by Kirsty Gunn
The strength of his father, his will, the detail and personality that sounded through in all his possessions – perhaps these qualities were behind John’s need to create for himself another place that would sit away from the House, and so be apart from the intricacies and influence of his father’s scholarship and musicianship. Perhaps. It could have been that simple, individual need that took him up to the hills to find the certain crevice in the land which would be unseen unless you knew where to go, that was flat enough, with the ruin of an old bothy on it, to build for himself a little shelter and be alone there, collect his own papers and materials and keep them somewhere that would be nothing to do with his father’s tiny detailed writing and his priceless books. It would be somewhere that could be his alone, a place he would make for himself, where John need not feel, to quote his own remark in the Times interview, that his musical inheritance had come to him ‘to his cost’. And who knows how long it took? To find the site in that hidden valley beside the water? To take the materials up there he would need, piece by piece, and quietly build up for himself four walls, a roof? How long to fit out his shelter and carry up there a chair first, a desk? Piece by piece. Item by item. Tune by tune. Yet he did all of this. Because then the Little Hut, as he always called it, in his books and notes – ‘TLH’ is the mark at the bottom of so many of his papers48 – became the way John Sutherland could create his own part of the world that might sit outside everything else that was in it. The Little Hut would be a place that would be his alone.49
All this to describe how John Sutherland came back, one might say, in these particular ways – to do with finding for himself the qualities of his father’s music, the wealth of it kept there in the House – to embrace all the things he’d left behind him. Not arriving to wait for a crowd of London friends to follow, but setting up the Music Room to be used again as his father had used it, to sit alone in there and go through the various manuscripts and to be playing from them. While not wanting to repeat his father’s habits, either – for he would never be like him, the great teacher and scholar, he could never be that disciplined or as pure. Rather, he came to find in the music certain passages that would start him thinking how he could develop his own sense of playing, an idea of a variation, say, presenting to him as the beginnings of a tune he might develop – and taking pleasure from this, a growing understanding of what his own music might sound like, what it would be.
So nothing like his father, then, he could still think! Nothing like!
Though he was in the Music Room all the same, and playing the same tunes according to his father’s markings, and over and over. And how would his father ever have guessed that one day his son might do that, look so clearly at his work, be so close to it – the child who was never good enough, who felt the sting of the flex across his knuckles, across the back of his legs, the strike of the cuff against his face when he made as much as even one mistake.
Yet now here he was, playing in his father’s room.
And so friends might have still been coming to the House, but only rarely and they were different friends, sons of his father’s friends, some of them, so pipers, and from the college in Glasgow, in Edinburgh – because it was the music they’d be coming for now, like in the old days. His father’s days. And there’d be parties, maybe, but parties because of the music they were playing. Up most of the night some nights, through to dawn those summers. John here like an owner of the place, as though he’d always been here, in time bringing his own son with him and with every year it seemed to him there were more reasons to stay. More to learn about, to think about. The old tunes, though. Only the old tunes in the House.
His own music – that was for the little place in the hills. The only place where he could think about the other music, that sound that started in his own head, and tried to complete there. In the Little Hut that was his, and his alone.
He thought.
When love went off or tenderness hardened into something no more than gesture – then, well, ‘Aye’. He had this. His own composition. No one else could have it, this secret part of himself he owned in a place that was, like himself, shut away and utterly unknown. It was somewhere he could ignore who he’d become, the things he’d lied about and never done. A place where he had no wife or son or lover or anyone in the past that he might remember – but one person. Only Margaret. As though she was a music of her own, exisiting outside the whole, the markings and patternings of his mind, her own note. As though there was something in that note that he needed and that he could hear through all the others, but had never been able to reach, a note he’d never let himself fully play …
Margaret.
Because what if he did play it? That note? What if he, just once, had played it? Just once and pure and true?
Though he’d written her a tune that would be her own tune and he called it ‘The Return’ and secretly to himself ‘Margaret’s Song’ …50
He’d ended up with only Himself here. In the little shelter in the hills.
The place that he thought was his alone.
gracenotes/piobaireachd: the Little Hut as a place of composition; also the history of the House as a school
The Little Hut, as we have already seen, represents a separate musical context for John MacKay Sutherland. The Music Room in The Grey House is associated with the story of his musical genealogy – of his father’s work, and his father’s before him, that in many respects goes all the way back to the musical nights of the original Grey Longhouse of the eighteenth century – but the Little Hut belongs to him alone.
It was for the very reason of his father – the heft and weight of his memory and influence that was always present in the House – that it became necessary for John to establish his own creative space. To quote from the variation that has just preceded this passage and other papers not used in that section: ‘While not wanting to repeat his father’s habits … Though he was in the Music Room all the time and playing the same tunes according to his father’s markings over and over … Nevertheless thinking about his own music by then, that he might do something that felt he did not have to acknowledge his father, that might be his own endeavour. Thinking how, if he was to make something new, something that might come from himself, he would need to be away from his father, from the memory of that man, the thoughts of what he would say, if he was alive, about his son’s own work, these compositions of his that were new, nothing like Callum Sutherland’s work at all.’
In part, the reason the Little Hut may have represented such freedom for John MacKay was due to the fact that it was not related to the idea of a musical school at all. Unlike his family home that had always been used this way, as a place of piobaireachd education and tuition, the Little Hut had no history, no credited past. To his mind, John Sutherland was the only person who knew about it, and in this sense it was more private to him, even, than the room at the top of the House where he and Margaret used to spend their nights together. That room, after all, had a history associated with it. His mother gave him lessons there when he was a child, and later, as is detailed in this same movement of ‘The Big Music’ and in relevant papers, it also, for a number of consecutive years, became a Schoolroom for local children.
The little cabin or ‘bothy’51 that John built for himself in the hills, though, was altogether different, with the atmosphere of classes, tuition and performance as far removed from the ethos of the building as could be.
As has been noted already in the Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’, the Sutherland Family of The Grey House district were renowned since the early eighteenth century as musicians who had established a form of teaching that became well known, from that time on, throughout the district and beyond (latterly referred to as ‘The Highland School of Piping’) when local pipers were invited to stay at the Grey Longhouse, as it was then, for weeks at a time, through the Winter Solstice so they could play and perfect their playing under the tutelage of John Roderick Sutherland.
Ove
r the years, with ensuing generations, these classes became formalised by the time of John Callum MacKay (‘Old John’) and were advertised, to an extent, throughout Scotland as The Grey House was extended. There were built lodgings and outhouses to accommodate pupils who would arrive in October through to January, to take advantage of the expertise of the generations of pipers that followed the time of the MacCrimmons – from ‘Old John’s classes through to what became officially known as ‘The Grey House Winter Classes’, conducted by the father of the John MacKay Sutherland whose story is featured in ‘The Big Music’.
John MacKay himself had classes, of sorts, conducted by himself and other pipers whom he’d invited to the House – this, after he began returning to Sutherland on a regular basis and some years after his mother’s death, when his guests were no longer the usual band of friends from London but those he knew who were connected with the piping world, past pupils of his father and their sons, members of various societies and schools. The Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’, in particular, describes how, when he left the House as a young man vowing to ‘never return!’, John Sutherland would have had no idea that not even half his life would pass before he went back and took up his father’s place in this way. But take it up he did. In fact, in those intervening years, after his mother’s death and before the onset of his own age and ill health, the atmosphere at The Grey House often seemed to resemble, almost entirely, those old days of the past. Though Iain Cowie would not have said so. By contrast, he remains faithful to the purist memory of Callum Sutherland as conducting his lessons in a very formal, concentrated manner. Though he is no piper himself, Iain would say that as far as he was concerned, the so-called ‘classes’ of John’s were more social in aspect, less dignified. But this can all be argued either way, and Iain, as we have already seen, had a great deal of time, one might say love, for the older man and would always think the way in which Callum Sutherland did a thing was the best way. Nevertheless, it is on record, by various pupils and teachers who attended John Sutherland’s own Winter Classes and who remembered the old days,52 that when there was a party of invited musicians in, the House really did seem to belong to another age – with John tutoring the young men who would arrive for a week’s playing and then conducting a series of performances on the Saturday evening accompanied by many a good dram. Those nights were festive indeed and most convivial.
insert/John Callum MacKay Sutherland
So he could be alone there. It was why he wanted it. As somewhere to go to, where he could be private. As though the House was not enough – even though by the end the House was private enough. But he was ill by the end, and tired. But even so – he managed it, didn’t he? To get up there to the private place?
He did. And nothing there ever interfered with his thinking. He could write there. He could listen to the notes that made patterns on the page before him. He could sit at the table and look out across the water. And still nothing to interfere there, nothing. With no memory of a father or anyone else – because this was his own secret place. A secret. Somewhere he found out that there was much, much more in the music than he’d thought when he started, that more of him lived there, within the music’s lines and phrases of that small shelter, than in all the places he had lived elsewhere, in the world, in the world.
For the world …
That was outside and in here he was alone and true.
Back in the House, well … It was as it had always been. He may have started off inviting his London friends, he’d invited those kinds of people then, and there’d been fishing, sometimes in season they’d taken out the guns … But, when he looks back, he can see how quickly those times were over, how short and thin the days. Much better that he had different people who were coming to the House after that, sons of his father’s friends, some of them, so pipers, and some from the colleges, in Glasgow, in Edinburgh. Because it was all music they were coming for now, like in the old days, his father’s days. And so there’d be parties, maybe, but parties because of the music. Up most of the night some nights. Through to dawn those summers. And John here like an owner of the place, surrounded by people like his father used to be. The teacher. The host. As though he’d always been here – ‘Welcome!’ ‘Come in!’
As though …
But not quite.
For though there was more to learn about the music, always more … And pipers to arrive and pupils to teach, the tradition of the Sutherlands unbroken … It was always only ever the old tunes. Only the old tunes in the House.
His own music – the thing that started in his head – that was for the other place.
Where he was completely alone.
narrative/5
The people at the House and what they thought of him
Iain
She’s like his own daughter. She is his daughter. He won’t think about the other – what went on, about anything else. She’s Margaret’s child, that’s all he needs to know.
Says: ‘She’s my girl.’
And today … With him on his last legs … And after all that business, up on the hill …
She showed what stuff she’s made of. Having the son back here as well and she hasn’t seen him since they were kids – and after everything she’d been through with the baby the day before, the way the old fool had her off with him and everyone thought she was lost …
‘Well, she showed us all’ Iain said to Margaret that night.
‘My girl.’
And there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to help her if he could – just like her lovely mother.
For he cares for them both, he’s the man at the ceremony who said, ‘I do.’
So of course there is nothing he wouldn’t do – even let them go as he’s had to, God knows he’s had to stand by while …
Though neither of them, not the father nor the son, deserve them …
Deserve Margaret.
Deserve Helen.
All he has to do is say their names.
Margaret
Helen was doing fine with her, who said you needed a husband anyway, with a baby? That’s what Helen herself said: ‘You taught me that, Mum.’
So, all through her pregnancy – saying to me, Iain, anyone else who asked her, pretty much the same thing: ‘I’m fine.’ She spoke of her independence – and she’s always been a strong girl – would say that independence and strength, these qualities, were the most important in a parent. How she sounds like my own mother that way! Saying that she didn’t need a partner. That she would be fine. That she would manage, absolutely, on her own.
I came to see it, too. Thought then and now: She’ll be okay. I said to her, ‘Well, I was on my own, too, when I was younger than you are and without my mother to help me.’ And Helen told me that she had always had that image in her mind, from when she was a child, of a mother raising children alone, that it came from the stories I used to tell her when she was a little girl. So. Of course. It all adds up. That she would follow to a pattern somehow, from me, my own mother. And the thing is, in her case, like my mother did, she has a mother to help. Because I am always here. And our dear little Katherine. For Iain and me … She’s a gift.
gracenotes/piobaireachd and lullaby; a husband’s understanding
Fathers and mothers all over the world sing their babies to sleep with songs that have been composed especially to calm and soothe and mollify. These songs are well known and even someone like Iain Cowie – to whom no lullaby was ever sung – would be familiar with certain tunes, certain words. Iain has heard his wife Margaret sing to Helen those quiet songs that he could hum to himself when he’s alone. Indeed, the pale lovely strain of something that Margaret used to sing to Helen when she was small … It’s playing in his mind now and soothing him.
And Helen – the child he has always considered to be his own child … She sings to her own daughter in the same way. Sings the same old songs, folk songs you might call them. And some of these, too, Iain knows, though some of them are new.
Certainly a different kind of lullaby has been an important theme of this book. It was there in the second line of the Urlar and has emerged as a developing musical idea throughout the piobaireachd ‘Lament for Himself’.