Erwan Keravec is a Breton piper who is in Australia for a series of concerts, including three concerts at the Canberra International Music Festival this weekend. He is interested in bagpipe music that is completely detached from Scottish or Breton culture. We talk to him about the Scottish bagpipe, the Breton biniou, improvisation, and the music of Philip Glass among other composers.
So you’re a player of the Scottish bagpipes, as well as an improviser and composer. How is the Scottish bagpipe different from the biniou?
Actually, we need to broaden the term “bagpipe” a bit. If we consider the instrument family, it’s not one single instrument. Bagpipes are a whole family of instruments. And all bagpipes are air-reserve instruments, with an airbag that powers reeds for continuous sound. It’s continuous airflow, but with a bag on the outside. So the Scottish bagpipe is a bagpipe—it comes from Scotland—and “biniou” actually means bagpipe in Breton. Just like we have the gaita, gaida… there are lots of terms, many names depending on the country they’re from, but they are all different. Their only shared trait is the presence of a bag.
However, the particularity of the Scottish bagpipes is that they’re also played in Brittany. You’ll find that instrument—the Scottish bagpipe—pretty much all over the world. You have it in Australia. There are some great Australian pipe bands. But the same instrument exists in Brittany too, though it was imported a little over a century ago. Breton musicians who were playing the biniou or the bombarde decided to import the Scottish bagpipe in order to use it in larger ensembles. That eventually gave rise to the bagad as we know it today, but initially, it was just about switching instruments.
Ah! How long have you been playing the Scottish bagpipe?
Since childhood. I grew up in Brittany and my parents were very involved in the Breton cultural scene. For them it was mostly dancing and popular festivals. So bagpipes, binious, and bombardes—that’s what I saw from a young age. Unlike other kids who saw a piano or a guitar growing up, I saw bagpipes and bombardes.
And your brother too. I believe he sometimes plays with you?
Yes, absolutely. He also specialises in the bombarde. We perform together regularly.
Ok. So it wasn’t really you who chose the instrument—it was more that your parents influenced you to choose it?
Well, I really did choose it myself. But we were in a cultural environment that naturally encouraged encounters with this kind of instrument.
And why did you decide to make a living out of it?
Oof, that’s a bit more complicated. I spent part of my adolescence in bagads—the equivalent of pipe bands in Scotland or Spain. I worked my way up the ranks—just like in Australia or Scotland, where they have the World Pipe Band Championships—we have the Bagadoù Championship in Brittany. So I advanced in level and eventually ended up in a very good group. We had an encounter with a jazz big band from Lyon called La marmite infernale. And in that setting, I found myself improvising—improvising freely, without melody, without rhythm—completely freely.
That practice was a kind of revelation for me. And it was because I started doing that that I wanted to devote time to music professionally. It was to develop projects in improvised and contemporary music that I decided to become a musician.
You started in the Bagad Roñsed-Mor de Lokoal-Mendon. Is that a big band school?
That’s the group I mentioned earlier. A group from a very small town in southern Brittany—today, there must be about 3,000 residents. It’s really tiny, but it’s home to one of the best groups in Brittany. And that’s where I learned a lot. I learned there, and I also led the group. So I learned how to conduct as well, which is quite unique, and I also learned to be very rigorous in musical interpretation. Because it’s just like a pipe band—bagads are really schools of rigor because when you play with 12 or 15 bagpipes, you have to be absolutely perfectly in sync. So it’s truly a school of discipline.
And how long were you there?
I’d say around ten years.
That’s a while! And the music you play isn’t traditional bagpipe music. You’re exploring peripheral sounds—new ways of playing and listening to the instrument that are far removed from its origins. You’re making it more modern? Where did that interest come from?
That goes back to what I was saying earlier about meeting jazz musicians and having started improvising. A whole new world opened up – something that had been very foreign to me. So, I learned to explore that space and found it absolutely fascinating. Getting to that place, that completely changed a lot of things for me.
I started working on peripheral sounds because bagpipes typically are loud and non-stop, which obviously makes improvising with others quite tricky. So I had to find new ways of playing music. Then, in fact, what interested me afterwards was knowing whether my instrument, which is very, very attached to its culture, can still be the vector of a thought that doesn’t evoke it in someone else’s thought, that isn’t from there and that can also lead to something totally different. So I turned to contemporary composers, like Japanese composers like Susumu Yoshida. These are composers who have nothing to do with Breton culture and who take an instrument for what it is and what it can do and transpose it into their music. And that’s where my interest lies.
Now, I just want to clarify that it’s not really about “modernising,” because traditional music is music that’s inherited. We learn it from previous generations, and every generation involved transforms it, interprets it, moulds it, modifies it, and passes it on. So there’s this idea of a never-ending chain. Of course, within that chain, some paths branch out in different directions, and some don’t continue because the next generation chooses not to follow them. So the concept of modernity doesn’t really exist—it’s always current. That’s the very nature of music: it’s a living, evolving form. I see myself fully as part of a lineage of sonneurs (Breton traditional players). Yes, with my own unique voice, but who’s to say that in 20 or 30 years, others won’t follow the same path I did, using and building upon what I’ve done?
You’re coming to Australia and going to three cities, but I believe the main reason for your visit is the Canberra International Music Festival. You’re also going to Sydney and Melbourne?
Yes. I’ll start in Sydney, where I’m meeting a musician I’ve never played with before, Clayton Thomas, an Australian improviser that I’ve crossed paths with many times in Europe at improvised music festivals. We’ve never played together, so we’re taking the opportunity to perform together in Sydney.
Then, yes, the whole team—there are eight of us musicians coming—we’ll be in Canberra for the main project, which we’re performing as a group of eight: 8 Pipers for Philip Glass. We’re adapting pieces by this American composer for eight traditional wind players: four bagpipes and four bombardes.
Yes, I was going to ask: what can audiences expect from that concert?
In 1969, Philip Glass wrote four pieces which are a compositional path, which start from something, a bit like the history of music which starts from unison. So in fact, what we could do from a very simple point of view was to all play the same thing. Then he did a piece that was music in fifths, so in fact there’s a gap of a fifth that plays throughout the piece. Then, as he had done that movement, which is really a parallel movement where the two voices follow each other all the time, he did a piece called Music in Contrary Motion where the movements oppose each other. Then in the end he made a piece of music, Similar Motion, which is a very orchestral piece, like a kind of completion of this compositional path, and in fact the voices follow each other without being parallel.
What interested me was to present the 4 in the same concert, which is done quite rarely because even the Philip Glass Ensemble plays 2 pieces, generally of the four. Here, I wanted to present all four of them to show, in fact, this path. And also to allow us, as musicians, to experience the progress he has made in composing these four works. So what can we expect? Well, we can expect something very hypnotic in fact.
It’s because they’re little patterns that you repeat and that get bigger and smaller. And then we move on to another and it never stops. So, in fact, with the great quality of the bagpipes, we’re really lucky. It never stops. So at some point, you just let yourself be lulled into a trance-like state.
That’s interesting. And among the 8 musicians who are coming, there is the Sonneurs quartet who are going to do a concert in Canberra too.
That’s right, yes.
Earlier, you explained that bagpipes are a category of air-reserve instruments . So the Sonneurs quartet is made up of instruments from the Breton tradition: the bagpipe, the bombarde, the binioù-kozh, and the trélombarde. What are the differences between those instruments?
I’ll just place that in a bit of context. A few years ago, when I started exploring contemporary music, I began doing so solo. I commissioned works from composers for solo bagpipe—largely because in Scotland, the historical tradition of bagpipe playing is solo.
I wanted the composers to write for and really explore the instrument itself. I didn’t want anything around it to mask or distract from that. So solo playing was the purest way to approach and deeply explore the instrument. Later, I created another form where I played alongside two classical singers.
And then, at that point, I wanted to extend what I’d done on my instrument to all the instruments found in Brittany, in what’s known as the sonner tradition. In other words, the tradition of pipers. And it turns out that in this tradition, there are four of them, a quartet. If there had been five, it would be a quintet, but in fact there are four. So historically, the Breton formula for music is the couple. It’s a duo that brings together the bombarde, which is a kind of oboe, and the biniou – the historic bagpipes. So that’s what Breton music is normally about. It’s the duet that we call a ‘couple de sonneur’.Afterwards, when the Scottish bagpipes arrived in Brittany, the duo was only dedicated to the binioù-kozh, which became possible with the Scottish bagpipes.
So there are two ways of distinguishing them. Moreover, we speak of a kozh couple when the couple is with a binioù-kozh and the Braz couple when the bagpipe is with the braz (big bagpipe) – because braz in Breton means big. So it’s the big bagpipes. So there are these two couples. It appeared after the Second World War. The bagad, then, is this orchestra that brings together bombards and bagpipes and snare drums, percussion. As this orchestra progressed, a bombard appeared that played an octave lower than the historical bombard. This bombarde has been called the trelombarde or tenor bombarde. In fact, it has had both names for 30 years.
That’s why I say that I consider it to be part of the tradition today, because it’s an instrument that can’t be ignored, the four instruments of the quartet. There are two bombards, which are a sort of oboe, and two bagpipes, the biniou and the Scottish bagpipes.
And for the Sonneurs à Canberra concert, you invited brass players and instrumentalists/ringers from the public to play with you. How does that work? And is this something you do often?
So, the music we play with the quartet is all pieces commissioned especially for the quartet. So with composers, as with the solo, there are lots of composers, there are now a dozen who have written for us.
And among the twelve, there’s a Japanese composer called Otomo Yoshihide. And Otomo has composed a very, very open piece. And in fact, when he gave me the score, he said, ‘Well, Erwan, here’s the score and you can play it by yourself or up to 100 musicians’. I looked at the score and said ‘Oh yes, all right’. So initially we played it with four people because we wanted to play with the quartet. And then we thought, well, if we can play it with 100 people like Otomo says, let’s give it a go.
So we started asking people where we were going to play. Can we work on this piece with other musicians? So that’s what’s going to be done in Canberra, but also at Monash University in Melbourne. We’re sharing Otomo Yoshihide’s score with musicians. And there are two of them from the Octet, the 8 Pipers for Philip Glass, who are working on the score with local musicians. And we’re integrating. As part of Canberra, we’re going to include a performance of this piece in the quartet’s concert.
I was wondering how this works and how much time you have with the public to rehearse.
They work two days beforehand. We call them open scores, which leave a lot of scope for interpretation, but at the same time are actually quite precise. That’s what we try to say to the people we meet, the musicians who are going to work on this piece, is that you have to find out each time what you want to do with it. What interests me about this is not so much that the musicians play and that I think about the piece because we’re already doing that, but rather that they also find, and that they find with us that they want to say what it evokes in them. That’s what’s really interesting, in fact, it’s saying, well, if you get this from Otomo Yoshihide, what do you do? And that’s what’s interesting.
And you’re doing a third concert in Canberra, which is also free like Sonneurs, called Whitewater. In the description it says that your aim is to show that the bagpipes are a universal instrument. What can audiences expect from this concert?
Well, Whitewater is a solo that I’ve started working on. It’s my music and it’s the basis of everything I’ve been telling you about for a while now. It’s the fact that, at one point, as a soloist, I decided to work on this idea: why shouldn’t the bagpipes be removed from their cultural origins and presented in a different way? And so that meant thinking of the music as totally detached from Scottish or Breton culture. So I started by doing a solo called Urban Pipes. Then I did a second one called Urban Pipes Deux. And now, this year, I’ve just recorded a third, called Whitewater, with the idea of a whirlwind that doesn’t stop, that spins, spins, spins, spins, spins, spins. And as a result, the things inside it are constantly changing. So if you want a whirlpool in a torrent, you’ll see a piece of wood, a piece of leaf. So in fact it transforms and becomes different. And then it’s another piece in fact. But it’s really something that doesn’t stop moving forward. It doesn’t stop moving.
So it’s music that operates by the successive arrival of events that become more and more important. So the idea is that I’m also in movement, I’m also interacting with what I see. So in fact, I’m discovering but I don’t know yet. We’ve agreed a place with Canberra where I’m going to play, but I don’t know it yet. So in fact, I’m going to arrive in the morning and I’ll decide what I’m going to play.
I’ve been playing solo for almost 20 years now. I’ve played them over 100 times, with this idea, I don’t know exactly what the music is, but this idea and this idea of these bagpipes displaced. I’ve got a lot of tools with that today and tools that help me say today, what’s it going to be? Above all, I ‘m always in for a bit of a surprise, even for myself.
So it’s a bit improvised in the sense that you’re going to decide on the day?
Within the set, I can improvise parts. There are things I do and I never really know completely what’s going to happen.
Why should people in Australia come and see these concerts?
Well, as I said earlier, my instrument, the voice, the Scottish bagpipes, are played in Australia. So I think you’re familiar with it; you’re familiar with this instrument. But on the other hand, what we’re about to present to you may be a surprise for you, I think. It’s this area that I hope the Australians will be seduced by. This instrument that you know so well, we can play something that you might not be so familiar with, although it’s still in that vein, and it’s still in a culture that’s quite close. Even so, there can be some nice surprises, I think.
Have you been to Australia before?
No, it will be the first time.
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We thank Erwan Keravec for this interview. As you can see with Erwan Keravec, bagpipes are certainly not a wind from the past.
KEY INFO FOR THE ERWAN KERAVEC AUSTRALIAN TOUR
WHAT : Concerts from piper Erwan Keravec
WHERE, WHEN & HOW:
3 May Canberra : 8 Pipers for Philip Glass @ Canberra International Music Festival Buy your tickets here
3 May Canberra : WHITEWATER – Erwan Keravec solo @ Canberra International Music Festival – FREE CONCERT. More info here
4 May Canberra : SONNEURS @ Canberra International Music Festival – CONCERT GRATUIT. More info here
5 May Melbourne : 8 Pipers for Philip Glass @ Melbourne Recital Centre – Buy your tickets here
6 May Melbourne : Erwan Keravec solo @ Make It Up Club – More info here
8 May Melbourne : Lunchtime Concert series : Erwan Keravec & Monash Winds @ Monash University – More info here
