I landed in Ireland days before Halloween, and on the road from Dublin to Kildare, our bus was stopped by a long line of school kids dressed in every costume you could imagine. The line seemed to never end, and we didn't care. It was one of those moments in travel you could never plan, but still feels like it happened just for you.

Much of Ireland was generous like that, full of things you couldn't plan and wouldn't have thought to ask for. Strangers who talked to me like they knew me. Castles older than my country at the side of the road.

And then there was the music.

On my first night, my ears were pulled toward a haunting sound coming from the most difficult-looking instrument I had ever laid eyes on. I walked closer to the musician to watch him. He was using his fingers, his arms, his wrists, his whole body.

The instrument was a set of uilleann pipes. The name comes from uilleann, the Irish word for elbow. One elbow operates the bellows to fill the bag with air, while the other controls the pressure in the bag. I pulled out my phone, opened my notes app and wrote: the sound of Ireland, so I would never forget the moment. It turns out that's what people already call it.

The complexity of the sound and the instrument left me wondering: who makes these pipes? And how much practice does it take to learn to play them? Both answers turned out to be measured in years. Some of them even in generations.

The man in the middle

Months later I put the question to Gay McKeon, who has played the pipes since he was eight and is now CEO of Na Píobairí Uilleann, the organization in Dublin that exists to promote the playing and making of the uilleann pipes.

His father, Tom McKeon, volunteered for many years at the Dublin Pipers Club together in the years when hardly anyone was playing. Today, his two sons, Conor and Seán, are award-winning musicians. respectively. He sits, I said to him, right in the middle of the past and the future of this music.

"I really appreciate that, because I've never thought about that," he said, and then proceeded to spend the next hour handing the credit to everybody else.

The legacy of Leo Rowsome

Funny enough, his father, Tom, couldn't play a note. "My father never played music," Gay says. "Neither could he sing."

But as a young man in County Leitrim, Tom heard the piper Leo Rowsome play, and the sound stayed in his bones through Belfast, through England, through meeting his wife and coming back home to Dublin. Eventually, he bought land close to where Rowsome lived, and the two men became friends.

Tom may not have played the instrument, but he played his part in keeping the sound alive. He was a joiner, meaning he would cut the wooden parts for Rowsome and the handful of other men still making pipes.

On a Saturday night in the 1960s, he brought his youngest child to the Pipers Club on Thomas Street, Dublin, to meet Rowsome, who asked whether the boy would like to try.

Gay admits he wasn't much of a student. He used every trick in the book to keep the lessons short so he could get back out to his friends. And still, Rowsome taught him, right up until his death in September 1970.

"He wasn't simply a tutor; he was a mentor, and his influence expanded way beyond the music."

Every former pupil of Leo that Gay has ever met says the same thing: that Rowsome was kindly and somehow childlike, and that he brought the best out of whoever sat in front of him.

Four hundred hours

When Rowsome died there were no full-time pipemakers left anywhere in the world. Thanks to organizations like Na Píobairí Uilleann, there are many more today, but there are far more people who want a set than there are sets readily available. Gay knows every maker in the country, and still waited ten years for his sons' sets.

A full set of uilleann pipes takes around four hundred hours of work, and an unusual combination of skills to be good at it. The maker is part woodturner, part engineer, part cabinetmaker, part metalworker, part leather craftsperson, part reed maker. And on top of all that, they have to play.

"You need to be a musician, really, to make them," Gay says. A set can be beautifully engineered and still sound wrong, because the reeds have to be in balance with one another, and only a player can hear when they aren't.

The maker also has to consider the piper's physicality. Someone who's six foot five doesn't get the same instrument as someone who's five foot two. Gay and his sons each have sets that were built by the same maker and look identical, but if they switch instruments, they'll know immediately. "When I play theirs, and they play mine, oh, no, no, no," he says. "It just feels so different."

Like an octopus falling out of a tree

As a moderate piano player, I asked Gay what it feels like to play something this complex.

He remembered a friend of his being asked the same thing after a concert at the National Concert Hall. "It's a bit like being handcuffed to a wild goat," the man said.

Gay's own description is an octopus falling out of a tree. Which sounds oddly accurate, even to someone who has never touched a set. You pump with one elbow, press with the other, finger the chanter, play the regulators with the heel of your hand and, he adds, you're probably tapping your foot and smiling at the same time.

"There's no earthly reason why you should be able to play these things," he tells his own students at the start of a workshop. "It defies logic."

And then, after years of it, something gives way.

"There's a point where the mechanics disappear," he says. "You stop thinking about the instrument, and you become completely absorbed in the music."

That's when the note stops being a note you strike and becomes one you shape.

"You don't just play the notes, you shape them," he says. "Every note can breathe, and breathe differently." You can make them whisper. You can make them cry.

Who gets them next

Gay never pushed either of his sons to play, and both received the TG4 Young Musician of the Year award—Conor in 2001 and Seán in 2005.

He gave them the basics in their childhood, and then sent them to other pipers he knew, men who spent most of the hour talking football with two boys and played a bit of music at the end. That's what made it stick.

He has strong views about where players get lost. Children who play the pipes get a lot of positive attention, and that attention carries them until they are fourteen or fifteen. Then it stops working. They have the technique, but the issue is that they need to be taught how to listen. Learning to hear this music, he says, is like learning to appreciate good poetry. You aren't born able to do it, and if you can't hear where the music might go, you can't take it anywhere. That's when they hit a brick wall and walk away.

Which is why he is careful about the five grandchildren. He has been quietly buying good instruments, the kind a child ought to start on, in case any of them ever want one. He is sure they will all play music. Whether any of them play the pipes is up to them.

When people try to describe the sound of Ireland, they reach for something otherworldly. Something ancient and mystical.

But underneath the sound is something deeply human. A joiner who cut wood for a man he admired, a teacher who kept showing up for a boy who wanted to leave practice early, four hundred hours in somebody's workshop, and a queue of people waiting years for their turn.

Gay won't take credit for any of it.

"I'm just very lucky to have played my part," he says. "The tradition doesn't belong to any one of us or any one generation."