who lived in it. That the old traditional music is in irregular tempos, just off a nudge. That when the first collectors came through, they couldn’t believe that the local people, shepherds and peasants basically, were making music in complicated time signatures like 7/11, so they wrote it all down as ¾. If anything, I felt a searing searchlight illuminating even more clearly, as if I needed reminding, the depth of my ignorance of the music and the tradition. My mind was on its highest rev, trying to keep up with this man’s complex grasp of areas of knowledge I’m never going to be able to touch. It was a precious hour of my life that I will never be able to recreate.

 11 April 2000
Kinvara, County Galway