The Big Music (39 page)

An order from John Campbell, Earl of Breadalbane to his chamberlain, Campbell of Barcaldine, reads: ‘Give McIntyre ye pyper fforty pounds scots as his prentices with McCrooman till May nixt as also provyde him in what Cloths he needs and dispatch him immediately to the Isles.’ The order seems to relate to a statement written by the mentioned Earl of Breadalbane on 22
April 1697 at Taymouth in Perthshire: ‘Item paid to quantiliane McCraingie McLeans pyper for one complete year as prentyce fie for the Litle pyper before he was sent to McCrooman, the soume of £160’ (modern
translation
: ‘Item, paid to Conduiligh Mac Frangaich [Rankin], MacLean’s piper, for one complete year, as apprentice fee for the Little Piper before he [the Little Piper] was sent to MacCrimmon, the sum of £160’). The
MacCrimmon
instructor that is referred to may well be Padraig Og.
58

The College was closed and the teaching finished with the Proscription Acts of the eighteenth century – which also brought about the
beginning
of the end of the great MacCrimmon dynasty of musicianship. However, the idea of the place lives on in pipers’ minds to the present day and, as various pages in ‘The Big Music’ indicate, provided the ‘
blueprint
’ for piping schools that were set up, at first secretly, throughout the Highlands, and then more openly, in the West, in particular, and in the North East where the classes of the Sutherland family had become well established, right up to the present day when certain schools of piping have national status – such as the Army School of Piping in Edinburgh and the National College of Piping in Glasgow.

Certainly, the sense of history that attends the teaching of
piobaireachd
in Scotland today is what gives it its special place in musical
education
. Here is the idea of a music school that was established before any known music schools were founded in the United Kingdom and it was a school run according to its own strict principles and beliefs. To the present day – whether piobaireachd is being taught in a one-on-one class or in a tutorial at a festival or in one of the many classes available throughout the world – the memory of the College at Boreraig, set amongst the rocks with the sound of the sea and the wheeling gulls overhead … And at its centre the teachers who represented the pinnacle of a musical tradition that was being passed down, from generation to generation … This is carried in the minds of all pipers everywhere, old and young.

The following information indicates John Callum MacKay’s position in his father’s family as only son, bearing his father’s name, and his role as husband, father – as well as giving some details regarding his endeavours and education. It may be noted that there is also a section devoted to domestic life and the history of the Sutherland family in relevant Appendices at the back of this book – but for now, here is how the life stands at the time of ‘The Big Music’. Here is John Callum MacKay Sutherland, of The Grey House, Brora region, Highlands of Scotland, presented, at the end of his life, by way of a history: the boy who left, the man who returned.

There follows, as we read in ‘The Big Music’, the birth of Callum John Sutherland, only child; the illness of his mother initiating a return to The Grey House after an absence of more than twenty years; the death of his father, after which he starts intermittent visits home to Sutherland, often in the summer months.

Then the death of his mother, Elizabeth Clare Nichol.

Moves back to The Grey House following an informal separation from his wife.

And from then to the present: see all movements of ‘The Big Music’ for further information.

His musical development can also be represented in similar fashion:

After first visit back to The Grey House: began practising the chanter again, and then the pipes.
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From then to present: Played seriously as a competitor, teacher, composer; awarded the following: Gold Medal at Inverness; the Clasp at Inverness; the Donald MacLeod Memorial Cuaich; International Pipe Music Award; the Piobaireachd Society Award; BBC Scotland Award for Composition and Play; the Isle of Skye MacCrimmon Memorial Cuaich.

As noted in the Taorluath and in this Crunluath movement of ‘The Big Music’, the Sutherland Family of The Grey House District were
renowned
, since the early eighteenth century (and no doubt before then) as musicians who had established a form of teaching that was referred to, from early on, as the ‘Winter Classes’ and that took place, generally, from October through to February.

John MacKay conducted classes that followed his forebears’ and
particularly
his father’s models of teaching – this, years after he’d begun returning to the House as a mature man and had uncovered the wealth of musical material his father had left behind there, by way of instruction. In this manner, the spirit and ethos of the classes remained the same, in the twentieth century, as they had been in the eighteenth, and before then, with some of the exercises that were played dating right back to those dark nights in the 1700s when Roderick Callum had first invited a group of pipers to come and spend the winter months learning to perfect their musicianship. The idea, from the very beginning, was to create a place of learning, to attain by practice and emulation the perfection of their art that pipers had known back in the days of Boreraig, back in those great days. During those winter months certain tunes were composed by the Sutherlands and created to develop technique and expertise, from the singing of canntaireachd through to chanter-playing, as well as instruction
given pertaining to tuning of pipes to drones, and the modulation of the treble to the bass so as to give the most beautiful sound. These tunes and exercises are still played today.

So John Sutherland returned to the world of piping that he’d left behind him when he rejected his father and all he stood for. In fact, in those intervening years, after his mother’s death and before the onset of his own age and ill health, the atmosphere at The Grey House quite often resembled that of his father’s parties and so-called ‘Big Nights’ that in themselves harked back to an earlier era – the time when the cold hills rang with music and a low house set in against the hill might provide, for a time against the weather, all the consolations of art and beauty.

Finally, there are the following family records that detail those sons of the Sutherland family who inherited both the holdings and musical tradition of the House that had been established as early as the mid-eighteenth century as a place for music and education. As is clear from the chart that appeared earlier in this movement, a variation of which is reproduced below, eldest sons were traditionally named John, though in some cases, following a death, a younger son inherited. The details of other siblings are not included here, though a full family tree is available as part of the completed archive. In some instances, younger brothers who were also
talented
pipers may have stayed on at the House to teach, but in most cases, certainly by the turn of the twentieth century, The Grey House was home to one piper only, with a single tradition that dominated the teaching and playing of music in that place. Underlined names suggest name in use.

John
Roderick MacKay of ‘Grey Longhouse’ (‘First John’) 1736–1793: early scraps of tunes survive; see Appendix 5, List of Additional Materials, archive

Roderick
John
(a tacksman) 1776–1823: extant tunes and writings: Notes on Canntaireachd; ‘The White Flower’, ‘A Tune for Mary Jean’; extended the holdings of the House; also known as Roderick Mor, a
piping
teacher

John ‘Elder’ Roderick
Callum
(possibly knew Iain MacCrimmon, the
last of that great family of hereditary pipers, who died in 1822) 1800–1871; famous tunes: ‘I Knew MacCrimmon’, ‘The White Flower, Again’, ‘The Long Night’. Bought the ‘corridor’ from Sutherland Estates; built The Grey House on existing foundations, incorporating a part of the original Grey Longhouse

John Callum
MacKay (‘Old John’) 1835–1911: all tunes as above, but formally printed and bound with his own notes; also ‘Lessons, Notes and Tunes for Lessons’; first formal lessons conducted in a ‘Study’ or ‘Music Room’ at The Grey House that had been extended and renovated; also known as John Mor, after his grandfather who had also been known for his teaching

(Roderick) John
Callum
(‘Himself’) 1887–1968: always known as Callum; the great twentieth-century ‘Modernist’ piper; most known piobaireachd ‘Salute to the Hills’; also many tunes for the Sutherland Highlanders and Army School of Piping; responsible for establishing the ‘Winter Classes’ at The Grey House as a fixture on the international piping calendar; oversaw further renovations that the House could accommodate large parties

John
Callum
MacKay
of this book, 1923–present: see the Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’ for a list of tunes composed, including ‘The Return’ and the unfinished ‘Lament for Himself’; secretly built what he called ‘the Little Hut’ in the hills in front of The Grey House for composition work and writing

Callum
Innes MacKay, his son, introduced in ‘The Big Music’: at time of writing it is unknown whether he will return to The Grey House and take up piping there.

The oral transmission of piobaireachd survives as a living tradition through diverse lineages of teachers and pupils, traceable back to the
earliest
accounts of the form. Distinctive approaches to performance
technique
and interpretation developed through different styles of playing and instruction, with two of the most influential coming to be known as the Cameron style, which is more rounded, and the MacPherson style, which is more clipped.

The Sutherland style of playing was one that took its name from the great Highland piper Roderick John Callum Sutherland of Rogart, who, with his son Roderick John Callum and his son John, went on to perfect a series of piobaireachd musical themes that came to describe a certain manner of phrasing and tone that relied less on traditional
ornamentation
and more on the hold and stay of the notes. Recordings of some of the later of these compositions survive but in the form of tapes only, which are currently being converted to CD.

More recently, recordings by acclaimed practitioners such as Robert Reid, a leading proponent of the Cameron style, and Donald MacPherson offer exemplary documentation of these performance traditions. In all instances, the beauty and complexity of the music must rely in the end on a perfectly tuned instrument, where reed and bag, drone and pipe are in finest condition and in unified accordance, one element to another. It has been said that the best way to think about playing a tune – and
therefore about the qualities of the instrument upon which the musician will be playing – is to imagine all at first as something that will be sung. To tune the voice, the mind to the music in hand – this was the way piobaireachd was taught in the beginning, when there were no written manuscripts, when the notes for the tunes had no representation upon the stave. Such is the power of music, of poetry, that it can be learned in this other, mysterious way – not so much read and understood as
listened
to and apprehended. It could well be that the traditional manner of learning piobaireachd by canntaireachd, by way of a range of sounds that were sung through, teacher to pupil, may contain instruction for our understanding of all of art’s mysteries. Certainly there need be no direct correlation between correct understanding and the power of effect for high art to make its charge upon us.

Indeed, the writer Seumus MacNeill has observed, because of this very fact – of the primacy of the human voice as being our way in to
piobaireachd
– that it could well be ‘that the more incorrectly a piobaireachd is written, the better it is to be played – because the learner is forced to seek assistance from a piper who knows more than he does and who has been taught himself in the traditional manner’.

Certainly, the idea of a music that sits behind the words, of entire lines and phrases that sound rather than represent … Is at the very heart of the project here in hand, from John Sutherland’s ‘Lament for Himself’ right through ‘The Big Music’ in its entirety.