Matt Welch brings bagpipes to the Barrel Hall
He has been called the “Eddie Van Halen of the Bagpipes.” But feel free to throw in names like Jeff Beck and Frank Zappa, mashed up with the minimalist masters like Philip Glass and Giacinto Scelsi.
Throwing composer’s caution to the wind, Matt Welch seamlessly mixes music that ranges from Javanese/Balinese gamelan to experimental, classical, rock and improvisation — a hybrid’s hybrid.
He has performed with everyone from new-music maestros John Zorn and Alvin Lucier, to his New York/San Francisco genre-busting band of brothers, Blarvuster, who have played the world over.
Blarvuster, with Welch’s bagpipes, sax and vocals, include Will Northlich-Redmond on electric guitar (BlipVert, PAK), Ian Riggs on bass guitar (Burning Spear, Lonesome Trio) and Brian Chase on drums (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Drums and Drones).
“My music is a lot of worlds coming together,” notes Welch via phone from San Francisco. “I mean, I obviously play the bagpipes and that is the most formal instrumental training that I have ever had,” he adds.
“It was kind of hard to not lis-
ten to other things growing up in North America. People were so fastidious about the bagpipes — a music tradition that comes from somewhere else. But for me, this just opened the door to a bunch of other ways of looking at music. I look at music as kind of geography or a voyage. And that started to become interesting.
“I always yearned to improvise on bagpipes,” admits Welch. “When I first starting playing, I immediately felt there was a need to create and be involved with the idea of performing sound and creating sound at the same time but not too separate in the beginning stages of all of my instrumental studies.
“That kind of study of an instrument has such a specific geography and tradition in its sound. It actually became a focal point for everything I was interested in,” says Welch.
Throughout his career the acclaimed piper has studied and performed with some of the world’s best pipe players, winning global competitions galore.
Welch, who is also a teacher, continues to redefine the sound of the pipes through pioneering new techniques and compositional structures creating exciting sonic dimensions and new music soundscapes for this highly traditional instrument.
The first instrument for Welch was the accordion.
“Accordion was where I first studied instrumentation and got into the formal study of music. It was not a very large leap to move onto the bagpipes.”
Welch is originally from Massachusetts but began piping in Florida. He did his undergraduate in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University.
At SFU, Welch learned Javanese/Balinese gamelan music. Then he went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut where he studied with renowned American composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton.
“Studying gamelan was a huge feather for my career,” notes Welch. “I think my world got even more messed up at Wesleyan with Anthony but in a good way,” he laughs. “There was a good lineage of intricate experimental music that used all sorts of combinations of traditions and minimalism — gamelan, avantgarde, free jazz, and improvisation in general. That was a great way to go to New York. I felt in New York that is where things became real. You could say I became an adult there.”
Welch also has a passion for opera and is the artistic director of Experiments in Opera. EIO has been lauded by many critics from The New York Times to Rolling Stone magazine.
Welch has been hailed as “one of 14 artists changing the future of opera.” He has boldly taken opera where no one has taken it before from “The Mutt” — based on a skateboard legend — to his most recent work, “And Here We Are,” with libretto by Daniel Neer, based on the memoirs of Welch’s great uncle Edgar Kneedler. The shadow-puppet opera, featuring four soloists and a mixed ensemble, is a 90-minute work based on traditional Javanese shadow puppetry.
“Music can be innovative or you could also have some sort of storyline or vice versa and it really became this — imagine gamelan music on bagpipes — it really creates a world out of something else and opera was the largest expression of that.”
Welch has always liked Philip Glass and cites Glass’s “Koyaanisqatsi” as his all-time favourite film. Welch arranged Glass’ 1968 composition “Two Pages” for bagpipes in honour of the piece’s 50th anniversary.
“I have mentioned this to Philip Glass once,” says Welch. “I think “Two Pages” is going to be coming out on his label. I just put it out as a sneak preview and the label really likes it so they are going to release it sometime in late November.”
When Welch was in Scotland he created a bagpipe piece called “Blues for Seraut.” He visited a Medieval abbey in Ayrshire that was built in the 1300s, immediately falling in love with the natural reverb of the space.
“I was inspired by (free jazz musician) Evan Parker’s ‘Conic Sections.’ ‘Blues for Seraut’ has to be done in a specific environment like the abbey that I was recording in. It was so reverberant that I was able to create that piece specifically there. I think at the Barrel Hall I will have a chance to present something like the reverberation that I did in Scotland,” says Welch, adding that he will be playing solo. “I will mostly be focused on compositions of mine. And I shall be doing quite a lot of stretching out and improvisations!”