FORGOTTEN WOODWINDS IN MUSEUMS
“Musical instruments are not just like any other “object” in the museum storage. They are like living things, dying away in storage, begging to be played again. At least this is how the musician sees it!
Without producing sound, these objects communicate only part of their story, and sooner or later, silently die away.
– How can we safely bring them back to life again?
– How can we learn from them, extract the most possible data, and hopefully still some music, without damaging them?
– What are the working protocols in place for institutions like the Sibelius Academy and the Finnish museums?
– How may we develop collaborative practices in which we meet the concerns shared by conservators, researchers and musicians, never losing sight of the best interests of the historic objects?
– How do we bring credibility to bagpipe research and fresh air from beyond the regional bubbles of expertise and established thinking?”

Special Guest Aki Arponen (Finland)

Aki finished his studies in conservation in 1997 and has worked in the National Museum of Finland for the past 23 years. Although specialised in the conservation of archaeological metal objects he has vast experience with all kinds of objects including musical instruments. In addition to his work as a conservator, he actively develops “conservation methods” and participates in the “exhibition” and “loan” processes of museum artefacts.
Aki holds a Master’s degree in Archeology and is conducting a PhD research concerning the medieval relic kept in the Turku Cathedral. In his thesis, Aki connects humanities with natural sciences in order to answer the questions – “Whose relic it is?”, “How old it is?” and “Where is it from?” among other research questions.

Simon Waters (UK | Northern Ireland)
Simon Waters joined the staff of the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast in September 2012, moving from his previous role as senior lecturer and Director of Electroacoustic Studios at the University of East Anglia (1994 – 2012). He is also an associate researcher of the Orpheus Instituut, Gent (2016-present). In the 1980s he established a reputation as a composer of electroacoustic music, working with many of the world’s major contemporary dance companies. His more recent work is at least as concerned with human conduct (what people do musically) as with how things sound. He teaches performance and composition, and has also taught courses in interaction design, improvisation, and music and material culture. He is preoccupied by instrument making in the broadest sense, which leads him both to build experimental instruments and to research the technologies on which music depends, whether these are historical or contemporary. He has supervised over fifty research students in areas as diverse as improvising machines and autonomous instruments, inexpertise in musical interaction, silence and silencedness, sound and the built environment, digital ethnography, post-club music, and the 3D modelling of historic instruments, as well as in more explicitly ‘compositional’ areas. His publications are similarly diverse, recent examples exploring empathy and ethics in improvised conduct, woodwind instrument production in eighteenth century London, the notion of the ‘local’ in a ubiquitously digitized world, and hybrid physical/virtual instrument design.

Ulrich Morgenstern (Germany | Austria)
Ulrich Morgenstern was born in Gießen, Germany (1964), and from 1986 to 1993 studied Systematic Musicology, East Slavic Studies and History at the University of Hamburg. In 2003 he gained a PhD in Systematic Musicology, gaining a further post-doctoral qualification (Habilitation) in Systematic musicology at the same University in 2011. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Frankfurt a.M. (2009–2011) and Cologne (2012), and in 2012 was appointed Professor of History and Theory of Folk Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. His specialist areas of research are: European folk music and folk musical instruments with a special focus on Russia; multipart instrumental music; European history of folk music research and music anthropology, history of performer-centred research; revival movements and contemporary folk music scenes in Russia, Germany, and Austria; folk music research, ethnomusicology, and political ideologies. Fieldwork studies since 1989 have included: European Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Romania, Turkey, and Georgia.
He is a member of the International Council for Traditional Music (Chair of the Study Group on Music and Dance of the Slavic World), European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, and the Galpin Society.
Photo: Valentina Roșu

Barnaby Brown (Scotland | UK)
Barnaby Brown is the first Highland piper to apply the principles of the early music movement to pibroch. His recordings, articles and editions have helped to revolutionize the way pipers approach the sources of pibroch (1760–1850), enriching the tradition beyond the legacy of the competition system. His quest to revive the northern triplepipe, the Highland bagpipe’s predecessor, led to six years in Sardinia and the formation of Band-Re with guitarist Gianluca Dessí, and from 2006 to 2012 Barnaby was a lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
His passion for giving a contemporary voice to ancient instruments has led to four projects with Delphian Records – In Praise of Saint Columba: the sound world of the Celtic Church (2014), Spellweaving: ancient music from the Highlands of Scotland (2016), Set upon the Rood: new music for choir & ancient instruments (2017) and Apollo & Dionysus: sounds from Classical Antiquity (2018). The first two were informed by his doctoral research on Hebridean piping at the University of Cambridge. A founding member of the European Music Archaeology Project (EMAP), he created www.doublepipes.info to serve its Auloi/Tibiae Revival Project and directed the first Euterpe doublepipe school, which EMAP organized in 2018.
Barnaby disseminates academic research widely, for example supplying music for the action game Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017), set in ancient Egypt, and appearing in the Netflix movie Outlaw King (2018), leading Hebridean psalm-singing. He actively addresses issues of respectability and scholarly integrity surrounding all performers who draw on ‘Very Early’ materials by co-designing scientific experiments, which generate new knowledge through interdisciplinary collaboration, in tandem with experiences appropriate for entertainment and education, which are vital for attracting and training competent co-investigators.
Photo: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ancient-greeks/

Zexuan Qiao (China | UK)
Zexuan is a woodwind instrument maker, an interaction designer, a virtual developer and a printmaker. His work has been focused on modelling and 3D printing of flutes and bagpipes based on historical models.
Zexuan has received a Masters degree in Architecture (with distinction) from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. There he has specialized in the modelling techniques and interaction design skills necessary to work with objects for performance.
Zexuan is currently a PhD candidate at the Queen’s University Belfast, studying the theme of “border small pipes” of Scotland and England.

FREE ADMISSION,  4th March 2022

LIVE at the Musiikkitalo, Helsinki
or via ZOOM https://uniarts.zoom.us/j/66930191508

We are happy to announce the 2nd edition of our Bagpipe Network meeting. The theme of this year’s edition is Forgotten Woodwinds in Museums.

FORGOTTEN WOODWINDS IN MUSEUMS
“Musical instruments are not just like any other “object” in the museum storage. They are like living things, dying away in storage, begging to be played again. At least this is how the musician sees it!
Without producing sound, these objects communicate only part of their story, and sooner or later, silently die away.
– How can we safely bring them back to life again?
– How can we learn from them, extract the most possible data, and hopefully still some music, without damaging them?
– What are the working protocols in place for institutions like the Sibelius Academy and the Finnish museums?
– How may we develop collaborative practices in which we meet the concerns shared by conservators, researchers and musicians, never losing sight of the best interests of the historic objects?
– How do we bring credibility to bagpipe research and fresh air from beyond the regional bubbles of expertise and established thinking?”

WHO IS COMING
This year’s meeting will focus on forgotten woodwinds in museums and will host live at the Musiikkitalo the speakers Zexuan Qiao (China), Barnaby Brown (Scotland), Simon Waters (Northern Ireland), Ulrich Morgenstern (Austria), and Aki Arponen (Finland)
For the first time, the meeting encourages a conversation around bagpipes also between the Sibelius Academy Folk Music and Music Technology Departments, and similar international departments, professors and Doctoral Candidates, coming from the Queen’s University of Belfast (Sonic Arts Research Center), The University of Music and Performing Arts of Vienna, and Cambridge University.

MORNING PRESENTATIONS Black Box – Musiikkitalo

10:00am GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

“Opening” Welcoming words by Sibelius Academy, Folk Music Department Prof. Kristiina Ilmonen 

~ 10:00am GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

“3D Printing – Revelations from the past, insight into the future” 3D printers have been widely available to the commercial market for over a decade now. This technology has resulted in many innovative music projects over the years. How can we use 3D printing for musical instrument making? This presentation will reveal those 3D-printed instruments, and demonstrate that the technology not only allows us to make new instruments but may also throw light on those from the past. […]  by Zexuan Qiao (China | UK) 

~ 10:30am GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

“Problems measuring Hellenic auloi and the Iain Dall chanter” The worlds of historical instrument making are human: a creative chaos characterised by inconsistency and cultural bias. Practice and intention are normally out of alignment. Uplifting knowledge and practical skills are either locked in silos or long dead. What are the key problems dragging down standards? From the perspectives of customer, maker, researcher, and museum curator, Barnaby Brown reflects on 25 years of practical experience breathing life into reconstructions of elite double-reed pipes: the instruments that led worship, accompanied drama, and buried warrior kings. […]  by Barnaby Brown (Scotland | UK)

~ 11:00am GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

“Russian reedpipes in museums, in organology and public discourses” Until two decades ago, reed aerophones were nearly absent in the Russian revival scene – due to the loss of ergological skills and, sometimes, to a lower emblematical value as national instruments. Nowadays, non-academic revivalists have gained much more knowledge about these, and many other types of traditional musical instruments, than ethno-organologists. […] by Ulrich Morgenstern (Germany | Austria)

~ 11:30am GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

“Entanglements with instruments: Musical Instruments and Museums” Musical instruments are dynamic systems – not static ‘conservable’ objects, but items in a constant state of change, seasoning, adjustment and decay. They are also crucial indices of human activity – narratives of use and value – which can frequently only be appreciated through being actively engaged with. Without such intimate engagement, knowledge is lost. Often the real experts in ‘conservation’ are not conservators, but those ‘private collectors’ who engage in active dialogue with their instruments – players. […]  by Simon Waters (UK | Northern Ireland)

AFTERNOON ACTIVITIES Camerata – Musiikkitalo

~ 14:00 GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

CALL TO ACTION ON NEW PROJECTS A wiki for all things bagpipe and other projects
Zexuan Qiao | Gonçalo Cruz

~ 14:30 GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION Forgotten Woodwinds in Museums: Can we do better?
Zexuan Qiao | Barnaby Brown | Simon Waters | Ulrich Morgenstern | Aki Arponen
Host: Gonçalo Cruz

~ 16:30 GMT +02:00 (Helsinki time)

CLOSING: INFORMAL MUSIC RECITAL
An Assortment of pipes – Play us a tune, will you?
Open stage to speakers and audience

The second episode of “Piper Staccato – A short interview”, this time with Marieke Van Ransbeeck
Piper staccato, a podcast produced by Gonçalo Cruz, is aimed as an international pro-bono project creating cultural bridges.

On this episode, this talented piper from Belgium lets us know how she became in love with bagpipes and tells us all about her current projects and her band Farandi – www.farandi.com
As usual, she also answered our “Staccato Questioner” – tips & tricks, likes and dislikes, of the world of bagpipes.

Marieke is a former student of the Sibelius Academy (University of the Arts Helsinki).
She holds a Masters in Early Music [LUCA School Of Arts – Leuven, Belgium], a Masters in Nordic Folk [Syddansk Musikkonsercatorium – Esbjerg, Denmark], and an extensive background in piping.
…………………………………………………………….

Nordic Masters in Folk Music:

Syddansk Musikkonservatorium in Esbjerg (DK)
Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (FIN)
Kungliga Musikhögskolan in Stockholm (SWE)
Ole Bull Academy in Voss (NOR).

The 2020 FIL – Festival Interceltique Lorient, appears not to have been cancelled… At least so far.
Every year a different world culture is celebrated. This year’s edition, the 50th, is under the theme “Bretagne” (Brittany) and will take place from the 7th-16th of August 2020.

It was my pleasure to visit the festival in previous editions and to make a podcast covering the event.
I share it here again, under the homeness of the Corona Pandemic, hoping for a “well-thought-out”, “safe”, but “speedy” re-opening of all cultural activities in the world.

It was a great experience with Gustavo Lobão (in the video) and 2 other very close friends and also pipers. An adventure I will certainly repeat in the future…
…will it be this year, I do it?…

Festival Interceltique Lorient

This and other news at www.GoncaloCruz.com/BLOG

Finnd’it founder, Gonçalo Cruz, presented his doctoral research “Forgotten Bagpipes – The Re-design of the Säkkipilli in Finland” at the Musiikkitalo (Helsinki Music Center) on Tuesday 10th March.
He introduced the audience to our project – “The Finnd’ít initiative” – and asked for the support of all.
Here is the video of his presentation, shared and promoted by the University of Arts of Helsinki on their YouTube channel.
The Sibelius Academy is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its Doctor of music degree. So this year, the two-day event called SibA Research Days 2020, had a special flavour. It was a great atmosphere, and I enjoyed very much sharing my ideas, discussing them with fellow researchers, and get in touch with their own particular research projects.

More videos & news at www.GoncaloCruz.com