The Big Music (59 page)
Authors: Kirsty Gunn
The following material is a sample list of papers that will be made available as a full collection kept in the Archive Department of the University of Dundee. The information was gathered together during publication of ‘The Big Music’ to provide background understanding of the files and inserts that had been used to form the content of that book, and they also appear in the final published version as Appendices and footnotes, contributing, too, towards the ordering of the Index and the overall arrangement of the four movements of the piobaireachd that is the story of John MacKay Sutherland and those who knew him.
A range of papers and journals came from The Grey House and were filed as part of the records there, with separate folders for business and personal administration and another file box containing all musical notes and MSS that were to accompany the finished tunes that Callum was able to locate and play when he returned home to see his father for the last time.
correspondence:
1 x letter – to Piping Society
1 x letter – to Piobaireachd Society
1 x letter – to lawyer, confirming dissolution of certain London business interests
1 x letter – to wife, Sarah, re arrangements for their son
1 x letter – from his mother to him and he to his mother – from boyhood
diaries/records:
1 x page of week-to-view diary – showing London appointments
1 x page of journal entry – showing land management details
1 x page of The Grey House records – showing additions made
1 x page of The Grey House records – showing reorganisation of Schoolroom
musical entries:
1 x page of musical notes – showing details of an early composition (MS – see below)
1 x page of musical notes – showing details of a much later composition
1 x page of musical notes – showing early notes for ‘Lament for Himself’
1 x page of musical diary – remarks on certain well-known tunes
1 x page of musical diary – as above and including reminiscences from competitions
1 x page of musical archive – detailing recordings made of tunes, compositions
manuscripts:
1 x example of early composition ‘Lament for Sutherland’ – in part (MS)
1 x example of much later composition ‘Lament for Sutherland, return’ – in part (MS)
accounts:
Accounts of bagpipes – sent, received
Accounts, battels – for Winter Schools, private tuition
older material:
Eighteenth-century fragments from the Grey Longhouse (these match those referred to in Appendix 6/v)
List of all early compositions – including poetry; ballads
Canntaireachd chart
That same night, while he was listening to a recording of one of his father’s piobaireachd, Callum remembered where he had seen the bulk of his father’s writing and manuscripts of new compositions and work in progress: that is, in the Little Hut up in the hills that no one knew about except himself, his father and Helen – and to which he and Helen went, repeatedly, when they were both young. The two of them were able to return there after Callum’s father’s death and retrieve the papers that had been kept hidden all those years. The Little Hut, it is clear, was a place of intense creativity – private and isolated. Everything we need for the story of ‘The Big Music’ came from this place – from the fragment of ‘Lament for Himself’ that was discovered on the table by the window to the notes John MacKay made there about Margaret, the woman he loved and who, in so many ways, is the beginning and end of this book.
notes; MSS:
Some notes from the hut – general
Notes on the three movements of what will become ‘Lament for Himself’
Preparatory MSS – for three tunes, including ‘Lament for Himself’
Preparatory MSS – for Lullaby theme in ‘Lament for Himself’
Preparatory MSS – for leitmotifs or variations for the above – including peat, tiny flowers, grass
letters:
Letter to Callum – incomplete and unposted
Letter to Piobaireachd Society
Letter to College of Piping
talks; essays:
Discussion of piobaireachd ‘The Return’ – for
The New Piping Times
‘Introduction to Piobaireachd’ – a talk given to the Royal Highland Society St Andrew’s Night Gala Dinner
Notes on Late Style’ – for BBC Scotland
also available:
Full list of Sutherland compositions – these relate to those mentioned in relevant
Appendices, including those by JMS, his father and forefathers
Scanned material:
A sample range of documentation appears as follows. NB: Some manuscript excerpts are also provided in relevant Appendices.
fig./one: ‘Lament for Himself’ – the original manuscript
(overleaf
Of further interest:
As we know from ‘The Big Music’, the piobaireachd ‘Lament for Himself’ was never completed as a piece of music by John MacKay Sutherland but was finished nevertheless by way of the narrative that was gathered together by Helen MacKay of Sutherland as part of a project that furthered her interests in certain modernist texts – particularly those of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. That work undertaken by her, ‘The Big Music’, is the tune of this book, of course.
However, since the gathering together of the papers that comprise the book, with the help and expertise of an anonymous composer, it has been possible to create a full piece of Ceol Mor that may accompany the text and indicate to the general reader the full and extended music John MacKay Sutherland may have been carrying with him in his head as he walked into the hills that day.
A website is currently being created that will give further details about this project.
Further relevant MSS:
fig./two: ‘The Return’ – or ‘Margaret’s Song’
(opposite)
Transcripts of conversations and interviews:
Amongst the wealth of domestic material that is available to the general reader, and that provides a sort of backstory to the book ‘The Big Music’, there is included a sound archive that comprises original recordings and interviews as well as transcripts of those conversations, preserved as verbatim accounts. The main body of this archive comprises the many taped recordings and interviews that took place between Margaret MacKay and her daughter Helen – as we have seen appearing in various sections of ‘The Big Music’ – and are part of an ongoing project about domestic life and maternity. Additional letters, narrative extracts, stories and notes contribute further to this work in progress.
There are also transcripts of various programmes made – radio and television. A small sample follows:
Transcript 1: John ‘Bobby’ Bain remembers a Big Night with Callum Sutherland presiding at The Grey House, November 1968. The interviewer is David Graham, a young piping student of the time who was compiling a list of interviews with prominent bagpipers of that era, including Donald McFadyen and Donald MacLeod.
DG: You say you can remember some of those Big Nights they had at The Grey House back then?
BB: Oh, aye, they were grand nights then. Plenty of good music, and of course old Callum, for he was getting on by then, would be in charge so you knew it would be good from the outset. I remember there was one chap, had come over from Canada and he was staying at the House … well. He’d never heard so many good pipers together in one place, in one room, I mean. He said to us all [puts on North American accent], ‘You guys sure do know how to have a party.’
DG: But this was educational as well, these evenings were part of the School.
BB Well, that’s true, too – but some of us would just come in for the evening, you see, as a sort of recital. We’d play a simple tune for the young ones, something like – ah, you know – ‘Flowers of the Forest’ – and then we’d discuss it with them, the progressions and so on. Then they’d play it after us and we’d look at how they could improve themselves. So there was that – went on in the evenings, also. As well as all the drams!
DG: And there was one night in particular?
BB: Oh, in November … And the snow, well … None of us would be getting home in that weather. So Callum decided, well, he’ll make it a bit of a session, you see. So we had a grand dinner in the evening – this was all arranged by Elizabeth, his wife, you know she was just marvellous at these things, just a marvellous hostess and generous … And so we had this very grand dinner, and then … The music starting after it. Callum played first, I remember that – for it set a tone. He played ‘Lament for Donald MacKay’. And just … perfect. I remember it so well. How he played that tune, and we all know it, of course, it’s such a familiar tune, but it was just as though it had been written for that room, for the moment of it being played there, you see, as though the tune had been made to be played right then, by him, on this particular occasion – oh, it was something. And the atmosphere in the room … There would have been about eight of us gathered … Well, you could barely speak afterwards. Is what it was like. As though a kind of a spell had been cast. And then, that was played, and the next one got up, and the
next – and we all got up – like that – one after the other – but with barely a word spoken between us and we played … you know, various tunes, the big tunes ‘Lament for the Children’ and so on, all the big tunes … We just played them through, all of us, like in a row, and no words between us … And do you know? Not a single wrong note? Misplaced note? Just the fingering, everything … Perfect. Perfect. And then the last one of us finished and it was like … Well, it was like a dam breaking then. All of us talking, roaring! After the silence and the music, suddenly, there we were – back to earth again – and, oh, the party started then! The whisky came out. That was a night. We finished when light broke … And of course, well, by the end, the whisky had taken over from the music by the end, there – but before, the night before … Well, nothing could take it away … the magic, you see, of that first tune, and the eight tunes that came after it, one after the other, coming out of the silence. It was something. All of us gathered together and quiet like that, I tell you … It was something, all right. I’ll never forget it. That particular night.
Transcript 2: Postman Roddy George recollects various aspects of local life for a BBC Scotland radio programme
In the Day
that was broadcast out of Glasgow between the years 1972 and 1974. The following is excerpted from a broadcast made in September 1973:
