The Big Music (45 page)
Authors: Kirsty Gunn
48
‘TLH’, standing for ‘The Little Hut’, is the mark at the bottom of many of the original papers discovered in that place, as described in the Crunluath A Mach section of ‘The Big Music’.
49
The relevance of this place of composition has already been noted in earlier sections of ‘The Big Music’; further details are contained in the following movement.
50
This composition has been noted already, on pp. 128 and 132, and details given of the change of title.
51
The Index at the back of ‘The Big Music’ gives various listings for the Little Hut, as they also appear in the opening pages of the Urlar.
52
At present there is under consideration a proposal to revive the spirit of this ‘School’, the so-called ‘Winter Classes’. Callum Sutherland is putting together a business plan whereby the administration and day-to-day organisation of The Grey House can be reconfigured as a limited company, owned by himself and those who have lived at The Grey House as long as he has known them – Margaret MacKay and her husband Iain, her daughter Helen – and to ‘buy in’ the expertise of an international roster of pipers to take classes and give recitals. Further details of these classes will be made available on a relevant website and by advertisement as soon as they are confirmed.
53
In one of his essays, MacKay refers to John Roderick Callum Sutherland (1800–1871) in particular, but sets him in a context that reaches back to the early eighteenth century, so taking in the previous two generations of the Sutherland family.
54
The List of Additional Materials found at the back of ‘The Big Music’ gives examples of original documents etc. that establish the musical prominence of the Sutherland family from early times.
55
This is listed in the Bibliography, along with other relevant publications that refer to the Winter Classes and bagpipe schools in general, especially the MacCrimmons of Boreraig.
56
The third return that has just preceded this section opens with this very concept at the heart of Archibald Campbell’s address to the London Piobaireachd Society in 1952.
57
All excerpts here are taken from the wealth of domestic material that is available to the general reader and that provides a sort of backstory to the book ‘The Big Music’ and that is collected in archive. This includes a sound archive that comprises original recordings and interviews as well as transcripts of those conversations, preserved as verbatim accounts that have been used here. There are also letters, private journals and cards that all relate to the use of The Grey House as a school and centre for piping over the years – in particular from the 1950s onwards. In addition, the List of Additional Materials contains some transcripts that may be of interest.
58
See MacNeill’s
Piobaireachd: Classical Music of the Highland Bagpipe
for a full account of the MacCrimmon family legacy and relevant periodical titles in the Bibliography for further examples of the role of the School and its legacy in the period both before and after Proscription.
59
NB: This is when he first met Margaret MacKay of Caithness.
60
We have seen the way lullabies and the tradition of Highland folk song often carry a plangent tune and lyric content that denotes loss and longing as well as a desire to soothe and placate. The casting away and loss of children is certainly a most present theme in these songs that are often sung most sweetly by elderly women, years and years after the babies have grown up and left and gone away. See Helen MacKay’s paper ‘The Metaphor of Lullaby’ in
Studies in the Maternal,
vol. 1, issue iv, University of London, 2009; also the Bibliography generally for further reading.
61
pp. 28–34 and 61–2 in particular give some of the history of Margaret MacKay and John Sutherland, a love story that is unconventional in the manner so celebrated by some of the great ballads and piobaireachds of the early eighteenth century. Appendix 12 includes information on the pre-piobaireachd music of the harp, that has relevance here, and the List of Additional Materials shows Laments featured in the book, and especially note details pertaining to ‘The Return’ or ‘Margaret’s Song’.
62
The later section of this Crunluath movement shows how Helen’s papers come to be seen to be central to the project of ‘The Big Music’, and have been from the outset.
63
Appendix 1: ‘History/Landscape of the North East Region’; Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’; Carter,
Farmlife in Northeast Scotland,
and other related titles in the Bibliography, may be of interest here.
64
As note above; also ‘Story of a Highland Estate’ in Richards and Clough,
Cromartie: Highland Life.
65
As recalled in the first variation in the Taorluath, and earlier sections of this movement and developed further here.
66
Appendix 3/ii: ‘Land Use and the Clearances’ gives further details of this period of Highland History; see also Bibliography and pp. 88–92 of ‘The Big Music’.
67
See Bibliography/History: Highland and Scottish – Richards,
Debating the Highland Clearances.
68
See Bibliography, in particular Richards’s
Debating the Highland Clearances,
and related papers in ‘The Big Music’ that describe how the Sutherland family, like many, resisted the changes that were elsewhere sweeping the Highlands.
69
Appendix 3 may be of interest here; also literary history – novels, stories and poems of the Highlands pre- and post-Clearances – listed in the Bibliography.
70
This idea is present in the individual embellishments as they appear in this movement as the domestic histories of various women connected to ‘The Big Music’ and, it is becoming increasingly clear as the Crunluath progresses, is a central theme that draws many of the papers and writings together. See also the footnotes on pp. 19 and 41 of the Urlar movement that, from early on in ‘The Big Music’, bring the reader’s attention to the use and provenance of the first-person in terms of the writing’s tone and influence.
71
John Roderick MacKay, 1736–1793, one of these; also Appendices 1–3a and 6/i relate to general characteristics of the region.
72
The earlier Taorluath movement gives more details of the House and its history, as do those Appendices relating to The Grey House and certain documents listed in the List of Additional Materials at the back of this book.
73
Earlier sections of ‘The Big Music’ describe the history of The Grey House from the mid-eighteenth century, and how it was first a traditional Highland longhouse or blackhouse.
74
A ceilidh translates as a gathering or dance, a party in which everyone participates; see also Glossary; and sources in the Bibliography/Music: Highland. Various gracenotes throughout the Crunluath may also provide insight as to the way the music of the culture permeates and is permeated by the Highland sensibility – the earlier sections on the House as a place that is both public and private, both intensely social and lonely, may also be of relevance here.
75
The earlier variation set out this arrangement.
76
The nineteenth-century recipe refers to an earlier ‘reciepie of Elizabeth Mary’ and has been collected, along with various other domestic papers, as part of the archive that is referred to in the List of Additional Materials at the back of ‘The Big Music’.
77
The full archive that exists in association with ‘The Big Music’ includes many historical documents such as this one, also copies of key papers kept in local libraries, museums etc.
78
See Appendix 3: ‘History of the Highland North East region’; also relevant sections of the Urlar and Taorluath movements of ‘The Big Music’.
79
As was indicated in the earlier variation.
80
Relevant publications include
The Piping Times
and
Piobaireachd in the North East
etc., all listed as sources of information in the List of Additional Materials at the back of ‘The Big Music’.
81
The Bibliography carries details of a number of books related to the history of piobaireachd teaching and the MacCrimmon legacy at Boreraig; Appendix 14: ‘The Cultural History of the Bagpipes’ may also be of interest.
82
The recipe, referred to in the List of Additional Materials, is the same recipe as was used by the original John Sutherland’s wife, Elizabeth Mary MacKay, in the late 1700s and is described in an eighteenth-century document featuring other items of domestic interest; also has been copied out in a separate book, with other recipes and kitchen notes, by Elizabeth Clare Nichol of Crieff.
83
This section and those following are taken from a tape recording made of a conversation between Helen and Margaret; certain questions were asked of Iain and this transcript comprises his answers with relevant edits.
84
Margaret’s version of events as spoken as a monologue, privately, into a tape recorder and simply transferred to the page.
85
pp. 73–4 and 82 of the Taorluath movement and sections of the Crunluath movement show in fragments, scraps of sentences, similar use of Margaret’s original writings, notes for a story.
86
Translates as ‘old woman, witch’: see Glossary for all Gaelic words and expressions used.
87
All the way through ‘The Big Music’ there has been the sense of a strengthening firstperson narrative that was first brought to the attention of the reader back on pp. 19 and 20 etc. of the Urlar. Now, in this final section of the Crunluath movement, the author of the papers is made clear as John Sutherland’s daughter, Helen, whose mother is Margaret MacKay and whose writing, that seemed to enter the text or ‘story’ at first in no more than a sentence or two, now declares itself to be the entire contents of this book.
After his father’s death, Callum and I went up to the Little Hut in the hills and found all the papers, John’s music and manuscripts, his notes and the writing that he’d set down that was to act as a sort of prompt for him in the composing of his last uncompleted piobaireachd, the ‘Lament for Himself’ that he was working on in the last months of his life.
We went there alone, to our father’s place.
As I just wrote, this was directly after John’s death, the day after – before Callum’s wife and sons arrived for the funeral in Brora, before the great complications of that ceremony that would bring Sarah back here, and all those people in London John had known when he’d had the business there, the relatives from his mother’s family in Perthshire and sons and relatives of his father’s friends who still had a connection to the House through music or the Winter Classes from all those years ago.
It took us a morning to walk up the hill and over. The season had turned – in just the last couple of days the autumn that had been with us, that seemed on some days still to have a touch of summer in it, that was gone – and it was cold and raining when we arrived. The loch was not visible through cloud.
Callum lit the wood-burning stove and we spent the day and the night there together. We saw everything that I then went on to use to make this collection of papers – the music and notes providing everything for the story that I would need. I took the materials away with me and, after
Callum and I had said goodbye to each other in our own way, and after he went back to London with his family, I set up a sort of study in the room at the top of the House, the place under the eaves that has always been known as the Schoolroom, and I started assembling the papers there.
So what follows here, in this final section, are simply examples of what I have had to work with; the actual manuscript of the ‘Lament’, the outline of it as written by John Sutherland, is separate, of course, including the beautiful leitmotif of the Lullaby, the section of music that was written for my daughter, that appears as the opening bars in the second line of the Urlar. It is unlikely that John himself fully understood, as he was composing it, how that part of the music would give the final shape to the overall theme – though some fragments of his notes found at the hut suggest that his mind was reaching in that direction, trying to find a metaphor that would give meaning and depth to his composition, that it would not simply be an account of his life but tell a larger story.
My hope is, however, that the words I have put down for his Ceol Mor, ‘The Big Music’, can go some way towards providing the lovely tune of his entire – so that though ‘Lament for Himself’ was never completed, the entire piobaireachd may sound through these pages.
In the end, it was only by going through and reading all the material that was there in the Little Hut that I came to understand what I did of the man who had composed it. And it was only by learning what I did of his life and history that I came to hear the part that he himself was never able to include.
That is the part my tiny daughter plays.
Asleep in her basket as I write this – the flower on the grass, as John himself wrote of her, when, unknown to him, he was describing her in his journal … And what was the other phrase of his? I found it there in one of his papers: ‘new life come out of old’ – something like that.
He put it better in the notes he used.
The material below is arranged in no particular order and gives a small sample only of the kinds of notes and writings that were found in the hut. In some sections, I have added a line or two myself to indicate as to how the material may have suggested itself to be used as part of a work of prose, as well as conveying how certain musical ideas may have been represented in sections of the manuscript.
To understand best how all these disparate elements were brought together and assembled to make some kind of whole, the reader of course has already the previous movements – the Urlar, the Taorluath, and Crunluath movements that precede this current section, the A Mach – that together comprise the entire piobaireachd.
To this end, everything you need for ‘The Big Music’ is contained within its pages.
However, it should also be noted that, as well as all that material discovered in the Little Hut, the entire contents of The Grey House library and additional personal and legal papers of John Callum Sutherland, the piper and composer, are currently being assembled as a permanent archive to be used by musicians and historians and those interested in the ongoing place of the Highland bagpipe in Western culture.
1
i
You’ve heard it already said: No wonder he got off to London so fast.
2
This to continue that theme.
That it was no wonder, after university in Edinburgh, that he put more and more distance between himself and the old man. No wonder he became so intent, the son, upon fixing himself up in a business that was far away from the family home and its terrible quiet.
That place always more like a school, anyhow, than a home, his father still teaching there even when he was very old.
3
[from – journal/notes for composition]
But you can’t labour under that same tutelage, Johnnie!
Can’t wrap the same banner around your body as that which your own father wore!
4
[from – notebook/various dated entries]
Anyway I wanted nothing to do with my father by then, or his way of doing business, the kind or extent of his concerns. I wanted nothing to do with lorries or tractors or transport and roads. To do with land and getting more land and buying off more land and putting roads through it, or dividing it into sections, and selling or renting it off, piece by piece.
Those small industrial estates of his, for light storage zones or for private use and micro-farming … I didn’t want any part of Sutherland that way, or Sutherland and Caithness together, for that matter, those sheds and roads and buildings a kind of industry for my father, with his machines and vehicles, boiling bitumen and tar by the side of the road – I didn’t want that for Sutherland, it wasn’t what I wanted stayed in my mind when I thought about the place,
5
while I was away getting married, fathering a child. Only hills and skies all loaded with weather. And the black water and the snow on the tops and the deer paths for walking.
I’d come back for that.
Not the other, the father. Only come back when the old man has died.
6
[from – various scraps of paper/uncollated, all written in pencil]
Come back to the familiar place. The Ailte vhor Alech, the End of the Road.
7
And when did it begin with Margaret, anyway?
For ever.
ii
Remember: following the Urlar, there’s a sense of a leap, sometimes, in the music – this is also known as a ‘Stag’s Leap’ – it’s like a preparation for the second movement.
Yet how can I say this is when Margaret fully enters ‘The Big Music’ when it’s as though she’s always been there?
[from – handwritten score/notes made in the margin]
She’s that note: there.
8
The key would be strong, but hitting back off the minor notes and plenty of interval between them for embellishment.
NB: additional thoughts: taken from journals, letters:
9
He couldn’t say exactly when, but it was early into his marriage that he knew he should have had his mind turned to his wife, to his baby son, but he couldn’t so turn for he’d realised, soon after the wedding, that he’d done the
wrong thing. Being south. Being married, being a father. All of it wrong. It started then, I think, that habit of cutting himself off from things, from people. Then he’d come home for his mother, remember? When they all thought she was going to die and he came home then after so much time away? He’d finally got in, from the long journey, overnight first to Edinburgh then the connecting train north and getting in to the station, late, late afternoon, opening the carriage door … And Margaret was there.
[from – a tape recording/words spoken, then sounding a note, a sequence of notes]
10
Margaret.
Margaret.
Margaret.
Thinking of her now, and full, in these last warm days before the real cold sets in.
[from – letter to self, typewritten]
They might phone you, your wife and son, asking after you, they might – but you’ve stopped taking the tablets now or you’d never get this piece written. It would never be done. There’s the first movement down in manuscript, but something missing from it even so.
But don’t say a word to anyone about it.
What you’re doing up here.
Because it’s what you wanted, isn’t it?
To be up here, in this private place, with all the past set down on the pages?
What you wanted, Johnnie?
To be completely alone?
11
[from – tape recording/interrupted chanter playing of first movement, spoken words and handwritten notes (indicated here in italics) inserted in the chanter case]
12
Is there anyone else?
This music needs something else.
Is there another theme here, that could come in?
Something to suggest lightness, possibility.
Here’s a phrase that keeps coming back to me: new life out of old.
iii
As he got older, his visits back to the House increased; he stayed longer and longer until he moved back permanently. By then it had been a long time since he and Margaret had been together in the room they had shared at the top of the House. After his last stroke, Margaret and Iain moved John to the little bedroom off the hall down by the room they used to call the Music Room.
13
That was from the days when his father taught in there, and the various musicians played and made their presentations there. It was thought the pipers would have marched up and down the hall right outside that little bedroom – and John would have that to think about, maybe, as he lay there in his bed.
It must have seemed to him by then that everything about his life had gone into the past. The manuscript shows the ‘Lament’ following more and more a minor trajectory that, in the opening section especially, seems barely able to lift itself above the drone of the ‘A’.
As though there’s nothing to give him pleasure any more.
The single High ‘A’, that relief … It’s as if he’s saving that for later.
[from – tape recording/interrupted chanter playing spoken words and handwritten notes (in italics) inserted in the chanter case]
For what use a tune when the wind turns cold or the rain might start? It’s more a blanket I need than a baby’s cloth, though I have seen the baby and she is fair. Still it’s more a covering for a bed I need, for a grave.
She’s Margaret’s daughter’s child.
The idea of having her with me, in the tune.
If at all possible, to get away up here, and finish it. Find the little theme that’s missing here. Like a blanket, like a baby’s cloth.
14
[from – journal/undated entries]
Another day – working on the second and third movements; written notes but nothing laid down yet. Overcast but warm.
An easy walk this morning, and they don’t know I’m here.
Raining.
Clear today, some cloud later.
iv
NB: idea for insert – John Callum:
15
To break the silence following the second movement: The young man thinks it, says ‘I’ll not go!’ … But he did go back, sure enough, for the funeral.
And his father was there, inside the box.
John had stood over him, before the men came up behind with the shovels and the earth.
‘Ready then?’ they’d asked him. The day was cold.
‘Aye, ready …’
[from – journal, notes written in third person]
For weeks now. Months even. Hearing it but having to be silent. For the work of the damn pills, and Sarah calling from London every minute to check up, ask the others, How’s he doing? Are you keeping an eye on things there?
But the tune. It’s coming.
And where, you might ask, is Callum in all of this?
16
Asking Sarah but
getting no answer there, down the line. For there’s no note in the music for him, for Callum, though he should be there.
Callum.
But how to get him in? When he’s his son and he belongs there?
How make a tune for someone, put him in, when you don’t know him at all?
v
[from – paper/handwritten]
Only …
That note.
Yet to come in.
The High, High – ‘A’ – of her.
Again …
And …
Again.
vi
