Herr Schlendrian

From what I've heard, the bagpipe is the most difficult... I'm not sure why though lol. But out of everything I've played, the hardest is probably voice. While organ is insanely difficult, it's just a matter of doing the right thing at the right time while doing a bunch of other things at once, but with voice you have to get all of your diction right (I had to basically re-learn how to speak english to sing :P), keep yourself resonating on the shelf no matter what, always keep the perfect length of tongue sticking out even though it changes for every note, change your lips/teeth brightness ratio, chest vibrating, diapragm supporting, pitch, and all that crazy stuff. Not to mention you can't even SEE 95% of the instrument that you're working with. :lol:

This is a very beautiful piece, but from a performance standpoint, I think it has some very awkward breath spots. There are multiple places in the piece (e.g. beat 4 of measure 6 in the alto part) which seem very important to execute powerfully and precisely, but would be very difficult to do because they're at the end of a breath. It's usually best to keep the really important parts in the middle of the breath, where the voice has the most control, and this makes for a very smooth and natural melodic line for the singer. Also when I tried to sing the piece I found that the whole thing was coming continuously with very short, almost impossible breath spots, or sometimes even no good breath spot at all.