Goucher Quarterly

Pipe Dreams

by Ann E. Kolakowski

Goucher Quarterly/ July 2004

Feature: Eliot Grasso

[Photo credits except for A Prairie Home Companion, Jim Burger. PHC photo courtesy Eliot Grasso]

“Nine fiddles, four guitars, three banjos, two flutes, two clarinets, one bassoon, one bass clarinet, three bass guitars, one piano, one organ, three sets of pipes, assorted whistles and mandolins, two accordions, one saxophone, a trumpet, and a trombone. “Wait - I forgot an accordion. Three accordions.”

Goucher senior Eliot Grasso has just taken a mental musical inventory of his family’s Perry Hall, MD, home. “Our whole house,” he says wryly, “is the music room.”

For as long as he can remember, Grasso says, music has provided a literal soundtrack for his life. When his father and mother weren’t fitting their own folk and traditional performances around respective careers as attorney and school librarian, they played record albums nonstop, by artists such as the Bothy Band and Chieftains.

By age 11, he had worked his way through the violin, piano, tin whistle, flute, and clarinet. Then, like many preteens, he begged his parents for lessons on a new instrument, one he would hurry home from middle school to play for hours in his bedroom. But unlike his peers, who might have pined for an electric guitar or a drum kit, Grasso wanted uilleann (ILL-en) pipes. The ones he’d been hearing for years on those record albums.

His mother found Paul Levin, a founding member of O’Malley’s March (the band fronted by Baltimore’s mayor, Martin O’Malley). Levin lent Grasso a set of practice pipes and, after six months of lessons, sent him to study with Kieran O’Hare, a former instructor with Dublin’s Na Piobairi Uilleann—the “epicenter of the uilleann piping world,” who had moved to Baltimore.

A Rising Star

It didn’t take long for Grasso to achieve international prominence. Since 1996, he has won multiple first-, second-, and third-place titles in competitions in New York and Dublin for both tin whistle and uilleann pipes. In 1998, O’Hare’s former club invited him to record on “A New Dawn,” a compilation of six pipers under the age of 18. Not only the youngest of the bunch, Grasso was the sole American on the album.

He’s played the Kennedy Center, Constitution Hall, Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (sharing the stage with the Chieftains themselves), the Library of Congress, and for National Humanities Awards and National Endowment for the Arts Awards ceremonies.

“There are two kinds of gigs,” he says. “The first is where the sound is great; the second is where the audience is great.” The Kennedy Center falls into the former, he says; as for the latter, there’s nowhere better than J. Patrick’s in Baltimore’s Locust Point neighborhood.

“Irish traditional music is an art, like poetry or good writing or jazz,” notes Billy McComiskey, noted musician and a founder of the city’s Irish music scene. “There are thousands of people who listen to it, and probably a good thousand or so who play it. And there are a few people who are listened to on both sides of the Atlantic. I think Eliot is becoming one of those people.”

Now, it will be easier for everyone to listen. In January 2004, he released a solo CD, “Standing Room Only.” The title is a tribute to Levin, who died of a brain tumor in May 2002. “His warmth, kindness, and love of the music drew so many people to him that there was standing room only at his funeral,” reflected Grasso in the CD’s liner notes. The respect was obviously mutual: Grasso inherited all of his mentor’s instruments.

“The CD is not for me; it’s for everyone else,” he says. “I hope someone will listen to it in 10 to 20 years and get something out of it.”

The Road to Goucher

At age 15, Grasso returned to the piano, which he had given up nearly a decade earlier. “I have to be moving my hands all the time,” he says simply. “The piano was a new way to move my hands.

“I like the sound and the repertoire. It’s become my real emotional outlet. You can play slowly, and you can play quietly, which is not possible with Irish music.” Although he considered attending the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, he chose Goucher and planned a double major in biology and music.

As a student in Fred Mauk’s music appreciation class, Grasso became fascinated with the pipe organ and decided to study it, too. He insists it’s not that far of a musical stretch.

“I love Bach … the counterpoints, the fugues, the dense polyphony,” he says. “It’s closely related to Irish music, harmonically and melodically. It’s harmonically predictable, and there’s a consistent flow.” Grasso’s senior thesis will focus on Bach’s music and its rise and fall from popularity over the past 200 years.

When his fourth-semester schedule included courses in genetics, organic chemistry, and calculus, “it all seemed like too much,” says Grasso. He dropped the biology major and briefly reconsidered Peabody. He realized that Goucher offered the same faculty—and much more, including an intensive study program on opera in Rimini, Italy, where he is spending three weeks this summer. “Being here has been invaluable to me. The liberal arts atmosphere is the best in the world.”

Although his world-class reputation as a piper took a bit of time to reach the Goucher campus, his ability didn’t go unrecognized. He is a four-time recipient of both the coveted Rosenberg Scholarship, for music, and the Eagle Scout Scholarship.

“After he had been taking lessons from me for about a year, he casually asked one day if I knew about his other area of expertise,” recalls Grasso’s advisor, Jeffrey Chappell. “I asked him to bring in his pipes, and he sat in the hallway and played them. I’m sure in all my years in Goucher I’ve never heard anything like it. He can perform at top speed on that instrument.” In April, the rest of the Goucher community had the chance to enjoy his piping talents when Grasso and a few of his fellow Irish musicians staged a concert in Haebler Memorial Chapel.

After he graduates next spring with a concentration in arts administration, Grasso looks forward to crafting a life that combines teaching, playing, and composing. He’s toying with the idea of attending law school. “I would never for a second consider being a professional performer,” he says firmly. “Traveling is hard, and I like being at home. I can’t imagine a time in my life when I’ll be more happy or satisfied.”

In many ways, Eliot Grasso is a hard act to follow.

Ann E. Kolakowski is editor of the Goucher Quarterly.

Eliot’s CD is available for purchase online at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/eliotgrasso/

No Skirt Required

Uilleann pipes have three main parts—the bag, which holds the air; the bellows, which fills the bag; and the chanter, on which the musician plays the melody. Its name is taken from the Irish-Celtic word for “elbow,” since the player’s right elbow powers the bellows while the left pressures the bag. Grasso’s mother once described the instrument as “a cross between an oboe, a whoopee cushion, and a brassiere.”

Often confused with their Scottish cousin, the great highland bagpipes, uilleann pipes differ in several ways:

Uilleann Pipes

•Played indoors

•Softer sound (similar to a fiddle)

•For social events

•Played seated, on piper’s lap

•Uses bellows to introduce air

•Full chromatic range

•Learned by ear; individual styling and composition encouraged

•Suited for a wide range of musical styles and interpretation

Great Highland Bagpipes

•Played outdoors

•Louder (heard at distances up to 10 miles)

•Once classified as an instrument of war

•Played standing, by pipers in kilts

•Relies on piper’s breath to fill bag

•9 notes

•Taught by rigid, rote memorization of written music

•Repertoire limited to standard tunes

The News from Lake Wobegon

Eliot added another prestigious venue to his resume on May 8, when he appeared at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN, as one of six finalist acts in the first-ever “Talent from Twelve to Twenty” competition on “A Prairie Home Companion.”

“It was like a paid vacation, not like a competition at all,” he says of the experience. “Of course, it was somewhat surreal to be sitting onstage and playing live on the radio for millions of listeners.

“I’ve never been so impressed by so many people before. It was really interesting to watch everyone do their thing.”

Although he didn’t take top musical honors, he no doubt won over his hosts. After his solo performance, he was invited to sit in on several musical numbers later in the show and received the Ray Marklund Memorial Tool Chest, a surprise award given to “the contestant who, in the judgment of the stage hands and crew was just the nicest to work with.” Host Garrison Keillor presented the behemoth bright-red toolbox with this assurance: “If you ever need to work on the pipes, there’s all the wrenches, all the screwdrivers you will ever need.”

To listen to Eliot’s performance online, visit http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2004/05/08/