The Big Music (30 page)

‘And he never asked me, either, about the past, about what went on there. He never asked about John. You must know: I would never have left Iain’ Margaret told Helen, years later and Helen was asking her about the past, their family. ‘Because Iain is my husband. And he has been a good
husband and a good father. A good, good man. So, I would never leave him.’

‘But you didn’t have a child with Iain’ Helen said.

Is why the feeling that Margaret had for Helen’s father all those years ago, from the very first time when she’d gone to his room …

Had never gone away.

‘Because it’s part of you’ said Helen, ‘who you are.’

And it’s true, Helen writes in her journal now:
‘That’s the main part of my mother that I recognise, I know.’
That quiet steady part of Margaret, that never stopped feeling the same way about someone she first met when she was only a girl, that had no regret about him or looking back or bitterness.

‘For though,’ Margaret said to Helen, ‘after my year at Aberdeen, when Eileen and I went away for our working holiday, I left Caithness planning to return –’

‘Your mother made it impossible for you’ Helen says. ‘To stay there. She didn’t understand you, couldn’t bear that you could be so different from her.’

‘You’ve described it exactly as it was.’
Helen writes in her journal now.
‘For when I met your father’ Margaret said, ‘that is when I may as well have said to my mother, goodbye.’

Helen keeps writing. By now putting together more and more detail and understanding into her mother’s story. More thought, more background imagining than was there before. Beginning:
Margaret first left her mother’s home in Caithness planning to return …
And adding to that, extending it.
Despite everything that’s in the past
…
Because Iain is my husband
…
Because of the ‘Why?’
…
The look of disappointment in her mother’s eyes
…
Putting in extra sections to the story. Rewriting parts so they make more sense. Adding something about Iain, how it was that he never knew about Margaret and John and all because of his pride – and then taking that part out. Imagining other details like that, too. What her grandmother may have looked like – ‘She looked a lot like you’ Margaret used to say – and hearing in her mind the things that unknown woman may have thought about, opinions she may
have had. She could see the sequence of events, Helen could, by
writing
this way.
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She could shape from them some kind of dramatic line, a plot. How, when Margaret’s mother died, the entire estate, her mother’s parents’ house and the land with it, was given over to her brother George, who sold up, emigrated to New Zealand leaving nothing behind, and Margaret never saw her brother again. How Mary had never replied to any of Margaret’s letters, did not inform her even, through friends, of the
illness
that would be the cause of her death, when Helen was just four years old. Helen could construct it all – these thoughts in sequence, the events that followed, one after the other, creating a shape, a sound, a story of her mother’s life that could be read like a myth or parable or warning – a mother’s punishment of her daughter’s will. That Mary had fashioned it that everything that Margaret might have had, would stand to inherit and be strengthened by, would become no more than a job down in
Sutherland
, working as housekeeper, an unskilled domestic. And all because of a man who gave her her first attention as a woman, that made her decide everything because of him, everything.

Is how Helen saw the story end: a terrible judgement that made
Margaret’s
mother so fierce in not allowing her daughter to come back home again, never see again the place where she was born, her friends, nor even her brother, he was not going to be allowed to invite her. So all that part of her life Margaret had had once was gone and the life she’d chosen for herself, here at the House, what she was left with.
That she’d brought upon herself,
as Mary would have it. That her daughter would have to say the sentence throughout her life like penance: ‘Because of my desire for a man, I never saw my mother again.’

So Helen writes in her journal:

When Margaret left her mother’s home for the second time, she knew she would never see her mother again.

But adds no moral to that sentence:
she knew she would never see her mother again.
Despite the fact that it was all for love, that kind of story. Despite the fashioning of a tale with a warning that’s attached to it, a punishment, even so, there’s no lesson here.

‘For there was nothing else I would have done’ Margaret said. ‘The decision that I made – I wanted it that way. I still want it.’

To have never gone home again.

‘That was my story’ she told Helen.

While my own,
writes Helen, in the same journal, by way of a reply,
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has been to return.

He hears the tune. Here in the Little Hut, where he always does his
writing
, where he’s always heard the music when it’s first coming, he’s been hearing it – the first notes, a phrase, and he can hear it now.

He’s at the table where he always sits to write when he’s up here, the window before him and the water beyond and the main theme – the ‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’, ‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’ – he’s starting to know it so well by now it’s like breathing. More than following the passage of his thoughts, this is like something coming from deep inside him, forming itself out of the heart and ventricles and spleen and stomach and bowel – that ‘B’ to ‘E’ starting it, the return to the inevitability of the base ‘A’, and doubling the pulse there … It is like breathing. It’s all of himself he can hear. At this rate, he thinks, he won’t even have to be looking at the notes he’s writing while he’s writing them. He could just close his eyes and the marks would put themselves down on the page, his whole body simply taking in air and expelling it and the music will be there.

He reaches into the drawer of the desk where he keeps manuscript paper and the pens he likes, those kinds of thick, inky black felt-tips but with the little points Callum sent him once, a couple of them, and he’s been using them ever since …

Callum.

Only where is the boy now? Only gone.

He arranges the lined paper in front of him and the pens. He thinks
about having a whisky, just a small one, like he always does when he starts writing …

But he doesn’t have long here.

And there’s no time to think about any of that now, about when he last saw Callum – and not likely he’ll be seeing him now, not this summer, or the next. Because it doesn’t matter that no one knows about this place, he’ll need to get back to the House while it’s still light. While the days are still warm and fine get everything done with finishing the tune before the weather turns cold and more and more getting up here at all is taking a charge upon him he can’t pay back.

So.

Callum.

And no doubt he should be in this tune, his son, but he’s not heard him. Not a single note.

Only the other notes – of himself – they’re called in all right. That theme of his that’s put in now, deliberate, the repeat of it. Like his own breathing.

‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’

‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’

‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘A’ to ‘A’

‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘A’ to ‘A’

So he might, take a whisky. He might.

But …

No.

For it’s all dependent on that, them not knowing and him getting the music finished while none of them think that he’s been away for anything more than a walk and a bit of air.
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Because if they knew, if they had even the slightest inkling that he’d got himself way up into the hills and without the medication they’re all so keen on … They’d have him back in the House and the doctor in and that would be him done for.

And there’d be no tune then. No Lament. Nothing written.

Just staying in the House and them putting him downstairs and feeding him the damn pills, one after the other, to keep him quiet.

To write about the significance of the Little Hut to the composition of ‘The Big Music’ one must first acknowledge the scale in which all bagpipe music is played, displaying itself most fully in piobaireachd as distinctive and ‘other’ and one of the greatest factors in contributing to the music’s overall effect.

In a sense, we might say, the place of composition and the notes for it are intertwined: both cannot easily be described, both are hidden,
somewhat
, set apart and unknown – yet both allow, too, for the imagination to operate in a way that is untrammelled by the usual constraints of what we recognise as familiar culture.

By going somewhere that was unknown to others, that was hidden and secret, John Sutherland was able to take himself to a liminal, undefined space that allowed his creativity to flourish. Indeed, one could even claim that because of its distance from the House, its difficulty of access –
especially
for an old man who had suffered a series of strokes and a
longstanding
heart condition – the Little Hut represents a place of danger, a forbidden zone. Here, after all, is a site unmarked on the map, unknown, as far as John Sutherland is aware, to anyone else but himself. That in itself makes it a dangerous place to visit. If something were to happen to him or to the building, no one would know where to go for him, to save him.

Its very secrecy, then, makes the Little Hut a potent location for
practical
as well as creative purposes. The rules are different for this place – as
though there are no rules. In the same way, the bagpipe scale is like no scale of music familiar to Western ears. To all of us who hear the diatonic scale as the ‘norm’, the notes for composition of Ceol Mor come from somewhere else; they too are other, somehow secret and mysterious.

Indeed, the sound of this scale has been described as disturbing and difficult to appreciate for those not raised on it. The intervals have been called ‘uncanny’, contributing to a music of ‘barbarous power’ that describes something quite shockingly different from ‘any ordinary modern scale’.
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In his book on piobaireachd,
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Seumus MacNeill writes about the scale in technical terms that define the breadth of the intervals between notes as being like those that would have occurred in the music of ancient Greece, where a particular interval on the scale, called a ‘limma’, was also present in the Phrygian scale of the music that was played before the great plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripedes. That too, the playing of that music, was a secret rite about which we know very little, except that it took place in a particular ‘site’ – an otherwise forbidden area that was the stage and its arena – in advance of the artwork that was to be performed, the performance of the tragedy, and that other elements were involved along with the playing of that music: the sacrifice of an animal, so blood, and wine.

These details fuse in the mind the idea that secret and imagination, site and place of composition, ritual and mystery in both classical and
modernist
aesthetics are inextricably linked – and that the history of ‘The Big Music’ and the Lament that it contains, play back to a much earlier story that is caught up with our understanding of what art is and our
relationship
to it – whether played in a diatonic or pentatonic scale.

MacNeill has this to say about the widely unknown set of notes available to the piper and his music:

He goes on to help the general reader:

‘Unique intervals’: the phrase alone, in this book ‘The Big Music’, carries the meaning of piobaireachd and the sound that is enabled by its composition. The Little Hut, that hidden space that exists beyond The Grey House, in a valley in a part of Ben Mhorvaig no one visits or knows, is itself an interval between notes, a curious reach, a space of sound. When John Sutherland went there to compose, especially in the last months and weeks of his life when he was working on the ‘Lament for Himself’, we understand how he was taking himself to a place that was not only secret and most private in order that he might have quiet and
thinking time. He was also allowing himself to enter into another aspect of his life, to disappear into a kind of gap – ‘a unique interval’ – between those notes that have empirical meaning in the world and thereby
reference
the significance of another scale altogether. That place is the gap between worlds inhabited by the artist rather than the individual. The usual rules no longer apply there.