Norden Sackpipa Association of the Americas (NSAA)

[MatthewVanitas]

In a month I'm headed up to the 2012 Piper's Gathering in Burlington, Vermont. It's an event for the various "alternative" bagpipes, so no Great Highland Pipes, but workshops/classes/panels on Irish uilleann, Scottish smallpipes and border-pipes, and Northumbrian smallpipes, and some tinwhistle/flute classes. Same as last year, I'll be in the "catch all" classes, which this year (same as last) is Boston's Tom Zajac teaching renaissiance and medieval music, likely for a motley crew of English, German, French, and Swedish pipes.

Last year I ran across a few other Swedish pipers, one of whom was also exclusively playing sackpipa, and taking Zajac's classes as well as getting some individual tutoring. And then one other musician happened to bring along his supplementary set but didn't play them much. And Dick Hensold performed with his sackpipa at the concert, though mostly played NSPs.

Is anyone else from this board attending this year's Gathering? At some point it'd be great to get a critical mass of sackpipa players and have at least one workshop or class for sackpipa (maybe lure Hensold away for one class?), or at least have a participant-led discussion or something. We might be a few years away from flying an actual sackpipa instructor out for the gathering, but if Seth keeps selling polymer sets there might eventually be a quorum...

If anyone's going to be up there, shoot me a line and we can do some sackpipa prosyletising up in Vermont this August.