The Big Music (28 page)
Authors: Kirsty Gunn
The people at the House and what they thought of him (appears as dialogue/possible fragment of a play)
All of today has gone into the past. Already the early morning, going up to my room and seeing she was gone – it’s like that happened in another life, to another woman. The baby … She was some other woman’s baby.
Yet the feeling of the leap into nothing, into vacancy – the jump of my heart when I saw the empty basket – that’s with me. I’ll remember that.
I’ve never felt such absence like it.
But you were calm. You didn’t cry out. Later – yes. But not at first. When you saw that she was gone …
Though anything, anything! Could have happened to her! And I myself knew at that second of the empty basket that I could have done anything. Killed. Gone mad. If I could have protected her.
And if John had kept her longer, Mother …
If he’d had her longer with him out on the hill …
Mother?
I know.
What would have become of her then, our little girl – although people say that babies are hardy and your daughter is hardy. Still he’s an old man and he could have perished up there on the hill and that would have been the death of our Katherine Anna, then, would have been.
Could have been.
But the day – it tided over, changed. Iain went out there …
He did. He was like lightning, he was gone.
And he found her …
Iain brought her home.
He did – and he gathered John up, I watched him, he gathered him up in his arms. So carefully, Mother, he was so gentle with him. He was so careful, and he laid him in the back of the Argo – and she was fine, our baby was safe. She was wet and cold and cross but she was safe, she was well. The hours that had seemed like hundreds of hours, the long, long morning since breakfast and the terror of realising she was gone … All those hours turned back into an ordinary day then, unbelievably, just an ordinary day, when I fed her, put her to bed …
And then I told you that Callum was on his way.
Yes. Callum.
And what must it be like for him now? With his father the way he is? When it’s been so long ago since he was last here? Poor Callum. That family of his so spoilt with their own dissatisfactions that they never see each other, look out for each other.
It’s been that way with them as long as I can remember.
When he first started coming up here, he was perhaps eight or nine.
I thought he was such a city boy.
And he was. But he was his father’s boy, too, who was born here. And the two of you together. You showed him all over the hills. And he loved the dogs, he had dogs that he looked after while he was here. He was just a boy.
And I loved being with him then.
You two were together all the time.
All the time, those summers.
The two of you, I never saw you all day. You were together all the time. Then the years went on and the summers went past and he was starting at university. And you yourself had left to go to Glasgow by then. It became harder after that, didn’t it? For him to keep up the visits here?
And by then I had gone away.
I could no longer help him, look after him.
So how old were you then, when you last saw each other?
I was seventeen.
(aside:)
Going up there to his father’s place …
You were still very young.
I was seventeen.
(aside:)
And no one guessed. No one knew …
And you went away then.
First Glasgow. Then Edinburgh. All those papers I wrote. All the time
while I was away. In Glasgow, the exams and all the papers. Then
Edinburgh
, it was the same. I worked so hard, I was always working, writing. Then back to Glasgow again for my PhD … And all the time, all that writing on the pages. I missed you, Mother. I was away for years.
But now home again.
Where I want to stay.
And all that time – in between then and now –
Like nothing.
(aside:)
Because I know where that place is, where we used to go. And he knows, Callum. We could go back there now, we would both remember the way.
(as before, to her mother:)
Because for all the years in between … Callum and I … We get along fine, don’t we?
You’ve always got along with him fine.
Everything about the music of piobaireachd indicates a turning back to its origins – from the structure of the music and its return over and over to the ideas of its Urlar or first theme, to the anatomy of the pipes
themselves
that creates limitations in key and octave that must keep the variety of the notes to certain repetitions and rephrasings – and it is this turning back, while going forward with a tune, that, perhaps, lends the music its great melancholy and sense of feeling.
For to return, to return … This idea runs all the way through the pages and the lives of John MacKay Sutherland and those who knew him. Remember the lines in the opening section of the Taorluath: ‘Certain roads, you get to a part of them, turn a corner, say, come over some kind of a hill, and you feel … No going back now. The road there to take you and all you can imagine is the place that lies ahead and who’s there, who’s waiting.’ The tone of those words sounds exactly the inevitability of the pipes’ own song that brings the piper home.
‘To the make of a piper go seven years’ wrote the novelist and
short-story
writer Neil Munro. ‘Seven years of his own learning and seven
generations
before.’
So … Return
Return
Return.
‘Look for us in the windscreen of your car and we’re waiting for you.’
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Now follows a ‘General Account’ of piobaireachd by Douglas
MacDonald
of Strathglass. He begins his remarks, too, with a reference to ‘The Lost Piobaireachd’, the short story by Neil Munro:
‘To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before. At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and lending a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs.’
Then he begins:
Piobaireachd is not the music of the pipe band (a nineteenth-century invention) nor is it the strathspeys and reels that folk dance to. These are known to pipers as Ceol Beag or little music. Piobaireachd (a Gaelic word literally meaning the playing of pipes) is called Ceol Mor, ‘the great music’ of the pipe that serious pipers revere as the height of their art.
So what is it that goes into the making of this so-called ‘great music’? Like the strathspey, this music is unique to the Highlands of Scotland. Generally tunes consist of a poetic urlar (a ground or theme), upon which several variations of varying tempi are constructed. These are embellished with a series of musical ornaments that become more complex as the tune progresses, culminating with the return to the urlar to complete the tune. The effect of these variations with an instrument that is harmonically balanced against its drones will provide an almost mesmerising effect. The piper uses subtle variations of note length to build poetic phrasing, expression and character into a piece to convey the story the original composer was trying to portray to the listener.
These piobaireachd are repetitious gathering tunes that call the Clan, stately salutes about the heroes of battle, or notable gents and ladies, or a lament mourning those who deserve our respect or sometimes contempt. These tunes often date back hundreds of years to a time when the bard or piper held great esteem in the Gaelic community.
Legend says that the MacCrimmons were the greatest of the hereditary pipers, who had a college at Boreraig in Skye where pipers from all over Scotland were refined over a number of years and returned to their patrons. The origin of the music and the history of the MacCrimmons were lost in the mists of time. Our earliest knowledge stretches back to Findlay and Iain Odhar, sometime around the sixteenth century.
After Colloden in 1745, and the subsequent bans on many aspects of Gaelic life, which included the bagpipe, regarded by the English as an instrument of war on the assumption that no Scottish Clan had ever marched into battle without a piper, many of the old tunes were lost, or in fear of being lost. Piping, which was then to survive within the Scottish regiments now serving the British crown, began to change its character and piobaireachd was more commonly heard on the competition boards at many gatherings, being judged by the local laird or vicar. Those days have gone, and the judges are now piping experts, with the audience made up of piping purists and the general public usually regarding piobaireachd as an acquired taste, preferring to watch the caber-tossing or tug-o-war.
In the nineteenth century, tunes were, for the first time, being written to manuscript. This has certainly preserved many that would otherwise have been lost to us, but the criticism being that such music cannot be written. Piobaireachd is based on a rhythmic meter much like poetry, where the piper cuts or extends notes to mark phrases, the ends of lines, or even various notes of identical value throughout a line to create interest and the mood of a tune. This is not done at random, and there must be some historical source upon which the pipers base their particular setting. There are various schools of playing and they all have their own individual styles and settings. Some of the piper’s own feelings and interpretation are no doubt always expressed in a tune, but variation from the existing settings is frowned upon.
Being an oral tradition, piobaireachd was taught using a canntaireachd. This was a method of verbalising the notes and embellishments in a tune and teaching it as a song. This method is still used today, with the manuscript used as a teaching aid. Rare is it to find a piper that has learnt piobaireachd with any success that has not had a proper teacher to refine his art using canntaireachd, even in this age of modern communication.
One of modern times’ greatest exponents of piobaireachd was Pipe Major John MacDonald of Inverness. He wrote in 1949 that, ‘A Piper should be a man of as wide a culture as possible, not only concerned about execution, but with strong and sympathetic understanding of nature’s varied moods, translated by him into music.
‘When a piper is at his best, and is being carried away by his tune, he sees a picture in his mind – at least that is how it is with me. When I am playing ‘The Kiss of the King’s Hand’, I visualise Skye and Boreraig and the MacCrimmons. The tune ‘Donald Doughall MacKay’ brings to mind a picture of the old pipers, and how they played this tune. A piper in order to play his best must be oblivious to his surroundings – he must be carried away by the beauty and harmony of the tune he is playing.’
Piobaireachd with its length, intricacies, emotions and the need to have a well-set pipe is not the domain of the novice. To say one stands at the start of knowledge after seven years of learning is no exaggeration as this art encompasses a lifetime’s study. The knowledge passed orally from our teachers cannot be underestimated and indeed I would say that any master’s skill could not be honed in this art without adding the input of previous generations of pipers to his learning. I have heard piobaireachd referred to as self-indulgent music, as it may sometimes seem to the uninitiated. It is played only on a solo pipe, and the competent performer often seems to be drifting off to some faraway place, but be assured he is ‘lending a fond ear to the drone’ and expressing the thoughts of ‘old folks and old affairs’.
Margaret first left her mother’s home in Caithness planning to return.
Is how that story started, the one about her mother striking out on her own. It’s a known story – the going out into the world like a woman in a Highland fable or a ballad, or in a book by Neil Gunn,
23
say, and Helen asked to hear it many times, the tale of her mother’s leaving, for in it she could come to read her own future, of going out, one day, to have
adventures
of her own but knowing she would also come home again.
‘I wanted to see other parts of Scotland, down south or through the west’ her mother might begin. Or ‘Once upon a time …’ And Helen would be sitting there, unmoving. Rigid with attention as she sat in a chair or at the table and not wanting to miss a single detail: of how her mother had planned on going away from the place where she’d been born to start university in Aberdeen; her taking up of a summer job in a house in Sutherland with a friend who would be nannying at a big lodge near Beauly. ‘The two of us travelled up from Aberdeen in the train together, it was the start of June …’ Ending with how Margaret had met Helen’s father, how she had just been a young girl when it happened, that day when she first saw him and his eyes rested upon her, the moment when – according to Helen, the way she used to tell it when she was a child, as though it were in itself a story for a child – her mother had ‘fallen in love’.
