The Big Music (31 page)
Authors: Kirsty Gunn
So he shouldn’t have a thing to drink. With being up here and on his own and so much to do. And with hearing the tune inside him this way, the shape of it and the sense and the general lay of it, how the green-grey ground he walked over to get here will be the map for the whole, and the criss cross of the variations like red veins running over it, those roads and tracks the tune will travel. It would be a waste to squander it. The place. And his being alone here like he needs to be alone.
So not a drink at all.
With the secret room around him, and him in the centre with the paper and the pens.
He won’t.
Though needing … Something. Even so – but what?
He has the pen, he has the paper on the table before him – and the opening is clear, the overall shape of the piobaireachd is clear to him, as he’s registered already that’s within him, part of him. But there’s
something
else to come, some theme. Some extra set of notes, an idea for a tune that sits within the tune, a line of music that he hasn’t thought of before but it should be there, set right into the Lament from the beginning and yet beyond him, somehow, apart. He can’t hear what it is yet – but it’s there.
And it will come to him in this place. Where the music always comes. Just the notes at first, would be enough to hear them – then think later
how they might fit in, what they might mean. So what kind of notes, how might they appear? And maybe like a kind of song set in?
Can he hear that? Think about that?
The idea of a run of notes, a simple melody – and getting down the opening section to try and hear where it might come in, this other sequence …
And it won’t be found in a drink at all. He won’t get what he needs that way.
But …
Somehow. He’ll have to find what it is. This tune within a tune that will exist beyond the music and will take it on, as into the future. That’s it. The idea of it. As though the future of the tune, his future, can be taken up, carried, within the notes that are already there …
Like a child carried in his arms.
‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘E’ to ‘A’
‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘E’ and ‘E’ …
There it is.
He can hear it now. As though singing to a child. So his child – then – Callum?
But no. It’s not Callum.
This ‘F’ to ‘G’.
This ‘E’ to ‘A’.
Though Callum gave him the pens and he’s using them now, it’s not Callum.
He hasn’t seen Callum for years.
Not for years and years.
His son.
That boy.
He has no note at all.
And yet these others …
‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘E’ to ‘A’
‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘E’ and ‘E’ …
He can hear them and strong, and he starts writing now, and fast – and, yes, the sequence of another tune is emerging here from out of the main
theme, the opening remarks of the piece, there is this other tune that seems to be set within it and just as the other was there within him like breathing so this part could be a song, all the notes already heard by him it seems – it’s just a case of his hand moving fast enough across the paper to get them all down …
And in the end he might take a drink, though, he might.
For Callum …
Though he’s not the theme that he needs …
Though you might think he would be – his own son, carrying his name after all – he’s not, and maybe he should take a drink for that reason, for Callum, that he’s his son and yet not the theme he needs here …
For where is Callum now but far away from the place where his father is seated.
So he couldn’t hear him if he wanted to. He couldn’t.
Callum.
He’s too far away and his father can’t hear him in the notes he needs to lay down.
There is no doubt that, unless one has been raised around bagpipe music, and exposed to piobaireachd in particular, the sound can be foreign and strange – and in this way the complexity of Ceol Mor, as Seumus Mac-Neill writes, ‘has at least one of the qualities of classical music – it does not usually make an immediate appeal to the listener’.
In part, this is to do with the sheer quality of its notes and tone, the sound of the scale and so on that has already been noted in various parts throughout ‘The Big Music’. But it is also the sheer intricacy of the music’s construction, the ‘rules’ it encompasses that, more often than not, are broken and altered, that makes piobaireachd more forbidding a
musical
genre than most. Unlike a simple melody played in dulcet tones, this is something that strikes up with volume and difficulty from the very first seconds of tuning.
In addition, there is a particular quality to the overall arc of the music that is heard before it is understood – much in the same way that T. S. Eliot has urged us to read a poem and hear it before (or if!) we attempt to break it down and understand it – and this arc may be a sound we stand under, look up at, feel shaped and surrounded by, a threatening concept, perhaps, to those who like their art packaged and delivered as a known sum of parts.
As Major-General Frank MacLean Richardson defined this most ‘highly cultivated product’,
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the music we are addressing does not reach
out to the listener in any populist kind of way whatsoever – though it may have as its basis the most human of situations such as the birth of a child, the death of someone who is now mourned, or to convey the great happiness at a meeting or gathering. Rather, it moves within its own terms and definitions, using its limitations, not the infinite array of ideas that might come from other sources, to create its endless variations and innovations. Nevertheless, despite all its technical and aesthetic aspects, the music is, more than anything, deeply human and empathetic in nature. In this way it is as direct and troubling and inspiring as someone singing low and relentless in the corner of a room or who stands right in front of the listener who must stay there listening until the musician has
finished
. There can be no looking away, no turning from the sound. Though, Richardson notes, an analysis of piobaireachd ‘will perhaps appeal less to the non-piper than to the dedicated piobaireachd enthusiast … Even the latter,’ he writes, ‘may take comfort from my own admission that, much as I admire those who have profound musical knowledge of this sort, I have never found it to be essential to an understanding of piobaireachd. The great John MacDonald of Inverness certainly taught me to analyse a tune before attempting to play it, but it was always in terms of “lines of poetry” – one of his favourite expressions.’
It is according to this spirit of poetry that we may understand how the movements play out, one against the other – from the Urlar to its singling and doubling, to the Leumluath and Taorluath variations, to the third major musical idea of the piece, which is the Crunluath, where we are now. So, in general, we have a good understanding of the basic shape of a piobaireachd in this book, with its four movements similarly laid out according to the classical pattern and its meanings described and defined further in various footnotes and Appendices. Seumus MacNeill describes the result of such formal arrangement thus:
The effect on the listener of the leumluath and taorluath variations can be most impressive, especially if the performer is able to abstract the full
beauty of the singlings, and by careful change of tempo is able to convey in the doublings a sense of urgency without haste. The crunluath movements however are quite different in their impact. All the gracenotes in a row, rippling cleanly and evenly from the fingers, produce by themselves an effect which is independent of the tune. The trick for the expert piper is to be sure that the melody is not completely obscured by this display of finger dexterity, and to keep the crunluath variations from degenerating into pure pyrotechnics. A player whose technical skill is not of the first rank will make the gracenotes longer than they should be. As a result he has to shorten the theme notes (unless he is to drag the variation badly). Short theme notes mean less emphasis on the melody.
During the crunluath movement it becomes clear that the climax is being reached. With the start of the crunluath doubling the piper usually stands still (up until then he has been pacing slowly backward and forward) and in his playing of the movement he shows, without appearing to hurry unduly, that this is the limit and this is the end of his performance. One more variation can be played after the crunluath doubling. This is called the crunluath a mach. A mach means ‘out’ and this is intended to be a description of what the piper is doing.
The listener might well feel when the end of the a mach is reached, since nothing more can be done, the piobaireachd is finished. This is not so for there is no end to the Celtic symphony. The piper does not stop but goes on to play the ground once again, thus maintaining the similarity with the other Celtic arts – the serpent with its tail in its mouth, the never-ending line, the symbol of infinity. To appreciate piobaireachd properly we should now hear the sound fade slowly into the distance, until we are left only with the everyday noises around us.
Callum was in London, it’s true, during this part of the tune while his father is getting the notes down for a new composition and using those pens Callum had sent him in the post two or three years ago. It’s that time of his father’s last few weeks of feeling strong, this paper – with the weather still fair enough that an old man could get up onto the hill and away to work properly on something he’s been thinking about for some time, concentrating on a piece that’s taken shape more or less as a whole in his mind, though he has no sense yet of how the parts will come together in the end – and Callum is far enough from his father, right now, far enough. It will be weeks yet before the telephone call from his mother asking him to come up here, it’s still only early August, and Callum has a deadline on a project – the same one he’ll be involved with when Sarah contacts him – and he’s hard at it, all through the boys’ holidays which is why Anna has taken them off to France to stay with a friend, though they’ll be home soon and he’s glad about that for he’s been missing them. So, yes, it’s weeks, well over a month, nearly two months, before the rest of the story that’s already been playing here will sound out as music because it won’t be until late September that his mother will get the message from the House that his father’s not well. And that they’re worried about him, something serious enough, Sarah will say, for those people to be telling her about John then, finally giving
her some news – which is why she is telephoning Callum now.
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‘Your father’ she had said, straight off. Remember?
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‘They’ve told me at the House he’s bad again. It’s been that way a while, it seems.’ Callum was in the office, the same project from the summer still there on his desk. ‘They’ve called to say he’s had a bad turn’ his mother had said, that quick way of hers, of talking. ‘They lost him today, they couldn’t find him at all. He’d taken himself off someplace. He’s done it before, apparently, just gone off on his own, on a walk somewhere, out the back, or down by the river those people seem to love so much …’
Those people.
As she always calls them – Margaret, the housekeeper up at the House, and her husband Iain, who are both looking after his father now that he’s gone up there to live permanently, though Sarah still won’t call them by name.
‘Those people’ she’d said. This time, they’d told her, John wasn’t to be found in any of those places.
He’ll have gone to the hut,
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Callum had thought then, straight away.
And he was right about that! Johnnie would have been pleased to know it. Because although, yes, it’s weeks before the boy has that singular thought about his father, about where his father is, he knew about him even so – for here he is now, just where Callum believes he would be! Not in the dark room, where they’ve moved him to – but out here, in all the air and it’s daylight here, beautiful sun across the water out on the loch, the sand on the beach … He could be lying out in this weather it’s so lovely!
For it’s August and the days are fine and high. And he has the last of his strength all about him to write down this tune that he’s been working on, that has come to him as a kind of a gift. So this is the last big time for John Sutherland, John Callum MacKay, and so a piobaireachd of course it has to be, a Lament in the style he’s written before but in a way of writing, too, that’s never been done before, to a subject so known, so intimate that it’s not about someone else or for someone else, but it’s his own life he’s writing.
And listen! To the sound of the tune.
With so much of it down already …
The opening lines, in this fine weather …
And the second melody set within the theme …
Then the variations … How the embellishments might come in …
The pen covering this page of manuscript and another and another.