Greater Trenton Pipes and Drums practice weekly at Springfield Elementary School.
By: Scott Morgan
SPRINGFIELD It usually starts like this: Someone they love becomes bewitched with the drone of a gangly bag of leg bones and suddenly the entire world goes Celtic.
Or if it’s not the pipes they find so beguiling, it’s the drums Boom-tappity-tap-tap-Boom-tappity-tappity-tap and sooner or later, it sucks you in and it just spreads into your core until it becomes …
What? An overriding thirst to play?
No, not a thirst. It all runs too deep through family veins and spreads too rapidly through husbands and wives and children to merely be some sort of drive. Bagpiping is more … intrinsic.
Let’s put it this way members of Greater Trenton Pipes and Drums have e-mail user names like "pipermajor," "marinepiper" and "highlander." They drive to Springfield Elementary School to practice every Thursday night and they come from as far as Exton, Levittown and Pennington to do it. As beginners, they spend $70 on practice pipes to nail down fingering exercises just so they can move up to the thousand-dollar bags of leg bones when they finally get that good. They think $400 for a kilt (and just the kilt) is a pittance for the chance to play.
And they find themselves at home on misty nights like this, when the weather feels like someone wrapped you in a wet sack and strapped you to the underbelly of Lear jet cruising over the North Atlantic. St. Patrick’s Day usually feels like this anyway, and why join a bagpipe band unless you want to march on St. Patrick’s Day, right?
Oh, there’s a lot more to it than that.
***
Pipes and drums don’t mix until formation. Doors are closed to accent this.
Mike Schillaci’s door is open because he’s teaching drummers in the music room and that’s where the players get their instruments. Three boys beat his desk with furry mallets while traffic, lots of it, skitters around them.
"One, two, three, and one," he tells the boys, a brew of snare drummers and bass drummers working to make music from "a bunch of noise" and eventually take his place on the drum line.
John Hermesmann is getting it faster than anyone else tonight. At the tender age of 10, John apparently is already "the Man." He’s pinned down his rhythm and intermittently celebrates his successes with a little bit of flourish. Well, "flourishing," actually a slick acrobatic mallet spin that makes a pale circular blur while other drummers in the line go "Boom-tappity-tap-tap-Boom …"
Mr. Schillaci likes John’s progress, but The Man isn’t quite ready to play the band’s St. Patrick’s Day season this year. Blair Kokotajlo, though she got to play her bass drum Sunday in Belmar and she’ll get to play it again this weekend in Atlantic City and West Orange. After three years of study with Mr. Schillaci (and about seven months in Greater Trenton Pipes and Drums), 11-year-old Blair is the following excited ("Yeah!"), nervous ("A little" ) and confident (just ask her drum). She’s never played a parade before, but hey everybody has a first time some time.
Back in Mr. Schillaci’s room, a prodigy of sorts comes in a little late. At 13, Gareth Sutherland also is ready to play in this year’s parades, but where was all this talent just a couple years ago?
"He lagged for a while, then all of a sudden he just … popped," says Gareth’s very English mum, Rosie. "He’s drumming everywhere, all the time." Pencils, fingers, knives and forks. Anything to turn a tabletop into a temporary snare.
Ms. Sutherland can thank her elder son, Cael, for this. Cael belongs to Greater Trenton too, although he isn’t here tonight. He’s in Pennington piping his first solo at a multicultural night at his high school. But Cael’s pipes, Ms. Sutherland said, are what put the itch in Gareth’s fingers, and with both sons smitten, well, let’s just say it’s rarely quiet around the Sutherland home anymore. If Cael were here, it’s hard to know which room he might be in. The pipers are all over the school in its after-hours tonight. He might be in the teacher’s lounge with the four girls who encircle one of the lunch tables, fingering practice pipes like a troupe of snake charmers round a wicker basket.
Or he might be down the hall with Anna Hermesmann, who despite playing an actual set of bagpipes is, like her little brother, not quite ready to march with the band. John and Anna do get to carry the Greater Trenton Pipes and Drums banner in the parades this year, though; and 15-year-old Anna is terribly excited to get her band costume.
"Uniform," corrects Patty Downey, "It’s a uniform."
The distinction is important, Ms. Downey, head music teacher at Springfield Elementary and very accomplished Greater Trenton piper, says; not least because of its thousand-dollar price tag. Costumes are for fun and games uniforms are for lifestyle. Which brings us back to an important point: bagpiping, at least in this particular band, is not just something people do for St. Patrick’s Day.
In a little nook in the hallway, Jill Brode’s hands translate scripture from a book of staves onto a practice snare drum pad sitting in her lap while a tape recorder keeps a merciless record. When she looks up, her face dissolves from steely attention to gregarious smile.
"There are so many other bands where people want to lead and not follow," she says. "These people are a breath of fresh air."
Jill and Kevin Brode used to belong to other pipe bands before they joined Greater Trenton about four months ago, she says. The difference now? "Everybody works together," she says. "You learn a lot from your mistakes."
Ms. Brode has her husband to thank for expanding her family by another 23 people. Long ago, she just enjoyed the sounds her husband, Kevin, made on his bagpipe, as did their 12-year-old daughter, Kelly, who’s already been playing for three years.
Then came the infection. Now Ms. Brode tapes her practice sessions and frowns when she hears her timing stray by a millisecond (yeah, she can tell) and Kelly is already piping in parades with papa.
And by the way, Kevin is a former competition piper, and yes, he really is that good.
***
Across the street, beneath the yellow lamps in the municipal parking lot on this damp sack of a night, Jeff Griesemer, who comes in from Trenton every Thursday night, has finally gotten his pipes in tune and joins the other members of the band.
"These things are a beast to get in tune and keep in tune," he says. "They tune by a beat frequency." Two notes, he explains with pinching fingers, play side by side until they get so close together, they effectively become just one.
This is that intoxicating drone. The A-note the note that gives bagpipe music what Mr. Griesemer calls "its tension." But he’s got it and just in time, too.
"Band ready," calls the drum major. "March!"
And off they march, at home, at practice, at play in this chilled and perfect night.