Bagpipe Blues -- A Haunting Highland Skirl Or A Wounded Duck?

What you're about to read is either a dire warning or an irresistible lure.

Members of the Washington Scottish Pipe Band are going to play for this Saturday's 7 p.m. opening at the Art/Not Terminal Gallery at Westlake and Virginia.

Already you are shuddering in anticipation - or horror. For many, it will be horror; the bagpipes have come in for their share of bad press over the centuries, often from enemies of the Scottish forces who used the pipes to summon the troops and to spur them on to victory. (The pipes also may have had a function in forcing the enemy to retreat.)

But for the rest of us, even those with barely a drop of Scottish blood, the sound of the pipes is a magical sound, one that stirs the senses and the imagination. And several years ago, when I heard the lament of the bagpipes floating off the battlements of Edinburgh Castle to serenade the city below, I thought: Why not learn to play the bagpipes?

In a rush of enthusiasm, we headed for a purveyor of pipes and all their trappings on the Edinburgh Mile, and with a flourish of the Visa card I became the proud owner of set of bagpipes. They went home separately because they wouldn't fit in the luggage.

After all, I reasoned, the bagpipe is a folk instrument. I already can play a couple of wind instruments at a basic level. How hard could this be? (That's one of those rhetorical questions that come back to haunt you later.)

Armed with plenty of advice from the bagpipe shop, I also got a practice chanter - the recorder-like pipe you play with the fingers - and an instruction manual. When you start with these, you get your first inkling that playing the pipes is not going to be a lead-pipe cinch.

With increasing consternation, I read such directions as: "The bag should be dressed on the inside periodically, or when required with a bag dressing supplied by a bagpipe maker according to the directions on the container. Pure honey is also recommended."

Then I looked at the practice tunes, filled with demisemiquavers (or 32nd notes), and notes for the practice of leumluaths, grips, taorluaths, the On Crunluath Fosgailte, and various other piobaireachd exercises. The text has such helpful pointers as: "The first notes being doubled be sure to put on the second notes smartly with the E finger."

What nobody tells you is that when you play the practice chanter, it's going to sound like a wounded duck, nothing like the noble skirl of the complete pipes. On and on you labor through "The 92nd Gordon Highlanders' March" or "Neil Gow's Farewell to Whiskey."

What you hear is "quack, quack, quack."

Perhaps it'll sound better if you try the whole bagpipe. But getting this thing into position is no picnic: It slithers around your shoulders like a tartan anaconda. The metal-tipped drone pipes flop about, conking you on the head. You retire in disorder, much as the foes of the Highlanders must have done as the pipers made their menacing advance.

All this is very humbling, as is the immediate realization that what I need is to take lessons. And someday, when I have a very, very large chunk of free time, that is exactly what I'll do.

In the meantime, the bagpipes are sitting in an upstairs closet, thumbing their chanter at me. They've won and they know it. The pipes, the pipes are calling.

And oh, yes, about that gallery opening this Saturday. You might be wondering why it's called the Art/Not Terminal Gallery: That's because it's in the old Trailways Terminal Building, and the artists want you to know you will find art there, not the terminal.

What they're opening is a "Hands On" Second Annual Sculpture Exhibition, with poetry readings, refreshments, door prizes (donated artworks) and a chance to add your own two cents' worth to an ongoing art project.

What does all this have to do with bagpipes? Not a great deal, but gallery representative Evelyn Harrison happened to be in the neighborhood when the pipers were practicing at Shorecrest High School.

"We like to have music at our openings," Harrison says. "We can't pay a lot. But I heard the pipers, and you know, it's really an amazing sound. We had to have this."

A sad postscript: Kevin McKiever, an actor who won praise in a 1980 production of "The Me Nobody Knows," a musical about ghetto life, at the old Skid Road Theatre, made a recent cover of New York magazine for fatally stabbing an aspiring young dancer in New York earlier this summer. McKiever's talent, according to the cover story, was sabotaged by his escalating problems with drug abuse and mental illness.

Melinda Bargreen's column appears Sundays in Arts & Entertainment.