The Big Music (54 page)

Piobaireachd is difficult to transcribe accurately using traditional musical
notation
, and early attempts suffered from conventions which do not accurately convey tune expression. More contemporary piobaireachd notation has attempted to
address
these issues, and has produced notation much closer to true expression of the tunes.

Piobaireachd does not follow a strict metre but it does have a rhythmic flow or pulse; it does not follow a strict beat or tempo although it does have pacing. The written transcription of piobaireachd serves mainly as a rough guide for the piper. The expression of the rhythms and tempos of the piobaireachd tune are primarily acquired from an experienced teacher and applied through interpretive performance practice.

The Gaelic titles of piobaireachd compositions have been categorised into four broad groupings. These are:

Functional – salutes, laments, marches and gatherings

Technical – referring to strictly musical characteristics of the pieces such as ‘port’ or ‘glas’, terms shared with wire-strung harpers

Textual – quotations from song lyrics, usually the opening words

Short names – diverse short names referring to places, people and events similar to those found in Scottish popular music of the period

Piobaireachd in the functional category were most commonly written for or have come to be associated with specific events, personages or situations:

Laments (cumha) are mourning tunes often written for a deceased person of note. Laments were commonly written as a result of families being displaced from their homeland, a practice that was very common after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

Salutes (failte) are tunes that acknowledge a person, event or location. Salutes were often written upon the birth of children or after a visitation to a prominent figure such as a clan chief. Many salutes have been written to commemorate famous pipers.

Gatherings (port tionail) are tunes written specifically for a clan. These tunes were used to call a clan together by their chief. The tune structure is usually simple so that it could be recognised easily by clan members.

Rowing piobaireachd are more rhythmic tunes used to encourage rowers while crossing the sea.

The different categories of piobaireachd do not have consistent distinctive
musical
patterns that are characteristic of the category. The role of the piobaireachd may inform the performers’ interpretative expression of rhythm and tempo.

Many piobaireachd tunes have intriguing names such as ‘Too Long in This
Condition
’, ‘The Piper’s Warning to His Master’, ‘Scarce of Fishing’, ‘The Unjust
Incarceration
’ and ‘The Big Spree’, which suggest specific narrative events or possible lyric sources. There are accounts in ‘The Big Music’ of certain piobaireachd written by pipers of the Sutherland family that are of a personal nature or suggest a re-visiting of an idea or theme. One such example is, first, ‘A Small White Flower’, then ‘A Small White Flower, Again’.

The oral transmission of the repertoire has led to diverse and divergent accounts of the names for tunes, and many tunes have a number of names. Mistranslation of Gaelic names with non-standard phonetic spelling adds to the confusion.

In some cases the name and subject matter of piobaireachd tunes appears to have been reassigned by nineteenth-century editors such as Angus MacKay, whose book
A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd or Highland Pipe Music
(1838) included
historically
fanciful and romantic piobaireachd source stories by antiquarian James Logan. A number of piobaireachd collected by MacKay have very different titles than in earlier manuscript sources. Nevertheless, MacKay’s translated English titles became the commonly accepted ones, sanctioned by subsequent Piobaireachd Society editors.

Roderick Cannon has compiled a dictionary of the Gaelic names of piobaireachd from early manuscripts and printed sources, detailing inconsistencies, difficulties in translation, variant names, accurate translations and verifiable historically
documented
attributions and dates in the few cases where this is possible.

In the absence of concrete documentary evidence, the origins of piobaireachd have taken on something of a mythic status. The earliest commonly recognised figures in the history of the music are the MacCrimmon family of pipers, particularly Donald Mor MacCrimmon (
c
.1570–1640), who is reputed to have left a group of highly
developed
tunes, and Patrick Mor MacCrimmon (
c
.1595–1670), one of the hereditary pipers to the Chief of the MacLeods of Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye.

There is some controversy over the attribution of authorship of key
piobaireachd
tunes to the MacCrimmons by Walter Scott, Angus MacKay and others who published on the topic in the nineteenth century. The
Campbell Canntaireachd,
written in 1797, is a two-volume manuscript with chanted vocable and phonetic
transcriptions
of piobaireachd music that pre-dates the nineteenth-century attributions. It contains no references to the MacCrimmons and has different names for numerous tunes that were subsequently associated with them.

The piobaireachd ‘Cha till mi tuill’ in the
Campbell Canntaireachd
manuscript, which translates as ‘I shall return no more’, is related to a tune associated with victims of the Clearances emigrating to the New World. Walter Scott wrote new romantic verses to this tune in 1818 with the title ‘Lament – Cha till suin tuille’, which
translates
as ‘We shall return no more’, later republished as ‘Mackrimmon’s Lament. Air – Cha till mi tuille’.

In Angus MacKay’s book
A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd or Highland Pipe Music
(1838), the piobaireachd ‘Cha till mi tuill’ is subsequently published with the title ‘MacCrummen will never return’.

Most piobaireachds are commonly assumed to have been written during the
sixteenth
to eighteenth centuries. The entire repertoire comprises approximately 300 tunes. In many cases the composer is unknown, however piobaireachd continues to be composed up to the present day. Recent research suggests that the style of
ornamentation
in the music points to earlier origins in wire-strung Gaelic harp compositions, in particular the use of rapid descending arpeggios as gracenotes.

A piobaireachd that is considered to be one of the oldest in the repertoire appears in the
Campbell Canntaireachd
with the title ‘Chumbh Craoibh Na Teidbh’, which
translates
as ‘Lament for the Tree of Strings’, a possible poetic reference to the wire-strung harp. Another, more well-known, piobaireachd published by Angus MacKay with the
Gaelic title ‘Cumhadh Craobh nan teud’ is translated as ‘Lament for the Harp Tree.’ This piobaireachd appears in the
Campbell Canntaireachd
manuscripts as ‘MacLeod’s Lament.’

Ceol Mor repertoire is likely to have transferred from the harp to the newly
developed
Italian violin in the late sixteenth century as fiddlers began to receive
aristocratic
patronage and supplement the role of the harpers.

A distinctive body of Ceol Mor known as fiddle piobaireachd developed in this period with melodic themes and formal variations that are similar to, but not necessarily derived from or imitative of, concurrent bagpipe piobaireachd, as the name ‘fiddle piobaireachd’ might suggest. The two forms are likely to have developed in parallel from a common source in earlier harp music and Gaelic song.

Aristocratic Scottish Gaelic Ceol Mor harp repertoire and practices are assumed to have begun to transfer across from the harp to the bagpipes in the sixteenth century. A North Uist tradition identifies the first MacCrimmon as a harper. The
MacCrimmons
asserted that they received their first training in a school in Ireland. Alexander Nicholson, in his book
History of Skye
, originally published in 1930, recounts a
tradition
that the MacCrimmons were ‘skilful players of the harp, and may have been composers of its music, before they began to cultivate the other and more romantic instrument’.

There were a number of musicians across the period from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries who were noted multi-instrumentalists and potentially formed a bridge from the harp to the fiddle and bagpipe repertoire. Ronald MacDonald of Morar (1662–1741), known in Gaelic as Raghnall MacAilein Oig, was an aristocratic wire-strung clarsach harpist, fiddler, piper and composer, celebrated in the
piobaireachd
‘The Lament for Ronald MacDonald of Morar’. He is the reputed composer of a number of highly regarded piobaireachds, including ‘An Tarbh BreacDearg/ The Red Speckled Bull’; ‘A Bhoalaich/An Intended Lament’, also published in Angus MacKay’s book as ‘A Bhoilich/The Vaunting’; and ‘Glas Mheur’, which MacKay translates as ‘The Finger Lock.’ This piobaireachd is entitled ‘Glass Mhoier’ in the
Campbell Canntaireachd.
There are three other piobaireachds in the
Campbell Canntaireachd
manuscripts with the related titles ‘A Glase’, ‘A Glass’ and ‘A Glas’.

‘Glas’ is also a key term found in the Irish wire-harp tradition, as noted down by
Edward Bunting, who uses ‘glass’ as a variant of ‘gléis’ in relation to tuning. He also lists the term ‘glas’ as a specific fingering technique, which he translates as ‘a joining’, a simile for lock. He describes this as ‘double notes, chords etc.’ for the left treble hand and right bass hand.

The rise of the bagpipe and the corresponding shift away from the harp and its associated traditions of bardic poetry is documented with a confronting disdain in the satirical song ‘Seanchas Sloinnidh na Piob o thùs/A History of the Pipes from the Beginning’ (
c
.1600) by Niall Mor MacMhuirich (
c
.1550–1630), poet to the MacDonalds of Clanranald:

This can be contrasted with the celebration of the heroic warrior associations of bagpipe piobaireachd at the expense of the harp and fiddle by later Clanranald poet Alasdair Mhaighstir (
c
.1695–1770) in the song ‘Moladh air Piob-Mhor Mhic Cruimein/In Praise of MacCrimmon’s Pipes’:

Bardic verses traditionally celebrated the clarsach harp and made no mention of bagpipes. Nevertheless, the bagpipes gained popularity and prominence through a social need for a prominent national instrument – whether it be martial, in a period of increasing military engagements, or cultural as the instrument became grafted on to existing structures of aristocratic cultural patronage and aesthetic appreciation in the mid-seventeenth century and became the primary Ceol Mor instrument.

This is reflected in the patronage offered to a succession of hereditary pipers who were retained by leading clan families, including piobaireachd dynasties such as the
MacCrimmons, pipers to the MacLeods of Dunvegan, and the MacArthurs, pipers to the MacDonalds of Sleat.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the old Gaelic cultural order underwent a near total collapse. Piobaireachd continued to be played by bagpipers, but with diminished patronage and status, and was perceived to have gone into a decline. The modern revival of piobaireachd was initiated by the newly founded Highland Society of London. They funded annual competitions, with the first being held at the Falkirk Masonic Lodge in 1781. Over the course of the nineteenth century, with the opening up of communications within the Highlands (in
particular
, the railways), a competing circuit emerged, with the two most pre-eminent competitions being held at Inverness and Oban, the former descended directly from the first Falkirk competition.

The orally transmitted repertoire was collected and documented in a diverse range of manuscript transcriptions mostly dating from the early nineteenth century. As noted, the first comprehensive collections were the canntaireachd transcriptions in the
Campbell Canntaireachd
(1797 and 1814) and the
Neil MacLeod Gesto Canntaireachd
(1828), collected from John MacCrimmon prior to his death in 1822. A series of manuscripts in the early nineteenth century documented piobaireachd transcribed in staff notation.

Angus MacKay’s book
A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd or Highland Pipe Music,
published in 1838, documented and presented the piobaireachd repertoire in staff notation with supplementary commentary by antiquarian James Logan. MacKay simplified many of the piobaireachd compositions, editing out complex
ornamentation
and asymmetries that were evident in documentation of the same compositions published in earlier manuscripts such as the
Campbell Canntaireachd.
He also specified regular time signatures that standardised and regulated a music that was traditionally performed with expressive rubato rhythmic interpretation of the musical phrasing and dynamics. MacKay’s staff-notated edited version of piobaireachd became the authoritative reference for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival of
piobaireachd
, and greatly influenced subsequent modern piobaireachd performance.