Authors: Kirsty Gunn
For she’s so spun into the theme by now, with her mother, her mother’s mother … That surely he must know the tune is safe, that it’s finished because it will go on. The ending has been fixed by the beginning.
Turning
on through the first movement to the second and into the third and beyond, the notes changing, spinning, spun round and around and increasing … And embellishing … And finishing … And …
Surely you can hear that, Johnnie? Out here in the wide air? How the ‘A’ of the drone that began everything is in tune so perfectly with the pure high note of her. So spun into the theme by now with her mother’s mother that you must keep playing, so you can hear, surely you must hear …
So keep playing. On into the wide air. All of it taking shape like a new blanket to be cast down upon the ground, Margaret’s child woven and wefted into it from the opening lines of the Urlar to everything that is to come, so wrapped, knit into all the theme notes like bits of bright colour
that have been woven, placed into dull tweed. See those bits of flowers out there on the grass that edges the yellow sand of the little beach at the edge of the loch? Yes, well, she’ll be all those bright colours. While your tune lays out the greens and greys and the peaty darks, she’ll be points of buttercup and gentian and the yellow grains of fine, fine sand.
So: Hush.
Out here with all the hills around you.
Hush, no need for weeping.
As Iain brings you in and the baby is returned to the mother, taken back from an old man’s arms.
As Iain says, ‘Come away now, John. I have you.’ As he picks John up and carries him.
‘And he was light’ he told me later, Iain. ‘As a leaf, and I saw no need for him to fall.’
And so the tune has been installed and will take the piper on, to where he needs to go. The notes have been established. His son has been in to say goodnight. His father is up there on the hill and his mother has taken him into her embrace. And still the tune is playing on, completing.
Playing
even now but only just hearing it, in these last few moments, quieter and quieter as it fades further and further into distance …
Yet with one note left to come.
The art of playing the bagpipe was for the performer to produce the music with an even tone without pauses.
The art of playing the bagpipe was to play beautifully and well, with great expression and technical expertise.
The art of playing the bagpipe was to play fully and with generosity of spirit – as though the pipes themselves had feeling.
While bagpipes were played throughout Europe prior to the 1700s, differences in the pipe music were defined more by the local customs and have led to some vast variations in both style and composition. So runs an article published by the Piobaireachd Society for general interest.
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‘Even in Scotland,’ the piece continues, ‘pipers occupied well-defined positions as town pipers, performers for weddings, feasts and fairs. There was no recorded “master piper” nor were there any recorded pipe schools. Lowland pipers played songs and dance music, as was expected by their audiences, so no effort was made to produce great musical compositions.’
However, during this same time in the same area of Europe, separated only by mountains and glens, were pipers of a different calibre. These pipers were strongly influenced by their background of the Celtic legends and the wild nature that is the Highlands of Scotland. The Highland piper occupied a high and honoured position within the clan system. To
be a piper was sufficient; if he could play well then nothing else would be asked. Most of the early history and songs associated with this
instrument
that still exist come from this small area in the North of Scotland.
As the bagpipe slowly left centre-stage throughout Europe a new form of music was starting in the Highlands. For more than three hundred years one family was to dominate piping in Scotland. The MacCrimmons were responsible for developing Highland pipe music and so established piobaireachd as a highly sophisticated musical form.
The basic structure of piobaireachd consists of an air with variations on the theme. The ground is the basic theme and is normally played slowly and is often the most interesting part of the music, laying out, as it does, its overall sound and central tone or idea. Some grounds are made up of short repeat phrases while others are free-flowing, but most are based on the pentatonic scale. The ground is generally followed by
variations
that are always simple and increase in complexity – with each one more difficult to play than the previous.
In concluding variations the composer’s ingenuity and the piper’s
capability
are tested. The piobaireachd ends with a return to the slow and impressive ground and the whole tune can take up to twenty-five
minutes
. Currently the ground is played at the beginning and the end of a tune only. In the past, the ground was played at intervals in the tune, often played between doublings of variations and the subsequent singling of the next variation.
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There is evidence of a variation of even greater complexity than the Crunluath, called the Barludh. According to Joseph MacDonald,
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it consisted of eighteen gracenotes after the theme note and finished on High ‘G’. Thankfully Patrick Og MacCrimmon phased this out as an unusual fancy.
Each piobaireachd tune has been composed for a certain reason and recent studies have broken the music down into the following types:
gatherings; marches; laments; salutes; and other titled tunes. The idea that the individual notes of the chanter take on meaning has been proposed several times
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and is one that John MacKay Sutherland of The Grey House followed, as shown in his many notes about various compositions – both of his own and others. Certainly ‘Lament for Himself’ follows the principle of using certain notes to ‘play’ in different contexts or phrases, suggesting the idea of a narrative or musical poem that might underlie the composition from the outset.
In the past, this idea, this ‘story of notes’ as I may call it, would have been sung, first, to make itself known. That’s because in the days before written music piobaireachd was always composed and taught by singing it through, single note by single note, in a system of taught music known as canntaireachd. The use of certain syllables, or ‘vocables’ as they are called, to express different notes allowed the pipers to train their pupils without the aid of any scales or other scores. This verbal system was used to
convey
both the tune and the emotion of the music and, as all true pipers and musicians agree, is far better than modern-day written notation for passing on the details and spirit – the sense – of the music.
Finally, piobaireachd is not easy to define or sometimes to describe. It has been called the voice of uproar and the music of real nature and rude passion. Many Highlander-pipers believed that their instrument could actually speak and that piobaireachd is an extension of the tales told by bards and poets to remember the clan’s history. Certainly it is the speciality of Highland bagpipes to seem to reach back through time to a chthonic musical source and draw from it something unworldly and ‘other’. No other instrument can produce the particular emotional response that the pipes do when playing piobaireachd. I know that. As others present here in the pages of this book have been similarly affected. To us it may be as though this music was the first phrase that was written.
The history of women in these places is always a quiet story, it’s quietly told. The mothers tell it sometimes, in pieces, to their children as they’re sitting on their beds at night, in the half-dark, after reading the children a story. They may begin another story then, in a kind of whisper, about their mothers, their grandmothers. Telling it in a way a man would never tell a son about his father because these stories of the women have too much tenderness in them – and by ‘tenderness’ I mean parts that are hurt, flayed back, exhibiting their sting and their mark.
So the women will tell children these soft and exposed parts.
‘Your granny lost her parents in a fire when she was five.’
‘Your uncle was always a coward, he drank too much because he was frightened of his life.’
‘Your aunt never loved her husband.’
So it goes on, the mother to the children, all the soft secrets.
‘I myself was afraid of my own father when I was a child.’
Or ‘I never want to be alone.’
The history of women in these places is often a story where there’s strength coming from them but no power. They marry, sometimes, to men who love them, whom they love, but this love might not sustain them – yet still they remain married, and the children comfort them. They work in the kitchen, keep animals, vegetables and gardens, sometimes they may do considerable amounts of hard labour on a farm, or if there’s a shop
they may work in the shop, or if, like Margaret, there’s no money to be had from the family for business of any kind, no prospects for a husband, then you find what work you can in the villages thereabouts, in one of the big houses, maybe, in the season, cooking or cleaning or housemaiding to one of the big shooting parties come up from London.
Either way, the passions get told quietly to the children. Helen heard her mother’s passion as a quiet thing, and there was something that she saw, also, when she was a child and she shouldn’t have seen it, and this may have affected how she understood her mother, came to know her with a deep intimacy. It would have. Her knowing that, indeed, her mother, despite the quiet manner in which she went about all things, had this huge tugging heart that didn’t whisper at all, but that cried out, that carried exultation.
For Margaret, the stories that she’d heard had come early from her own mother, who had no husband. So she had been brought up, Margaret had, and her brother, by a small and clever woman who had never been
married
, who’d had no intention of it. This was Mary Katherine, Margaret’s mother, Mary Katherine MacKay as she was, Mary MacKay until her death. She had been with the man who’d attracted her when she was a girl, an older man who lived along the road, somewhat away from her own
village
, back in the glen behind Dunbeath; he was a married man, but they went together. She’d been just nineteen when she met him, she told
Margaret
in a story, and, in time, had two children by him but never wanted him to live with, never wanted, like the other girls in the village wanted … A man at your feet or at your door, wanting things and proposing them and telling you about what to do. Margaret’s mother, she told her
daughter
, when Margaret was small, wanted only to be on her own.
And for her, she was lucky this way, in that she could afford to do as she wanted. Her parents were living and prosperous by the time she bore her first child, Margaret’s brother George. The MacKays had had
interests
in the herring – they’d been one of the first families in Caithness to supply haulage and carts for all the fish and tackle coming off the boats, in the days when all had to be brought in from the harbour after the catch came in, and was laid out by the long low houses that were inland
and sheltered, where the fish could be dried in long batches, slung up in the rafters of those same houses, and also the tackle was mended there, and the boat’s sails. This was all from the time written about in Neil Gunn’s book
The Silver Darlings,
he wrote of it there:
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how families like the MacKays were able to prosper from the fishing in new ways around the middle years of the nineteenth century, and in the early 1900s – and so the MacKays found themselves, by the time their daughter Mary
Katherine
was born, with land and animals and a good-sized house back in the strath and away from the wind by a little water, with flowers in the garden, even, and a dog for the fun of a dog and some cats and chickens and everything gentle that could be counted for as some wealth in those empty parts of the Highlands in those days. They counted as richness like butter, like mutton, like fat.
So Mary had enough at her back to be bringing a child of her own on her own into the world. She didn’t need a husband to provide for her in the way other women might need a man – for those women had nothing, nothing, while for Mary, when the children came, her father had someone from the village build a house for her, along from her mother and father’s house, where her mother could help her with the babies, where her father could be sure she wasn’t so much left alone. He wanted to protect her, I suppose, this capable and strong and healthy young woman. To that extent a man facilitated her life – is what Mary told Margaret, later, in one of the stories about what it is to be a woman on your own – but in general it was because the family was sound and careful that Mary was able to grow up and do as she herself willed. Both Mary’s father and her mother would not have wanted their daughter left isolated and showing her aloneness to the village – if you know what I mean by that expression:
showing her aloneness.
Not picking up attention in a way that was unwelcome. So the presence of a house of her own near her parents’ house would protect her against that.
Therefore nothing was straitened for her, this Mary. Is how she explained it to Margaret, when Margaret was old enough to understand. Everything was as she wanted – with this care from her parents – and so there were just riches, to look around her. The riches she had! A home, food, a little work at her mother’s kitchen garden, with the children playing beside, and later, as they grew older, she might take a small position in the village on a Tuesday and a Thursday at the post office, weighing the letters and stamping out the pension books or the coupons for radio and later television. She’d been well schooled down at Latheron for all kinds of work like this, and her mother would take the children then, George and Margaret in their turn, would have them playing at her own house, sending them off to lessons, while their mother drew on her lipstick and went into the village for a job to do.