by Kirsty Gunn
Then he begins:
Piobaireachd is not the music of the pipe band (a nineteenth-century invention) nor is it the strathspeys and reels that folk dance to. These are known to pipers as Ceol Beag or little music. Piobaireachd (a Gaelic word literally meaning the playing of pipes) is called Ceol Mor, ‘the great music’ of the pipe that serious pipers revere as the height of their art.
So what is it that goes into the making of this so-called ‘great music’? Like the strathspey, this music is unique to the Highlands of Scotland. Generally tunes consist of a poetic urlar (a ground or theme), upon which several variations of varying tempi are constructed. These are embellished with a series of musical ornaments that become more complex as the tune progresses, culminating with the return to the urlar to complete the tune. The effect of these variations with an instrument that is harmonically balanced against its drones will provide an almost mesmerising effect. The piper uses subtle variations of note length to build poetic phrasing, expression and character into a piece to convey the story the original composer was trying to portray to the listener.
These piobaireachd are repetitious gathering tunes that call the Clan, stately salutes about the heroes of battle, or notable gents and ladies, or a lament mourning those who deserve our respect or sometimes contempt. These tunes often date back hundreds of years to a time when the bard or piper held great esteem in the Gaelic community.
Legend says that the MacCrimmons were the greatest of the hereditary pipers, who had a college at Boreraig in Skye where pipers from all over Scotland were refined over a number of years and returned to their patrons. The origin of the music and the history of the MacCrimmons were lost in the mists of time. Our earliest knowledge stretches back to Findlay and Iain Odhar, sometime around the sixteenth century.
After Colloden in 1745, and the subsequent bans on many aspects of Gaelic life, which included the bagpipe, regarded by the English as an instrument of war on the assumption that no Scottish Clan had ever marched into battle without a piper, many of the old tunes were lost, or in fear of being lost. Piping, which was then to survive within the Scottish regiments now serving the British crown, began to change its character and piobaireachd was more commonly heard on the competition boards at many gatherings, being judged by the local laird or vicar. Those days have gone, and the judges are now piping experts, with the audience made up of piping purists and the general public usually regarding piobaireachd as an acquired taste, preferring to watch the caber-tossing or tug-o-war.
In the nineteenth century, tunes were, for the first time, being written to manuscript. This has certainly preserved many that would otherwise have been lost to us, but the criticism being that such music cannot be written. Piobaireachd is based on a rhythmic meter much like poetry, where the piper cuts or extends notes to mark phrases, the ends of lines, or even various notes of identical value throughout a line to create interest and the mood of a tune. This is not done at random, and there must be some historical source upon which the pipers base their particular setting. There are various schools of playing and they all have their own individual styles and settings. Some of the piper’s own feelings and interpretation are no doubt always expressed in a tune, but variation from the existing settings is frowned upon.
Being an oral tradition, piobaireachd was taught using a canntaireachd. This was a method of verbalising the notes and embellishments in a tune and teaching it as a song. This method is still used today, with the manuscript used as a teaching aid. Rare is it to find a piper that has learnt piobaireachd with any success that has not had a proper teacher to refine his art using canntaireachd, even in this age of modern communication.
One of modern times’ greatest exponents of piobaireachd was Pipe Major John MacDonald of Inverness. He wrote in 1949 that, ‘A Piper should be a man of as wide a culture as possible, not only concerned about execution, but with strong and sympathetic understanding of nature’s varied moods, translated by him into music.
‘When a piper is at his best, and is being carried away by his tune, he sees a picture in his mind – at least that is how it is with me. When I am playing ‘The Kiss of the King’s Hand’, I visualise Skye and Boreraig and the MacCrimmons. The tune ‘Donald Doughall MacKay’ brings to mind a picture of the old pipers, and how they played this tune. A piper in order to play his best must be oblivious to his surroundings – he must be carried away by the beauty and harmony of the tune he is playing.’
Piobaireachd with its length, intricacies, emotions and the need to have a well-set pipe is not the domain of the novice. To say one stands at the start of knowledge after seven years of learning is no exaggeration as this art encompasses a lifetime’s study. The knowledge passed orally from our teachers cannot be underestimated and indeed I would say that any master’s skill could not be honed in this art without adding the input of previous generations of pipers to his learning. I have heard piobaireachd referred to as self-indulgent music, as it may sometimes seem to the uninitiated. It is played only on a solo pipe, and the competent performer often seems to be drifting off to some faraway place, but be assured he is ‘lending a fond ear to the drone’ and expressing the thoughts of ‘old folks and old affairs’.
embellishment/1a: domestic detail: Margaret MacKay
Margaret first left her mother’s home in Caithness planning to return.
Is how that story started, the one about her mother striking out on her own. It’s a known story – the going out into the world like a woman in a Highland fable or a ballad, or in a book by Neil Gunn,23 say, and Helen asked to hear it many times, the tale of her mother’s leaving, for in it she could come to read her own future, of going out, one day, to have adventures of her own but knowing she would also come home again.
‘I wanted to see other parts of Scotland, down south or through the west’ her mother might begin. Or ‘Once upon a time …’ And Helen would be sitting there, unmoving. Rigid with attention as she sat in a chair or at the table and not wanting to miss a single detail: of how her mother had planned on going away from the place where she’d been born to start university in Aberdeen; her taking up of a summer job in a house in Sutherland with a friend who would be nannying at a big lodge near Beauly. ‘The two of us travelled up from Aberdeen in the train together, it was the start of June …’ Ending with how Margaret had met Helen’s father, how she had just been a young girl when it happened, that day when she first saw him and his eyes rested upon her, the moment when – according to Helen, the way she used to tell it when she was a child, as though it were in itself a story for a child – her mother had ‘fallen in love’.
She worked that first summer, Margaret did, for Elizabeth and Callum Sutherland, already quite elderly then, with no sign of any family nearby, just a local girl who came in and helped three times a week – and right at the beginning, when Margaret had only been at the House for a week or so, Elizabeth Sutherland came down with something they would have called ‘women’s trouble’ then. Depression? Menopause? Something more than that, though, that ailed her, made her go deep, deep into herself and all of a sudden the doctor was in the room and telling her, telling Margaret, they would need to inform the son who lived away in London to come back to the House and see her, as he might be the only chance for her now.
So she was the one, Margaret, who telephoned London, to speak to him first.
She, in a way, the one who would bring John home.
For that was unexpected for him, we know.24 That he would have to go back to the House at all … He had never intended it. This, to do with the family’s estrangement and those details of his past that would come out later, that John would tell Margaret when they were alone together. About him and his father, the distance between them that had kept him far away, and how, but for this one telephone call from a woman he’d never met, telling him about his mother, what the doctor had said, he would never want to have to go back and see his father again.
Still, on this occasion he must return: ‘Y
ou have no choice’ was the way Margaret had put it, when she’d spoken to him on the phone. And when he arrived, there she was, the same unknown woman who had called him up unannounced in London … Come to meet him off the train, driving his father’s car to take him back up the grey road to the House where he’d been born.
And so …
Margaret.
Right from the beginning, you could say, she was the one.
Is how the story goes. How Helen heard it from her mother when she was just a little girl. How it continued. How her mother was the reason that John Sutherland came home at all, that first time – for his father would have never called him. A high clear note is how you might describe her, Helen thinks. Like the upper ‘A’ of the scale calls the Piper’s note in,25 her sound arranges all the other sounds around it.
For she was the one, Helen knows, who placed her hand on John’s arm to steady him, as she drove him home up the grey road when he’d never intended to be there, the one who comforted him with her presence that day, when he asked her about his mother: How long did she have? How was she now? This tall stranger beside him in the car, looking straight ahead at the road in front of her but who went to him that night, to his room, the strength of feeling such between them from the moment he first let his eyes rest upon her that there could be no avoiding it …
Margaret.
No wonder it’s thoughts of Margaret coming in to the piobaireachd now, and high and fine.
Like ‘Once upon a time’
With Helen listening to her mother, who is telling her daughter everything, everything.
A great love story beginning.
That Helen might learn for herself through words how the circumstances of her birth may not be so much like other stories she knew, those she had read about or heard, the relationship between two people not as fixed as it was in those stories, or as certain or as known – but that doesn’t change the charge of it, its strength. Doesn’t make it any less true or full or lovely. Doesn’t make it less at all.
And old Mrs Sutherland recovered – of course Helen knew that, she could still remember the old lady from when she was small. The virus had turned out to be some freak illness that passed over quickly, and John returned to London three days after he’d arrived, when it became clear his mother was perfectly well.
Only by then, Helen’s mother and father had been together in the House and not apart for one minute and all night the night before John must leave Margaret the two of them had spent, until morning came, … each other Goodbye.
‘And afterwards?’ Helen would ask, waiting for the next part of the story. ‘What happened next?’
Well, it was a long summer for Margaret that year, she said, with plenty to do in the big House, to take care of the old couple, help Elizabeth get better again, ‘and by the time I went back to see my mother, before starting into the second year at Aberdeen, I knew I was going to have a child.’
And when she told her mother that, Margaret said, her mother had held her in her arms.
‘Just like you and me, Mum?’ Helen asked. She was five years old, six years old.
‘Just like you hold me in your arms?’
‘Just like.’
‘We’ll be fine’ Mary had said. ‘You’ll stay here and I’ll take care of you, and the baby when she comes. Then, when you’re ready, you can go back to university and finish what you’ve started. We’ll get your books sent up, all the study you’re missing out on now – we can work on that together.’
She had held her close.
‘Your granny was strong’ Margaret used to tell Helen. As instruction? Warning? ‘A strong woman who loved me very much.’
‘And yet?’ Helen said, when she was older.
‘And yet …’ her mother replied.
For was it instruction, even so? That strength could carry in it also clear warning? That love could be too strong, judgemental, or nothing more than will?
For what turned from Margaret’s mother’s love? Would want to keep her captive within it?
Something.
And Margaret herself also contained it. The same force of opinion, singularity of purpose. So that when she found herself wanting to see the man again she had been with, to get back to the House, to wait and see if John might come back there … It was no surprise, she knew, that her mother would change towards her, but still she herself could not change. Even though her mother asked her daughter, repeatedly, why? Why would she want to do such a thing? A man who had no interest in her, who’d gone away, why should she maintain any thought for him? If he had nothing to do with her life, her plans? If she couldn’t see him – Why? When she might find someone else she could be with whenever she wanted, Mary said, as she herself had been with Margaret’s father when she wanted – but why must she have to do this other thing, go there to a place where he might return, just stand and wait? Why that? When there were all her plans – her study in Aberdeen, her intentions to go on and teach, to inherit the land and house in Caithness and productively use it, along with her brother, to be independent. Why? She kept saying. Why? Change that now? Why? And all the time, by way of reply to her, Margaret kept her own will. In the midst of her mother’s words. In her own silence. Only thinking about the baby’s father. Keeping him close. Remembering over and over the way they had been together, his face and voice and body. That she might be with him again.
‘I’ll be fine, Mum’ she said to her mother – but her mother wasn’t listening.
Then what happened was this: a letter Margaret had sent to the House, enquiring after the situation there, Elizabeth’s health, was forwarded on to John and a note came back – that his parents would very much like her to return, if she could manage it, to the House that next summer, and if she wanted, stay on. The virus may have passed but still his mother was no longer strong, John wrote, and could not manage the place in the way she used to. Another note was enclosed in the same envelope – Elizabeth writing to say she and old Mr Sutherland needed someone more permanent to help them with the housekeeping, for during the year and also for if their son might come home, if he might bring friends, or just come on his own to stay, the letter hoped, either way, would she consider it?
For that next summer?
It took no time at all for Margaret to respond. And when Helen was born, after a few weeks, she was able to tell her mother of her plans …
To go and work for a while in this House …
That the man she loved there may be returning and she would, this way, see him again …
So would her mother help her, look after Helen until then? Until she was able to see him and they could be together again and decide what they were going to do …
But that was the end.
When her mother, who’d been holding Helen while her daughter spoke, put the baby back in Margaret’s arms.
Walked away into another room.
That the moment …
When she gave everything up. Mary did. As Margaret had – is what she said.
‘Everything!’
And for – what? Her mother blazed at her. Desire? Hope? Some idea, notion, that Margaret might have herself marrying this stranger she’d met for three days, only three days and yet here she is saying she’ll return to him …
That was when Margaret first heard, and from her own mother, that what she’d had with John Sutherland, the two of them together for those scant two nights … Was not love.
With her mother looking at her the way she did.
Speaking to her in the way she did.
Another story beginning when Margaret left her mother’s home for the second time and knew she would never see her mother again.
embellishment/1b: domestic detail: Margaret MacKay
Margaret told Helen, much later, when she was no longer a child, but the two women could talk to each other as women who might understand each other: how that day when she saw her mother’s pitying look, saw that judgement on her face … Was the first time Marga
ret had to consider what she’d gone through the rest of her life considering: that what she had with Helen’s father was not love.
It was a conversation between the two women that might go on for the rest of their lives.
For that idea – that someone who might so occupy your thoughts, who you hold close in your mind in detail and with care … Could be as nothing – was one the two women would return to think about again and again. Like in a story, one may return to a central idea that is never quite resolved, as in a fable or a myth there may seem to be an ending but the ending is not there. So here was a situation that didn’t contain within it a simple solution that may count as conclusion to this piece:26 a man, after all, who Margaret barely saw and yet had thoughts around him wrapped
and with desire, and with care too, for she cared about this man, Helen’s father. So why might not those feelings count as love? Just because she wasn’t with him, wasn’t married to him? Because he didn’t claim her in the outside world? That certain actions and deeds would be necessary, to be in place and carried out, in order to call what was between them love?
These thoughts Margaret had first encountered in her mother’s pitying face and could never let them go.
The ‘Why?’ and the disappointment in her eyes. The things she had said. Looking at her daughter, with pity and with judgement, before she turned and walked away.
Of course Margaret would think about these things, talk about them with her daughter. As the years went on, and she saw Helen’s father again when he returned for his father’s funeral and the two of them were together then but he left soon afterwards, to return the following summer, maybe, and the next and then the next and so on every year until just this last year but always, in the end, going away from her again … It wasn’t as though she knew he was ever going to stay. Is why, over time, she came to consider that Iain’s feelings for her, that were reserved for her alone – his tenderness towards her, his thoughtfulness for her and for her child – that this, by contrast, all added up to something that was real. For in Iain was the strength of habit, familiarity. The three of them, Iain and Margaret and Helen, sitting around the kitchen table every night all those years when Helen was small. Iain driving Helen down the end of the road to catch the school bus each day, Iain wallpapering her room when she was older, the paper with the stars … One by one these days built up to make a home.