The Big Music

Piobaireachd (pron.
pe-brohh
) or Ceol Mor, as it is also known, translates into English as ‘The Big Music' and is the classical compositional form of the Highland bagpipe. It is music that is written to be played outside or in a wide space that may best set off its sound and range and scale,
addressing
large themes of loss and longing, of recognition and salute and farewell … And so is music that cannot make itself be small. Like many formal classical compositions it is lengthy and involved, constructed
according
to an opening theme – the Urlar, or Ground – and subsequent variations that build upon it, including the Taorluath, the Crunluath, or Crown, and the Crunluath A Mach that will describe the tune's
conclusion
. These later movements extend the Urlar's opening ideas while
demonstrating
both the dexterity of the piper and the composer's ambitions. The piobaireachd ends, however, not with difficulty and reach but in a return to the Urlar's opening simplicity. Then the piper will play those same notes with which the composition began, walking away over the hill as the sound of the music fades from the air and stillness takes up its watch again upon the empty page.

The story that follows – a narrative made up of journal entries, papers and inserted sections of domestic history that together become ‘The Big Music’ – first came to my attention several years ago when I was working on a piece of short fiction that was set in the Highlands of Scotland. While I was imagining scenarios and characters for that project, thinking of this person, then another, deciding where it was they might live,
planning
the background of their lives, there was presented to me a file of papers – well, several files, in truth, bound together as separate chapters or sections with paperclips or stapled in sheaves, and some that were in narrative order, others not – that seemed to hold within it all the world I had been previously imagining, delivering it to me as something already in existence.

The more I read into these pages, the more deeply involved I became in their provenance and meaning. Were the sections part of one journal? They appeared to be, a large portion of them, as the reader will come to see, with all of a journal’s quality of the personal, of something direct and urgent that needs to be told. Yet other sections of the file were more like transcripts, or notes for stories, or finished stories, some of them. There seemed no way at first of plying the layers of the pages together to bring some kind of structure to the whole.

Then, as I came to move the papers around, arranging them in
different
sequences and patterns, I saw that in fact the idea of the piobaireachd
as a determining form was governing the overall content. Here, in this way, did I find ‘The Big Music’ – for that is what piobaireachd means, as described in the definition on p. xi. And by finding a title, embedded as it were within the
millefeuille
of these pages that were in my possession, well then, so I was able to find a shape for something that could be … What? Not so much a story as a place, a world. Something that could be held between the covers of a book that might read in parts like a narrative, in others like a history or even a dream.

That shape is the shape of the piobaireachd itself: a concerto, a piece of music made up of separate movements that take an idea and build on it, as the movements themselves build to a conclusion – that, according to the terms of the composition, returns at the end to the original idea, to the moment of utter simplicity that was the outlining of the first few notes.

My arrangement of what follows, therefore, is nothing more than a suggestion along these lines – of a shape – although there are pages here of writing that show that the same shape was also intended. The notation and references that appear on the text are my own, and indicate areas of further reading that may be of interest to those who want to explore more fully the world of this book, its history and music and sense of place. It is, however, by no means necessary to go to the Appendices and material that is available while reading. Rather, consider these additional pages as a landscape that is at your back or a view through a window or beyond an open door – a place to be explored only if you want to go there.

In addition, I have included in that separate section a list of papers that were part of the original cardboard file – manuscripts, documents relating to the history of The Grey House, notes and entries from
various
diaries that may have been used by John Callum Sutherland and his forebears – including a fragment of the unfinished composition ‘Lament for Himself’.

In all my endeavours, I have been supported helpfully and
enthusiastically
by colleagues and friends – at the University of Dundee and
elsewhere
. Professor Christopher Whatley provided an historical reading list and certain books; with Dr Gail Low I came up with the plan of creating
an archive for the papers that were assembled in connection with this project. In addition, my colleagues in literary and creative studies, Dr Jim Stewart and Dr Jane Goldman – Woolf scholars and writers both – have provided endless inspiration and ideas as we discuss Modernism and its glorious implications upon the construction of written texts. It was Jane Goldman, now of the University of Glasgow, who reminded me of T. S. Eliot’s introduction to Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood
, in which he informs the reader of the importance of meeting the challenges of another kind of fiction that is nothing like a conventional story, to understand that the novel need not be just a simple form of communication from and about the real world but, like a poem, can be intricately and fully ‘written’.

Finally, there can be no doubt that none of the pages gathered together here would have been so gathered, into this particular ‘novel’, were it not for the support – both financial and intellectual – of Dr Gavin Wallace, Director of Literature at the Scottish Arts Council, now Creative
Scotland
. The work of Dr Wallace and his team in supporting literature – and this project – has been of utmost significance to me, and I doubt this book would have become realised as a finished piece at all were it not for the generous support of a Scottish Arts Council Bursary seven years ago when the papers around me were first being sifted together and formed into certain piles and formations, and ideas for ‘The Big Music’ were swirling around in my head.

I hope that what follows might gather the reader up in the way it did me – these curious sentences and half-stories sounding through the
paragraphs
in ways that reminded me from the outset of the beautiful music my father has always played. His musicianship, his sense of Ceol Mor, ‘The Big Music’ that sounds from his pipes, in its fine and ancient form that is reflexive and supple and strange, is the inspiration for me tackling this project here in the first place.

The errors I make, either in translating the sense of the mystery of that music in words or in the descriptions of it that I give, are mine alone and are no way to repay the hours of advice I have had from him and from piobaireachd specialists and musicians, both in person and in the reading they have supplied. Consider these shortcomings simply a result of my
poor and most rudimentary understanding of this complicated musical form played on an instrument that is still broadly misunderstood.

If these pages go any way towards bringing to a more general audience the richness and depth of a great music that comes from what is surely one of the most lonely and inaccessible parts of the British Isles …

Well then, perhaps my poor attempts at drawing together a text from it will be forgiven.

Kirsty Gunn

The hills only come back the same:
I don’t mind,
and all the flat moorland and the sky.
I don’t mind
they say, and the water says it too, those black falls that are rimmed with peat, and the mountains in the distance to the west say it, and to the north … As though the whole empty wasted lovely space is calling back at him in the silence that is around him, to this man out here in the midst of it, in the midst of all these hills and all the air. That his presence means nothing, that he could walk for miles into these same hills, in bad weather or in fine, could fall down and not get up again, could go crying into the peat with music for his thoughts maybe, and ideas for a tune, but none of it according him a place here, amongst the grasses and the water and the sky … Still it would come back to him the same in the silence, in the fineness of the air …
I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind.

Is what there is to begin with, a few words and the scrap of a tune put down for the back of the book in some attempt to catch the
opening
of the thing, how it might start. With this image of a man, born eighty-three years ago down out of these same hills, and how he might think now how the land doesn’t mind him, never has. Here he is walking in up the strath towards that far bend in the river and the loudest note could sound in his head and him follow it with a sequence and still this country, his country, would keep its own stillness and only give back to
him the louder quiet, like the name of the tune itself could be
I don’t mind,
is what he’ll call it, ‘Lament for Himself’.
1

It’s early morning but the sun is already well settled in the sky and there is no cloud near to cover it. Only a thin wind comes off the hill and makes it cooler than it was a second ago, but then it stops and it’s warm again. The man shifts the baby he’s carrying in his arms. In the wrappings and the cloth she’s quite difficult to hold. Still, he moves her again, lifting her higher into the crook of his elbow, and she doesn’t cry or twist, the ‘E’ note coming clear all around her, high and pure and steady, even now with her eyes closed. She’ll be all ‘E’ into ‘G’ notes just, the little theme he wants for her, a lullaby. So who cares if the cloths about her are
flapping
in the air? That carrying her’s not like the taking up of a parcel as he thought it would be? He needs her for the tune, even so. For listen: the sequence going now, from the ‘E’ to ‘G’ to ‘E’ to ‘A’ and repeat, you hear it? Johnnie does. The tune that’s new life coming out of old and the drone going heavy below …

Of course he needs to keep the child with him for the tune. And get that bit down he just heard onto a paper and quickly before it’s lost – but no time for it now. For they’ll be up by now, back at the House, going into his bedroom and realising he’s gone, seeing in the child’s mother’s room the empty basket. So he’ll need to keep walking, and faster if he can, with his good stride. Cutting down off the bank and onto the flat,
heading
westwards, no change of pace for a man practised all his life to show rigour in his walking, never idle on the grass. Take the stride on the flat just the same as on the steep hill, boy. Don’t think about stopping. The
pattern of the walk lays down your ground.
2
Just as the sage-coloured grass at his feet can’t be anything than that colour this time of year, late summer by now you might say because of how warm it’s been sometimes and the air so clear but in the month’s heart is resting autumn, and just as that grass underfoot has that small bite to it still says a good summer’s passed and the deer will be down right enough later in the month just for to tear at the sweetness and substance of the grass … So the tune will stay and you can’t change it, the ground laid out for the deer to come down.

He glances around to get his bearings though he barely needs to. There’s the river at his left, his ben
3
side, and he’ll be crossing it in a second to strike over the flat towards the base of Luath, take the small path up the side of the east face where it forms protection. The climbing of that part will be the steepest and most hard, then he’ll cut up the green face and over the top and down, and he’ll be running then, he thinks, oh, Johnnie. For won’t he then be free?

He looks down into his arm. She’s awake, the child is, giving him that fixed look but not judging, deep and thoughtful as though she’s from another world, as well she has been for she’s been with her mother …

‘Hush.’ He whispers quietly like he’s seen her do, the baby’s mother, pokes in one of the little cloths to keep her from the breeze. ‘You know fine’ he answers her ‘what I’m doing with you here.’

For it’s a tune for her, is what it is. The smallest, gentlest song against the ground, against the broad and mindless hills. He can hear it in his own ‘Hush’ and in her soft way with him as she lies in his arms, just looking up at him, just looking. The whole little song of her coming in, the few notes, like a breath of breeze across the land and him settling her in close to his side again as though that will quiet her but she’s not crying.

‘And this is the only way’ says John Sutherland then, clear into the
air. ‘You understand me?’ He stops and turns, as though to a friend. As though he has a friend there with him and is talking with him as though talking in a room, or across a table talking.

‘The only way’ he says again to the friend, to the empty air. ‘You do understand me. How I needed to have her with me this way for the tune.’ So ‘Hush again, my darling’ he sings, speaks the words, shifting her into his other arm and looking about him for the right place to cross the water. Where he won’t slip. Where he couldn’t possibly fall.

To get something down now about the shape of the strath, this part of Sutherland, this river the ‘Dubh Burn’ it’s called, ‘Black Water’. Yet there’s nothing particular in that name either for there are many rivers in the Highlands called ‘black water’ that seem to run that colour, the peaty dark that’s common this part of the world.

This ‘black water’, though, is set in the north-east corner of
Sutherland
so could be, one may imagine, somewhat darker than the rest for the way it starts so deep inland, so far, far away. It starts up there east of the Brora, from a little fall that feeds into that famous river, and the Naver too, and makes its way south-eastwards, widening out several miles north of Rogart and carrying on in the same direction all the way to the sea. So it’s always been a river for the fishing. Less known than the Brora and Naver but near as good for the quality of the catch – and yet, for all that, the land that it runs through has little marked on the map to denote it and for the best part of a hundred years the place where John Callum MacKay Sutherland of Sutherland wants to take himself, into the set of hills that are provided at the head of a long strath, below the peaks of the ‘Cailleachs’, ‘Old Sisters’, Ben Luath and Ben Mhorvaig … Well, it has always been as though empty here.
4

Yet this part of the land was populated once, before the Clearings
5
this
would have been, and well populated too for there’s the ruins of a
schoolhouse
a couple of miles back and around it, scattered like stones, the remains of little houses and crofts. And that’s a generous thing to think. How the place was laid out once, to be a grouping of people with days to fill and order. There’s that schoolhouse, set up on a hill above a kind of beach that the river has formed, broadening out with a little strand of gravelly pale sand, and children would have played upon that once, would have stepped out from it to swim, perhaps after their morning lessons they might have – one can imagine that – on one of those endless high summer days, doing that, gathering up their skirts and tunics and walking into the water.

So, yes, the strath would have had the sounds of cries upon the air, once, children and their parents, coming down by the river, calling each for the other, to come in, to go home, to come back … And there would have been animals here too, some sheep and a few cows grazing on the green that’s rich along each side of the river, drained off every spring so it forms pasture in the warm months. There are also, one can see, on the low foothills and there are more beyond, on the high moor behind Luath, stone walls set in circles, those sheltering places made for animals but a shepherd will sleep there too, some nights, and further back, scattered down the strath beyond, are the houses and dwellings of the people who lived here. Can you think on that? Imagine them? The families and the children and their animals? It’s as though, if you were out here now in this place, you might see them. Like you might be able to smell the ghosts of their peat fires against the air, hear their voices, catch in the wisp of the wind a frail ribbon of their songs.

Fair to say, then, no lie or exaggeration of the truth, that this has been hospitable enough land in the past, to grow things and to live. That this part of the strath that stretches towards the west … That it’s been fair. That the water has been good with fish, the salmon that have been coming through to spawn for thousands of years and fat and glistening with milk and eggs. And that up on the hills there have always been enough deer, so
there’s meat too, in addition to the animals grazing, and wool, that there’s the fact of green here and it has been fair enough, that the fact of all these elements taken together seems enough, more than enough when you look at conditions elsewhere, this part of Scotland, the far North East, they seem generous to my mind, like this really is a land of – as it’s been called in the past, by those who remember from their grandfather’s and grandmother’s stories – ‘Milk and Honey’.

There are bumblebees droning in the heather, on a warm day. On a warm day, dozing yourself on the hill, you could hear them. There were hives here once. In the same way as there were walls. There were wheels to spin, looms. There was a place to make butter and cheese. There’ll be papers later in the book to describe the life that went on here, and there’ll be papers set into the story that show how the Sutherland
family
first came to be here and what they did with the empty strip of the country that lay further inland along the river, that they made into
grazing
land, how they put into the low rising hills a track that could take a cart and some horses.
6
But for now it’s enough to record the sense of thick earth that lies under your feet here, in this sheltered place along the black water, that though it’s lonely now, and you can read only about the one man who’s about to cross the water and head inland into what seems all emptiness, still, there’s richness all about him, too, in this place, in its history embroidered with the business of people’s lives and families and their homes, the small flowers they may have picked and tucked into their clothes, put in square jars on tables by the window where they might be seen in the light.