The Big Music (13 page)

Anyhow, enough to say that as the years passed old John’s son, Roderick Mor, he was called, John MacKay Sutherland’s grandfather’s grandfather,
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seemed to have been a great tacksman on the Sutherland Estate, back in the time when to be fair and reasonable and sound at that kind of work, which might be unfavourable in a great many places in the Highlands, could go fairly to a man’s advantage. For in that period of employment he earned certain privileges to work a piece of land which was not seen to be of any use to the estate as it was way up high on the hill, and half of it in scree, but which in turn he was able to clear somewhat of the rock and to drain the boggy south side and could extend it then to form a kind of ‘corridor’ that sat between one side of the county to another and which would much later become the main route from the east south, not only for the black cattle but also for the sheep. So he had the foresight then to see land not only as a piece in itself but as a part of a bigger pattern, something that could be seen as a particular section of the entire region, connecting it, one part to another and not just of someone else’s portion. As though it were a small estate, though not like that, not so grand – but nevertheless a part of the country that would be his own.
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Roderick Sutherland could
see that. And he had the wit, too, and foresight, you could say, to build on the small base of stone and flattened land that had always been there as a dwelling place, and to mark up the sides of its walls into more of a croft house, a longhouse, than a mere byre. This way, he could offer those passing through something like proper accommodation, a place to sleep, to shelter, and in time he arranged this in such a manner so as to be like some form of hostelry, taking a kind of a tithe from the shepherds who passed through and stopped there in the form of those animals they couldn’t keep on the move south so that over time this meant he could build up a flock of sheep more than the one or two he’d always managed to keep for himself. And he was able to manage it, too, that those same shepherds, who’d paid him in tithes of a newborn lamb or a ewe injured or old or in other ways animals not good anyway for the journey, could take in turn his own beasts to market on his account, and sell them there for him – so he could spend his time in something like leisure then, in the summer months, later. Only it was music that was his leisure, and some might say that art of any kind will give you no leisure at all, only a kind of endless restlessness and yearning. To find and make more and more time for it. To make it better, clearer. To create the space for its devotion and study and practice. And certainly this was how the music developed at the House and became strong and was refined – because of the way it was worked into the day and the life and the routine there. That art might become part of work, was how it started, part of the life of the Grey Longhouse, as it was called then, and in time to become the work itself – to be an end in itself. But not like any other work that people from around there knew, for this same end held within it its own beginnings, with always more to discover, more ways in which by attending to it one might learn and grow. So the Sutherland family described the music that was their art. By then they were able to afford to set aside dedicated time for playing, composing, to be autonomous that way – and there is evidence, from fragments of tunes that survive from this period, and indications of a rudimentary kind of piping school that would be built on and developed to the full over the
succeeding generations
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– the playing and its development, its processes, connected only to itself. Needing nothing else for its completion or
beginning
. Only its own first few notes to start it and then it was real.

Anyhow, be that as it may, the point here is the beginning of an
enterprise
that came to be known, by the time of Roderick’s son, John
Roderick
Callum (known as John ‘Elder’), across the Highlands as ‘Callum’s Rest’
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– the comforting walls of a house on the flat of a bare hill, at a time when a man may need it most. And it became something that the Lairg shepherds would talk about as they came over, getting nearer to that place: how much they were looking forward to the warmth of the fire there, the bowl of soup prepared by John’s wife, Anna Alexandra,
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and the music that would be heard while the sheep too might have some shelter in the byre out of those winds.

Now all this marks a different kind of climate, you might say, to that which raged and made a thin kind of air with snow in it around so many other parts of the Highlands. For Roderick Sutherland, and by then his son John, with their own sheep and cattle which, by this time, had increased greatly in number, could challenge in the markets for better prices for animals they themselves had raised and tended and so were not like those beasts that had just been collected and driven by shepherds who were working in bondage for the estate. All this put the Sutherlands in a better position than most, this enterprise of their family strengthening their resolve to build on it further, increasing the value of the land on the tops by burning off the heather there and turning it to some reasonable
grazing, taking what they had and managing to make something more of it even so. And that’s not to give the impression here that any resented the tithe that had been taken in the past, in exchange for shelter, for the opposite was the case. Agreement had been made and understood amongst the men themselves, at the beginning, and in time, as John Roderick
developed
these arrangements further, the way ‘Through Callum’s’ became known, so it was established that the big estates of the district would also pay a reasonable fee for the improvement of the route for the good it did both their animals and the men they had working for them, that would in turn favour their own fortunes. So too should I mention that, in part, there was good feeling for this enterprise because of the music that this area of Sutherland was known for, so the men who passed through the district viewed the family Sutherland as friends, as people who, through hard work, had made something of their lives and yet were as they were themselves, with frugal ways and making of little education as much as they could, and with none of the glitter of the landed classes that had the big houses tucked away into the hills for their pleasure. Indeed, it was the music more than anything else set them apart – as old John Roderick had been known as a great piper in his boyhood and his son had continued that tradition, and so had his son, too, John ‘Elder’, known as ‘Callum’, who was taught, it is said, by the last MacCrimmon
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and was a composer whose work was known at the time by Angus MacKay of Raasay and is written of in accounts of that time.
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And in the same way, as the century
progressed, and the generations continued, many felt, by the time of John Callum MacKay, that the Sutherlands had been a family that had used its wit and cleverness to put back into the way of life up in that part of the hills something of the goodness of the land and its ways that, over the time of the Clearances, had, for many, been lost.
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The music of course played its large part there. Giving life and a
colour
, a sense of the past and its traditions to the present way of doing things, making occupations that were otherwise quite simple – some may say menial and poor – to have dignity in their own right, laid down as they could be upon a grand ground.
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For a man tired, living outdoors with animals, to be able to stop at this part of the world and hear the piobaireachd that he’s heard his grandfather talk about or sing, hear again a tune that comes right back from the grand times of the MacCrimmons,
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to hear again the complexity and the depth of that music that reached back through centuries yet had relevance to him now … It lent structure to his world but softness too. After a hard day of work and great physical labour and exertion the music gave easing place, that rest.

So, in this way, life continued in this part of Sutherland, through the 1800s and into the turn of the new century when John MacKay’s father, Roderick Callum, was born. By now the House had itself well settled as a place where people could come and hear a tune, and where they could send their boys for some tuition and to learn canntaireachd and the true
phrasing and the marking up of the tunes so as to be able to play them thoroughly and well. Everyone then would talk back to the great days of Skye and the MacCrimmons’ School of Piping on that island, all would take a dram, have stories of their own then to follow – about that incredible family of musicians, and about their tunes and what they knew of the
origins
of those tunes, or how they remembered various people playing then a certain way – and they would make a toast or two to the assembled
company
, that here they were in Sutherland, three hundred years later, and
setting
up a School of their own, you might say, where the pipes were played and compositions made in the proper style of the old laments and salutes.

Johnnie’s father, then, this John Callum, known, as his grandfather had been before him, as Callum, ‘Himself’,
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grew up with these men and boys around him, some of whom were near his own age, who might come to stay for a part of the winter when there was little to do on their own crofts and holdings up in Caithness or down by the sea, with the weather too brutal to take out the herring boats that time of year.
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So they would gather at the House through parts of those winter months, boys and their fathers, old men who had fathers who as boys had known old John ‘Elder’ when he was an old man, who may have learned some of the old tunes from him that they could get them down on paper to remember.
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And these the tunes their sons were now playing in the annexe of the House, away from the kitchen and the rooms for sleeping, in a room that became
known by them all as the ‘Study’, also ‘the Big Music Room’ – and you can imagine the feeling it must have given those who gathered there, people who worked outdoors in all conditions, who had little in the way of material goods, who may have crofts of their own but paid hard for them, or were indentured to the factors of the estates that were managed … To come into this House that was like a free house, a free-held building and not part of any estate but sitting there on the hill in its corridor of land and no man could take it … And to have something of a room called a ‘Study’, a ‘Music Room’ – you can think about that. What it did to the minds of people who came there. That there was a room for the playing of ‘The Big Music’ … In a house that was established for teaching and
learning
… How it enlarged the spaces in the visitors’ minds. Sent them home again in the early spring with a sense of their own place in the world, with dignity and pride and a largeness come out of the music itself, that there was more to life than work and feeling poor and powerless. That you had this other thing in you, as part of who you were, that held you up.

So John’s father grew up, following the lessons of his father before him, to become a great teacher himself and known, not just through the Highlands but down south in Edinburgh and further, in London even, where by now the Society for Piobaireachd
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had been established and ‘Young Callum’, as he was known to the old pipers of his father’s day, ‘Callum Og’, some of them called him, with a laugh but in deference to the MacCrimmons’ famous son,
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was invited over and over to come down there and play and to talk and to give his own private lessons to those in the south who might not otherwise, apart from having the manuscripts of the old music to hand, have a chance to hear it played in the right way, with the right phrasing and nuance.

Therefore the House became well known throughout Britain at that time by pipers, and was referred to, though unofficially, as ‘The Highland School for Piping’.
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And we may consider here the significance of such a ‘School’ in that part of the country then. For this was the time before the First World War and the area was still held back, you might say, by an old economy, and by the stripping of the population through the work of the Clearances – with many still alive to remember how that was, to be turned out of a home, a place where you had given birth to the babies and nursed the old – and all this to be argued over, of course, and this not the place for it here, but to say just that there are many too who also believe that time of our history was a natural thing in so far as it was brutal, as natural things often are, who will say that the land could not support the kinds of numbers were living there, and badly living, many, on bits of food and only barely managing to survive in dark places in Caithness and in the Sutherland Hills. And others will say it was the fashion for the grand houses and their sports that caused such disruption – that there are no economics in it at all and nothing natural in it or fair – with the land to be kept apart from the many just for the summer shooting or the salmon for the few …

But as all these arguments go on, here is this House standing, and people coming to the House, and the man who lives in it and his wife known all over the country and respected for what they are doing here, what they have done. Making more of simple talk or the songs that may have been sung in blackhouses at night, through ceilidhs or for weddings, creating more than just a kind of entertainment that would simply exchange information in the traditions of spoken word. Because now you have a formal culture: music written down, performed in Edinburgh and in London, competitions established all through the Highlands and through Scotland to support and encourage technique, the art, the excellence of the music.
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And at the heart of all of these activities, by the mid-twentieth century, is John MacKay’s father, Roderick John Callum, ‘Himself’, son of John Callum, and before him John ‘Elder’, son of Roderick Mor, son of ‘First John’ Sutherland.