The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  17 These words of the composition ‘Lullaby’ that appears in sections throughout this paper are shown in full on p. 466. John Sutherland’s paper ‘Innovations to the Piobaireachd’, contained in the List of Additional Materials at the back of the book may also be of interest.

  (first verse)

  In the small room, a basket waits,

  A basket empty for no baby is there.

  The mother is gone, left the room for a moment

  – and in that moment he’s mounted the stair.

  (chorus)

  You took her away,

  young Katherine Anna,

  carried her off, tall Helen’s child.

  You took her away, a baby sleeping

  In your old arms, took her into the wild.

  18 Here is a substantial reference to the small bothy or shelter John Sutherland built for himself in the Mhorvaig hills soon after he returned to The Grey House following his father’s death. Having what he always referred to in his private journals by the initials ‘LH’ gave him somewhere he could be entirely alone and could separate himself from that musical legacy he’d inherited from his father. There are further details about the significance of the building and the music and notes that were found there that will play out in the Crunluath A Mach movement, and there is also further information in the List of Additional Materials.

  19 Information about traditional Highland lullabies that really might sing a child to sleep is given in the Crunluath movement of this composition. It is unlikely that John Sutherland would have known any of these – hence the line here no doubt describes the voice we heard from earlier in this Urlar, not his. See following paragraphs also for further evidence of this.

  20 The Taorluath and Crunluath sections of ‘The Big Music’ show certain transcripts of recordings of conversations between Margaret and her daughter Helen, and notes made that describe their relationship and discussions. In addition, Appendix 8/i shows how these transcripts were used in establishing a history of The Grey House that is now held in archive and may be consulted at leisure.

  21 ‘Himself’ was the pet name given to John Sutherland’s father, the great Modernist bagpiper who went by the name ‘Callum’ though he’d been christened Roderick and became ‘John’, after the death of his elder brother, according to the Sutherland family tradition of so naming the first-born. There are more details about this, and about family trees, genealogy charts etc. in relevant Appendices 4–9. For now it is enough to note that Iain here is using the name ‘Himself’ ironically.

  22 The Urlar is the opening movement of a piobaireachd – as is clear from this section of ‘The Big Music’ – to be followed by three other movements. Details of all these – the Urlar, ground; Taorluath, stag’s leap; Crunluath, crown; Crunluath A Mach, the showing of the crown – can be found in Appendices 11 and 12, along with notes on structure and meaning.

  23 Here again is evidence of a narrative voice that is placed outside the experience of John Callum and others in this book. Is it the same person noted earlier entering into the text this way? I think we are asked to consider here that this may be the case. Either way, the first person ‘I’ appears here, and with increasing frequency as ‘The Big Music’ continues – though will not always be annotated separately.

  24 The manuscript ‘Lament for Himself’ in its original form shows how the theme was to be developed within the Urlar, as two variations – first a singling (the insertion of a number of single gracenotes around the existing notes) and then a doubling (where these gracenotes are doubled from the ‘top’ to provide a sort of mirror image of the original tune). This is marked on the MS ‘dithis’ (pron. zhitt-ee), and note also the siubhal (pron. shoo-al), Gaelic terms meaning this particular musical development in bagpipe music.

  25 There is information about the structure of ‘Lament for Himself’ in Appendix 10/i, ii and iii, and about piobaireachd structure generally in Appendix 11. Also the Crunluath A Mach movement of ‘The Big Music’ contains details of an essay by John MacKay Callum Sutherland, ‘Innovations to the Piobaireachd’, that refers to a tune being more than just a theme but is also about the particular deployment of that theme.

  26 The crown here refers to the Crunluath movement of ‘The Big Music’ – crunluath meaning ‘crown’, and the important concluding ‘narrative’ section of piobaireachd music that is then followed by the show of technique that is the A Mach.

  27 Appendix 7 indicates those sections of ‘The Big Music’ that refer to John Callum’s family; history; business interests. Throughout the book we come to see how John Sutherland may have vowed never to return to the place where he’d been born (‘I’ll not be back!’, p. 14) but did come to live out the end of his life at The Grey House after all.

  28 The Taorluath and Crunluath movements give details of the Sutherland family’s history.

  29 The Music Room, or the Study, as it was also called in John Sutherland’s father’s day, is also the little sitting room at The Grey House.

  30 Note the use of first person in this segment of the text; also refer to pp. 8 and 25 in the Urlar, as examples of a certain tone, style of voice emerging in the narrative. Also, opening section of Taorluath movement.

  32 This is from a poem by Robert Frost, and describes Helen MacKay’s interest in American poetry (that in her journal she refers to as ‘real-voice poetry’, a phrase lifted from her PhD thesis), from Whitman through Dickinson to the New York School. Appendix 8/ii: ‘Helen’s notes and reading’ shows her interest in particular poets and novelists, as well as general understanding of and research into various schools of literary modernism.

  33 Iain is referring here to the notorious Highland Clearances, and the way the Sutherland family stayed clear of the evictions and relocation that took place at that time. There are further details of their position in the Taorluath and Crunluath sections of ‘The Big Music’; also Appendices 1–3, and parts of 4–9 may be of interest here.

  34 By now there have been a number of references to the piping school (known formally as the ‘Winter Classes’) that took place, along with various recitals and competitions at The Grey House under the direction of Callum Sutherland, the father of John MacKay of ‘The Big Music’. The theme of this School continues within the structure of this book – as part of its history and positioning within the culture of piobaireachd – and in the Crunluath movement, in particular. There is also related information contained within Appendices 4–9 and in the List of Additional Materials.

  35 These memories survive as fragments only in ‘The Big Music’ but later sections of the book cast some light on the character of John’s father, by way of various transcripts and related papers.

  36 The parts of the bagpipe are illustrated and listed in Appendix 13.

  37 These snatches of phrases are inserted here to show continuity with the ongoing project of describing how ‘Lament for Himself’ has been composed. The phrases appear in the patterning of notes at the beginning of the Urlar, in their repetition and pacing. The fourth movement of ‘The Big Music’, the Crunluath A Mach, also contains details of how these fragmentary style notes contribute to the whole.

  SECOND MOVEMENT: TAORLUATH

  two/first paper1

  Certain roads you get to a part of them, turn a corner, say, come over some kind of a hill, and you feel … No going back now. The road there to take you and all you can imagine is the place that lies ahead and who’s there, who’s waiting.

  Callum Sutherland, he’ll be like me enough that way. A man in his car now, coming along that exact same piece of road I’m writing about, and it’s early morning, a grey light and soft and cold, but look at the place, darling, all around you. You can’t help but see it, feel your heart clench like a little fist behind the bones of your chest as you sit forward slightly in the seat of your car with the land falling away like blankets on either side.

  Beallach Nam Drumochta.

  The Pass.

  It’s a part of the journey
they talk about a lot here. About the length of it, time taken. The road north altogether, when you get up this far, is something they’ll always ask after but this stretch of road in particular –

  ‘Did you make it over all right?’ Iain will ask it, or my mother. Someone in the pub at Rogart, in the midst of a high summer although there were winds, so asking ‘Drumochta, how was it? You managed okay? In all this air?’

  They used to ask me, too, the same, and I became used to my own answers given. How there was no traffic on the road, or there was a bit, or a report in the paper about another accident on the long stretch coming back off down the hill, someone taking over on a bad corner, and though the road’s improved still it’s bad in places and dangerous and fast. But Callum would say nothing, would he? About any of those things? Nor the excitement for the journey, the way the light opens out and the size of the country unfolds itself before you. He wouldn’t feel himself entitled. To speak about his sense of the place that way because what right does he have to claim that kind of attachment, the idea of coming back to somewhere that’s so familiar, so known, when he’s never lived here, wasn’t born here? When this is where he’s only ever come for his holidays is all.

  Is what he’ll think. What he’ll believe.

  And anyway, his reasons for coming up this time drawn out from necessity, not desire – the call that came through from his mother, the arrangements he had to make.

  And he’d have had his wife asking, his family: Do you really need to go up there? Now? When who knows how long your father will go on, how he’ll treat you when you get there? When maybe this is just a turn of his, something temporary, and he’ll go back to the way he was and nothing much wrong with him in the first place that’s not just to do with age and his stubborn will? For all this is his decision, it’s not yours, Callum. Come from where your father’s decided that he wants to live, at the other end of the country, and that that’s where he’s going to stay – but nothing to do with you, is it? What your father’s decided? Who he thinks he is? It’s not for you to be dealing with, is it? And Callum might be thinking that, too. For certainly his wife would be asking, and his sons. Does he really need to come all the way up this road to be here?

  Yet even so …

  To think of the son coming back up here to be with the father …

  Though it’s against his will, perhaps. Against his wife’s desire to have him stay.

  Still, it’s hard not to see it as returning. Though it was his father used those words, the return, and Callum himself may never use those words. Even so there he is in my mind now, looking for the House in his windscreen, though he’s miles away. And there’s the excitement even so. In the getting up. The getting over. Of Drumochta,2 and the rise of the road as the journey takes form beneath him, the distance and the time closing up any space between the last time I saw him and now. So it does mean something else, coming back, after all. That’s more than duty. More than need. That’s more than his mother’s insistence on the phone that he’s the only one can talk to his father and get through to him, stir up some kind of recognition in his mind. That’s more than all those things. So that he’s switched the headlights off five minutes or so ago to let himself have a good sense of it, the land, the pale colours. Up there on the tops, looking north.

  And …

  Callum.

  Callum, Callum.

  Of course you are entitled.

  You’re the son. You’re the only one.

  Look for us in the windscreen of your car and we’re waiting for you.

  The call came through yesterday while he was at work.

  His mother, in that quick way of hers of talking. ‘Your father’ she would have said. ‘They’ve told me at the House he’s bad again. It’s been that way a while it seems. But not taking the medication so now they’re worried enough to let me know.’

  There would have been a moment then. I can see it, imagine it quite clearly: when the phone rang; when Callum picked up. A moment when he would seem to be taken by surprise – still thinking about what he’d just been doing, plans for a project laid out on the white desk in front of him, his eyes still on the drawing he’s just completed.

  ‘Callum?’

  And someone else, maybe, speaking to him at the same time from another part of the office, and him nodding, holding up his fingers when he picks up: two seconds. Mouthing the words, then saying to his mother, ‘Okay, I’m here.’

  Because at that point, though the call had been half expected, his father not well, he knew that, and his mother concerned, still he hadn’t been thinking about any of that just then, about his father, and I think he might have wanted to prevaricate, not quite take his eyes from the papers in front of him to listen to his mother, to answer her straight away. Not quite ready to take the weight of the content of the sentences she was passing over to him, down the line.

  Now they’re worried enough to let me know.

  So he just said ‘Okay’ to her then. ‘Okay.’

  For there was a big commission, perhaps, come up at work, that’s what the plans were on the table, a busy time after the long summer break and suddenly deadlines ahead of him, a building to be finished in the first stage same time next year. And there were to be meetings. And accountants, lawyers. I don’t know. Reschedules to be drawn up, alterations made.

  So ‘Okay’ he might have said, like trying to put it off, the moment when she would ask him what she was going to ask him to do. ‘Okay.’

  ‘These people’ she would have said then. ‘They tell me now what’s been going on. That he’s been out roaming on the hills, it turns out, is the latest. For weeks, apparently, this has been going on, and on his own. After all this time and they tell me now. These people. How can you get through to these people?’

  And he might have laughed then.

  ‘Mum –’

  But she would have said, and insisting, no choice in it at all, ‘I want you to go up there, Cal. I want you to. To bring him back and I’ll take him for a while. If he won’t stay in hospital at least I can make sure he gets back onto a proper care programme here. With the right attention, the right medication –’

  And he would have replied then, a different tone in his voice, ‘He’s not going to want it.’

  So it would have been his mother’s turn to laugh, though not a real laugh. ‘It doesn’t matter what he wants.’

  ‘But he’ll not agree’ Callum would have said. ‘He’ll not let himself –’

  ‘Cal.’

  ‘Be taken.’

  Sarah wouldn’t have heard. ‘You’ll have to go up there’ she would have told him, the laugh of hers never a real laugh. ‘As soon as you can, Callum. Get up to the House and bring him back here to me.’

  And all this was – when? Yesterday? Only yesterday and yet already it feels like another phase of his life, that he was another man altogether who had stood there at his desk in his office with a cup of coffee in his hand, the plans laid out before him, when the phone rang and interrupted. And though in so many ways his mother’s request was not unexpected – when he looks back on it now he’s here, on this road, driving back up North to be with him again – still it was like he was someone barely connected to his father that moment, when his mother talked to him that way. As though his father was someone else entirely, with no mind or past or will that Callum had ever known. As though he were not someone who he’d grown up with, learned from. Who had emotions he was familiar with, the impatience and judgement and rage like his father has had rage all through his life and when Callum was a boy he had to suffer that rage, when he had to make the journey up north with his father for the summer and his father hated the driving to get there. As though, for those moments when Callum had stood with the phone in his hand and heard his mother talking, he was unconnected to any of those memories he might have had, unconnected to the idea of this journey, even, with the boy grown up, the father old, and he, the son, the one who was driving …

  But a
ll that’s gone now, now he’s here. Now that he’s actually on the road, on his way. So it’s the day his mother called him that’s become the time that’s unreal, that’s not linked to this present, the feeling from yesterday already gone from his mind, of his distance from the past. All gone because now it seems like it was only minutes ago that he was last on the Pass, and as the incline of it increases, gradually, and now the day is lifting … Everything else has slipped away. The day before. The night. The wife in bed with him this morning in the dark, the two boys in their room. The streetlights and the oily wet of the road where he lives, pulling the car out of the drive … All of it gone by now … Left way behind him, in another country, and it’s all that’s ahead of him now, not the other, that is the real.

  It’s the light does it. How it takes you to another place, casts off, eclipses all the skies you’ve seen before, all the places you have been. I’ve felt the same way coming back up here, and approaching the Beallach Callum looks out and it’s as though the entire sky of the world is open, poured out, let loose down upon the hills. Like there was never such a thing as darkness here, like there could be no darkness, only this bare, clear air. There are the clean open flats of the moors, pale grey and dun and heather streaked with dark and peat, and blackish watery burns some places coming down cut with broken stones, rocks, and all of it, the sweet land, available to him somehow, that sense of reaching out to it like you might take it, all of it, be able to gather it into yourself and make it yours, a universe of endless land and sky and distance and pick out the mountains for your stars.