The Big Music (52 page)

The earliest tunes played at the site of what is now The Grey House will never be fully registered, as these pieces, like so many compositions for the pipes over the years, were passed down by canntaireachd from generation to generation, with subtle alterations along the way, until they came to rest in the manuscript versions held in the so-called ‘Music Room’.

The tunes in particular that were originated at the first longhouse, and composed, according to family history and local legend, by the first John Roderick MacKay (1736–1793) are as follows:

These were adapted by John Callum MacKay (1835–1911) and taught in the Study, or Music Room, as part of the ‘curriculum’ for the first and subsequent ‘Winter Classes’ conducted at the House in the last part of the nineteenth century and onwards, classes that were then incorporated into the more formal ‘Winter School of Piping’ at The Grey House.

When manuscript paper was introduced and utilised, from around the
mid-nineteenth
century onwards, following the great publication by Angus MacKay of
A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd
and then later the Kilberry manuscripts (see Appendix 6/v and Bibliography), all compositions could be recorded and filed. Some of these in original form and photocopies of all extant MSS are available in archive, and are also in the List of Additional Materials at the back of this book.

The more well-known piobaireachd of The Grey House from around this time are:

There are also a number of lesser-known airs, songs and reels composed and recorded in manuscript form.

By the time of the early 1950s, the time of the father of John MacKay Sutherland of this book, there were some early recordings made of him playing certain tunes, and many of his compositions were collated into an album published later by the Piobaireachd Society. As we read in ‘The Big Music’, certain marches and music for gatherings were also composed for his regiment that served in France and these folios are kept in the Library of the Imperial War Museum in London and at the Military Museum for the Highlands in Fort Augustus – all appearing under strictly numerical headings: March/1, March/2 etc.; The Gathering at Auvergne/1, and so on.

John MacKay himself, as we know from the Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’, kept recordings of all his compositions on cassette – latterly, these have been
transferred
over to CD and were collected in the sideboard in the Music Room, beneath the whisky decanter to which Callum returned over and over on the night of his father’s death.

At the time of writing, though Callum Sutherland has taken up his father’s pipes, it is unknown as to whether he will compose music himself to add to the library established by his father and forebears.

Details of the history and development of music within the Sutherland family are found all through the four movements of ‘The Big Music’, with certain papers, embellishments and variations given over to an exact description of classes and lessons and musical evenings that were held from the period of the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Further details can be found in various issues of
The New Piping Times
and related magazines of the period, mid-twentieth century onwards, as well as in archive.

An interview with Callum MacKay Sutherland and a transcript of the interview with a past pupil of one of the Winter School classes may be of particular interest, the latter reproduced within the Crunluath movement of ‘The Big Music’.

For a general historical introduction to piobaireachd and its musical form, see Appendices 12 and 13; also Bibliography/Music: Piobaireachd/primary and/secondary – in particular MacKay,
A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd;
Campbell,
The Kilberry Book of Ceol Mor;
MacNeill,
Piobaireachd.

What will be seen, the further one goes into a study of the music’s origins and definition, is that the form, though reflexive in terms of its structure (see the
Crunluath
and Crunluath A Mach movements in particular, that are composed to show the dexterity and skills of the piper), is never so in subject. Piobaireachd has a
public
, social function: it is always either a salute, or a call to a gathering, or a lament, and always it is written and played for something or someone beyond the piper’s playing. The Lament composed by John Callum Sutherland, therefore, that appears in its opening ‘remarks’
1
on the first pages of ‘The Big Music’, is unique in that this is a Lament written for the composer himself. So the subject of the theme is the composer of it, and the subsequent opening bars that Sutherland managed to complete in the Urlar, and that can be seen in Appendix 10A/ii and in full in the Endpapers at the back of this book, indicate that there are passages in the music suggesting not only the composer’s own frailty and impending death, but other themes connected with his life that would have been developed further had he been able to complete the tune.
2
These musical ideas include the use of a singular ‘breathing’ theme that is outlined in the first few bars, where the very sound of the music indicates a man who may be inhaling and exhaling his last breaths upon this earth, and then the use of ‘dithis’ singling and doubling upon this theme (see Glossary), a singling and doubling of the notes to indicate the presence of the composer’s father and son as being part of those last moments of life.

Another unusual feature of Sutherland’s composition is the insertion within it of a sequence of notes at the beginning of the second line that carry the suggestion of a theme within a theme – in this case a Lullaby, or, rather, an idea for a Lullaby
3
in the repetition of the interval: ‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘E’ to ‘A’, ‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘E’ to ‘E’. For a more detailed account of the composition of the Urlar movement, see Appendices 11 and 12: ‘General structure of the piobaireachd’ and ‘The form of a piobaireachd’, as well as the notes on the Urlar contained in section iv of this Appendix. This use of an inserted theme or themes within the overall musical idea of a piece is not unlike Wagner’s use of leitmotif, in compositional terms (see Bibliography/Music: General, in particular Gilkes,
Wagner and his Leitmotifs
and Seoras,
Use of Recurring Musical Sequencing in Nineteenth Century Composition;
also Glossary: leitmotif; gesundkunstwerk; Crunluath A Mach), and shows how repeated use of a few notes can enhance the overall sound of the whole, giving added depth and meaning – in this case a delicate, haunting Lullaby that is indicated by the few notes below:

As seen in Appendices 12 and 13, it is speculated that some piobaireachd music has its basis in certain Highland songs and airs that may date back to the fifteenth century or earlier. It is perhaps the knowledge of this tradition that worked upon John Sutherland in his thinking about his own final composition; the Lullaby that he had in mind being one, perhaps, that was already known to him. No records of such a song were found amongst his papers; but his daughter, Helen MacKay, surely discovered certain notes and writings up at the Little Hut that may have assisted her in putting together the words of the Lullaby that appear first on p. 21 of ‘The Big Music’. Certainly the theme of babies lost or without their mothers was a common enough one in folk song (see Bibliography/Music: Highland – Stephens,
History of Highland Songs and Airs,
and the chapters ‘Metaphor in Folk Song’ and ‘The Image of the Changeling and Missing Child in Scottish Folklore and Songs’) and would have
suggested itself easily enough as a poetic idea to a mother who had herself
experienced
the loss, albeit temporarily, of a baby.

A scanned version of the original manuscript of the lullaby appears in the List of Additional Materials, manuscripts, in part on pp. 20–1 and 25 of the Urlar of ‘The Big Music’, and in full here:

The Urlar of John Sutherland’s composition in ‘The Big Music’ also takes the word literally – ‘urlar’ meaning ‘ground’, to suggest the ground notes of the music, the laying out of an initial theme – but used here figuratively, to suggest the ground, the hills and landscape of his birthplace, as part of the ‘colouring’ or ordering of the music (see Bibliography/Music: General – Graham,
The Literal Musical
). Certain notes appear in sequence to describe this ground, as indicated by entries in the journal and in various papers gathered together by Helen MacKay that relate to this
composition (see the Crunluath A Mach section in ‘The Big Music’). The idea of certain notes in the bagpipe scale having certain meanings is not new, as the chart in the Last Appendix shows. That notation might match a particular place or person, so as to lend texture and a sense of narrative to the composition, is, however, not one hitherto explored by classical Highland music scholars and could provide a rich seam of understanding of certain piobaireachd sequences were it to be uncovered more fully – starting perhaps with a parsing of Sutherland’s own Urlar to show, for example, certain notes for different people who feature in ‘The Big Music’; also
colours
or objects – grass, hills, a particular burn, the fall of light in the east coast, its sea etc. See the Index of ‘The Big Music’ for an indication of how these themes and notes might play out in the composition and form certain patterns that may marry.

One could then go through the recurring images in the Urlar and compare these to the recurrence of certain notes as they appear in the manuscript of the music of ‘Lament for Himself’ (that is, as much of this as was written) that is reproduced at the end of this book. See, too, John MacKay’s own paper ‘Innovations to the
Piobaireachd
’, referred to in footnotes and in the List of Additional Materials at the end of this book, and consider his ideas in the light of the completed text of that narrative.

In the List of Additional Materials we see the original manuscript that was
discovered
by Helen MacKay and Callum Sutherland following the death of John Sutherland at The Grey House. The manuscript, that appears here in full, in fact only represents a fragment of what was intended to be completed as a ‘modest tune’ – John Sutherland’s phrase, as seen below in an excerpt from his notes about the composition. Nevertheless, it indicates the themes of mortality and rebirth that were to become significantly developed in the papers that comprise ‘The Big Music’: see especially the recurring Lullaby (as described in Appendix 10/ii above) and the reference to ‘last breath taken’ in the sequence of notes in the opening bars of music. Subsequent developments in the music – including the suggestion of the
Leumluath
idea within the second movement: a leaping off; a sense of risk – are contained within this first Urlar; see, for example, the ‘drop’ to a Low ‘G’ indicating horror and devastation (in the second bar of the second line) and the ‘E’ to ‘A’ interval that appears in the third line only that comes to fully represent the part Margaret plays in John Sutherland’s life and music, and will be fully marked in the Crunluath movement of ‘The Big Music’ in particular. The use of singling and doubling in the extant MS shows how the themes of generation play out in the composition: the
first representing his father, the great Modernist piper Roderick John Callum, from whom, during his life, John MacKay was estranged, and the second for his son, Callum MacKay, also barely known to the composer by the time of writing but whose notes are indicated in the way the composition’s doubling of the theme allows him a place in the music after all. Both these themes are also indicated in the Urlar and Taorluath movements of ‘The Big Music’.