The Big Music (35 page)

And by then, we know, he’d found himself wanting the time alone, needing it. Not thinking for a moment of the other family who lived here, though he saw Margaret, of course, he would always want to feel her nearby, somewhere close to him in the House. But more and more, generally for him, the thinking when he was here was – why bother with anyone else? Those people from London he used to invite? Those things he used to do? Because by now he’d got out his chanter again, that he’d left behind here with his father all those years ago. He’d found it amongst his
father’s things and all his old exercises, his music. Though he’d said he’d never be back for all of that. Never! Remember? That he’d had enough of his father and his father’s damn music? Even so. Just as in London, those long years away he had always been able to hear the ghost of the old tunes, and not just in dreams, but driving somewhere, in the middle of the day. Or coming out from a building in the City, out onto the street, he’d hear the thread of some part of the old music then, one of his father’s tunes, or something he himself used to play … So he found the manuscripts in time that gave him the notes for those tunes, that he now needed – you could say it was just a matter of time. Looking out the sheets of handwritten music, and the folios of printed tunes. All there in the bookshelves above his father’s desk in the Music Room. First one tune, something easy to start with. ‘Flowers of the Forest’, say. ‘Return from Boreraig’. Then other tunes, more difficult, more interesting. He’d read through the music, sing it. There were some later compositions of his father’s also, that he’d never heard before … He played them. Those tunes as well, and more tunes … He went through everything in his father’s Music Room until he’d arrived at a place in his mind where he’d think: What need to see anyone else at all? Talk to anyone? When he was going through that music, getting out his father’s pipes and his old practice chanter and playing his father’s big music, the Big Music, again, and playing it again and again. Why bother by then, you might say, about anything else? What need for anyone? Any conversation, any thought for another? When there was this, in his life, at the centre of it, music. There need be nothing else. No friends. No wife. No child.

Is how the years had passed for John Sutherland, a routine in place for him by the time he reached middle age about how he might live – with Elizabeth long gone and Callum’s headstone down in Brora green with lichen – so once again the Music Room became the focus of the House, the sound of the pipes playing again like his own father had always wanted. And by then he had brought out all Callum Sutherland’s music in one body of work, all the manuscripts, all his books and notes – a process that has been recorded in a special interview that was run in
The New Piping Times,
that describes all the sense of the son coming upon the inheritance
of the father, the understanding for John Sutherland that the teaching he had received as a boy had been at a master’s hand.
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Thereafter he’d spent his time, increasingly, going through each of his father’s papers, one by one, checking each version of notes in one tune by another, going on to read and play them in their variations and those passages his father had marked up with his own doublings and embellishments. He was working in his own particular fashion, intent and serious but nevertheless in pencil – to keep vivid and present his own father’s work that way and not overscore it – making copies off the original Angus MacKay editions
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that his father had inherited from his father, putting in the accidentals in a miniature stave and key signature, right above the manuscripted notes. John couldn’t believe the detail of the work when he went through it. How the pages of the original nineteenth-century folio his father had worked from
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were thin and yellowed and threatened to come away from the spine, and yet still his father had kept the book in such beautiful condition that he had sewed certain pages in with silk thread, or had Elizabeth do it, so to read through it when he came upon it years later … The music looked lovely still, could be secure in its original condition, and so these books were lovely things to hold.

The strength of his father, his will, the detail and personality that sounded through in all his possessions – perhaps these qualities were behind John’s need to create for himself another place that would sit away from the House, and so be apart from the intricacies and influence of his father’s scholarship and musicianship. Perhaps. It could have been that simple, individual need that took him up to the hills to find the certain crevice in the land which would be unseen unless you knew where to go, that was flat enough, with the ruin of an old bothy on it, to build for
himself
a little shelter and be alone there, collect his own papers and materials and keep them somewhere that would be nothing to do with his father’s tiny detailed writing and his priceless books. It would be somewhere that could be his alone, a place he would make for himself, where John need not feel, to quote his own remark in the
Times
interview, that his musical inheritance had come to him ‘to his cost’. And who knows how long it took? To find the site in that hidden valley beside the water? To take the materials up there he would need, piece by piece, and quietly build up for himself four walls, a roof? How long to fit out his shelter and carry up there a chair first, a desk? Piece by piece. Item by item. Tune by tune. Yet he did all of this. Because then the Little Hut, as he always called it, in his books and notes – ‘TLH’ is the mark at the bottom of so many of his papers
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– became the way John Sutherland could create his own part of the world that might sit outside everything else that was in it. The Little Hut would be a place that would be his alone.
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All this to describe how John Sutherland came back, one might say, in these particular ways – to do with finding for himself the qualities of his father’s music, the wealth of it kept there in the House – to embrace all the things he’d left behind him. Not arriving to wait for a crowd of London friends to follow, but setting up the Music Room to be used again as his father had used it, to sit alone in there and go through the
various manuscripts and to be playing from them. While not wanting to repeat his father’s habits, either – for he would never be like him, the great teacher and scholar, he could never be that disciplined or as pure. Rather, he came to find in the music certain passages that would start him
thinking
how he could develop his own sense of playing, an idea of a variation, say, presenting to him as the beginnings of a tune he might develop – and taking pleasure from this, a growing understanding of what his own music might sound like, what it would be.

So nothing like his father, then, he could still think! Nothing like!

Though he was in the Music Room all the same, and playing the same tunes according to his father’s markings, and over and over. And how would his father ever have guessed that one day his son might do that, look so clearly at his work, be so close to it – the child who was never good enough, who felt the sting of the flex across his knuckles, across the back of his legs, the strike of the cuff against his face when he made as much as even one mistake.

Yet now here he was, playing in his father’s room.

And so friends might have still been coming to the House, but only rarely and they were different friends, sons of his father’s friends, some of them, so pipers, and from the college in Glasgow, in Edinburgh – because it was the music they’d be coming for now, like in the old days. His father’s days. And there’d be parties, maybe, but parties because of the music they were playing. Up most of the night some nights, through to dawn those summers. John here like an owner of the place, as though he’d always been here, in time bringing his own son with him and with every year it seemed to him there were more reasons to stay. More to learn about, to think about. The old tunes, though. Only the old tunes in the House.

His own music – that was for the little place in the hills. The only place where he could think about the other music, that sound that started in his own head, and tried to complete there. In the Little Hut that was his, and his alone.

He thought.

When love went off or tenderness hardened into something no more than gesture – then, well, ‘Aye’. He had this. His own composition. No
one else could have it, this secret part of himself he owned in a place that was, like himself, shut away and utterly unknown. It was somewhere he could ignore who he’d become, the things he’d lied about and never done. A place where he had no wife or son or lover or anyone in the past that he might remember – but one person. Only Margaret. As though she was a music of her own, exisiting outside the whole, the markings and
patternings
of his mind, her own note. As though there was something in that note that he needed and that he could hear through all the others, but had never been able to reach, a note he’d never let himself fully play …

Margaret.

Because what if he did play it? That note? What if he, just once, had played it? Just once and pure and true?

Though he’d written her a tune that would be her own tune and he called it ‘The Return’ and secretly to himself ‘Margaret’s Song’ …
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He’d ended up with only Himself here. In the little shelter in the hills.

The place that he thought was his alone.

The Little Hut, as we have already seen, represents a separate musical context for John MacKay Sutherland. The Music Room in The Grey House is associated with the story of his musical genealogy – of his father’s work, and his father’s before him, that in many respects goes all the way back to the musical nights of the original Grey Longhouse of the eighteenth century – but the Little Hut belongs to him alone.

It was for the very reason of his father – the heft and weight of his memory and influence that was always present in the House – that it became necessary for John to establish his own creative space. To quote from the variation that has just preceded this passage and other papers not used in that section: ‘While not wanting to repeat his father’s habits … Though he was in the Music Room all the time and playing the same tunes according to his father’s markings over and over … Nevertheless thinking about his own music by then, that he might do something that felt he did not have to acknowledge his father, that might be his own endeavour. Thinking how, if he was to make something new, something that might come from himself, he would need to be away from his father, from the memory of that man, the thoughts of what he would say, if he was alive, about his son’s own work, these compositions of his that were new, nothing like Callum Sutherland’s work at all.’

In part, the reason the Little Hut may have represented such freedom for John MacKay was due to the fact that it was not related to the idea of a
musical school at all. Unlike his family home that had always been used this way, as a place of piobaireachd education and tuition, the Little Hut had no history, no credited past. To his mind, John Sutherland was the only person who knew about it, and in this sense it was more private to him, even, than the room at the top of the House where he and Margaret used to spend their nights together. That room, after all, had a history associated with it. His mother gave him lessons there when he was a child, and later, as is detailed in this same movement of ‘The Big Music’ and in relevant papers, it also, for a number of consecutive years, became a Schoolroom for local children.

The little cabin or ‘bothy’
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that John built for himself in the hills, though, was altogether different, with the atmosphere of classes, tuition and
performance
as far removed from the ethos of the building as could be.

As has been noted already in the Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’, the Sutherland Family of The Grey House district were renowned since the early eighteenth century as musicians who had established a form of teaching that became well known, from that time on, throughout the
district
and beyond (latterly referred to as ‘The Highland School of Piping’) when local pipers were invited to stay at the Grey Longhouse, as it was then, for weeks at a time, through the Winter Solstice so they could play and perfect their playing under the tutelage of John Roderick Sutherland.

Over the years, with ensuing generations, these classes became
formalised
by the time of John Callum MacKay (‘Old John’) and were advertised, to an extent, throughout Scotland as The Grey House was extended. There were built lodgings and outhouses to accommodate pupils who would arrive in October through to January, to take advantage of the expertise of the generations of pipers that followed the time of the MacCrimmons – from ‘Old John’s classes through to what became officially known as ‘The Grey House Winter Classes’, conducted by the father of the John MacKay Sutherland whose story is featured in ‘The Big Music’.

John MacKay himself had classes, of sorts, conducted by himself and other pipers whom he’d invited to the House – this, after he began
returning
to Sutherland on a regular basis and some years after his mother’s death, when his guests were no longer the usual band of friends from London but those he knew who were connected with the piping world, past pupils of his father and their sons, members of various societies and schools. The Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’, in particular, describes how, when he left the House as a young man vowing to ‘never return!’, John Sutherland would have had no idea that not even half his life would pass before he went back and took up his father’s place in this way. But take it up he did. In fact, in those intervening years, after his mother’s death and before the onset of his own age and ill health, the atmosphere at The Grey House often seemed to resemble, almost entirely, those old days of the past. Though Iain Cowie would not have said so. By contrast, he remains faithful to the purist memory of Callum Sutherland as conducting his lessons in a very formal, concentrated manner. Though he is no piper himself, Iain would say that as far as he was concerned, the so-called ‘classes’ of John’s were more social in aspect, less dignified. But this can all be argued either way, and Iain, as we have already seen, had a great deal of time, one might say love, for the older man and would always think the way in which Callum Sutherland did a thing was the best way. Nevertheless, it is on record, by various pupils and teachers who attended John Sutherland’s own Winter Classes and who remembered the old days,
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that when there was a party of invited musicians in, the House really did seem to belong to another age – with John tutoring the young men who would arrive for a week’s playing and then conducting a series of performances on the Saturday evening accompanied by many a good dram. Those nights were festive indeed and most convivial.