by Kirsty Gunn
You took her away …
That song for someone else’s granddaughter, maybe, but she’s Iain’s own child, the way he considers it. So –
You took her away …
But he brought her home again. Iain did. And the notes, though they have that drop, of the shock, of a child who has been taken … Even so the tune has been composed to quiet all the crying.
That, hush.
Hush.
The Lullaby whispers.
As Iain himself sits quietly now.
For in the end, after everything that has happened, a lullaby will soothe. It’s a tune made for calmness, contemplation. Indeed, most musicians will acknowledge that the idea of a lullaby, a set of notes that are intended to bring a still centre to a composition, is at the heart of anything they play or sing or write. No matter how busy the tune may seem to be, how agitated at first, or quickening, so it has always been that the music itself will bring comfort, solace – and though John Sutherland’s lullaby that is annotated so clearly in his ‘Lament for Himself’ is perhaps the first example of this sort of thinking being incorporated within the piobaireachd form, nevertheless at the heart of even the most stately Ceol Mor we hear a soft song.
The earliest printed collection of this kind of music appeared, with no reference at all as to how it may be included within a composition of bagpipe music, in an edition published by a John Forbes in 1662 in Aberdeen. The folio comprised twenty-five old Scottish airs and lullabies, and established at the time a genre of secular music that was disseminated in a range of pamphlets and editions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including The Scots Musical Museum, published in six volumes from 1787 to 1803 by James Johnson and Robert Burns, which also included new works by Burns. The Select Scottish Airs collected by George Thomson and published between 1799 and 1818 included contributions from Burns and Walter Scott.
From then it took several generations of pipers and Highland musicians to identify and highlight the links between the lyrics and tunes of these publications and certain compositions played on the Highland bagpipe. Most recently, following the related discussion around the piobaireachd ‘Lament for Himself’, Helen MacKay of Sutherland has brought attention to the connections between the two in a number of scholarly papers published by Edinburgh University Press entitled ‘The Lullaby as a Feminist Metaphor in Highland Literature – from the Ballad to Neil Gunn’, and has also written about the musical link between the great MacCrimmon piobaireachd ‘Lament for the Children’ and the tradition of song and lullaby that exisited at the time of its composition. Seumus MacNeill, in his book Piobaireachd: Classical Music of the Highland Bagpipe, also establishes the similarity between the sound of the pipes, when expertly played, and the human voice when it is used to sing a song with great emotional and psychological content. The connection between piobaireachd and lyric, sound and poetry, is at its most marked in these passages of his book and come to bear upon the timbre and tone of ‘The Big Music’ itself as a genre that blends together words and music.
embellishment/2a: domestic and social history: Elizabeth Clare Nichol
From that first second when the nurse let her have him to her, to hold, she felt herself to be undone by the strength of feeling for him. Like holding her breath and then forgetting how to let it go is how it seemed, as though physically she was completely changed now that she had this infant in her care. There was nothing else she could do but be a mother to him, feed him, clean him, incline her whole body towards him, as though protecting him from the weather. Think about an animal in the field with its young –
I could lick him clean …
– is how Elizabeth’s instincts came alive for her, with her first and only child in her arms. He was tucked right in beside her, his tiny wrapped body so close against her that he remained part of her, is how she thought of him, attached, a part of herself just as he’d been inside her before, when her body had been his room and cradle and now here he was pulled out of that dark place, maybe, and in the light to look at, but still belonging to somewhere no one but him knew about or could see.
And how she pored over him, Elizabeth, how she couldn’t stop looking into his face, his scowling brow as he slept, changing in seconds to joy and fear and wonder. All the emotions of the world passing over him like weather, then opening his eyes to regard her with a shocked and steady stare. Who are you? His gaze seemed to say then. Where have you come from? Lying there unmoving in a shocked and steady stillness. Or his hands would come up at the side of his face – those tiny hands with their miniature fingers clasping like a bird’s claw, fingernails so miniature they were unimaginable, somehow, even as she took one of his fingers between her own and examined it for size … Unimaginable.
Is why she couldn’t stop looking. As though looking might make him real. And to touch him, hold him … She never wanted to let him go. That first day, after she’d had him against her, the frail weight of him in his blankets … She couldn’t imagine then how she could ever let him out of her sight. Though she must, she knew – would have to give him up to the nurse that day, and those that followed, and when she was fully recovered from the birth … She would have to give him up for longer. Finally, at the end of the day when the maid came for him, she must go back then to the room where her husband was waiting.
And to do that! To have to hand her son over! Leave the nursery where his things were, his tiny clothes and blankets and toys, his ball, his little wooden ship. To have to leave that beautiful place and go to another part of the House, to have to see her tiny boy be taken away by the capable maid who would simply come for him, sweep him up from the crib where he had lain beneath Elizabeth’s gaze, his mother’s gaze, to have him plucked out from his mother’s arms and taken off in a bundle away from her …
To witness him gone from her like that, possessed by another, held in another woman’s arms and not her own and knowing that she could not have him again until morning … And instead to have to go to her husband, to be with him …
All this seemed impossible to her.
When she couldn’t even think of her husband, couldn’t listen to what her husband was saying. Couldn’t reply to him, turn to him when he came up against her when she had no baby with her, the way he wanted her to respond to him, listen to him. The way, later, in the night he expected more of her and more and more when he came at her, when all the time she was thinking of her own baby boy and his soft head, his sweet, sweet little body …
It was unbearable, actually.
To have to live in that other world, where her child was away from her.
Unbearable, she might say, not to have him to bear.
And as time went on that feeling didn’t go away. It stayed with her and strong. Of her husband like a rock that might tether her to the ground but this other light and delicate thing that would have her away, the wonder of him caught in her held breath. The feeling didn’t alter in its strength as the years went on – and she wouldn’t give it up either because she wanted to keep it in her, like a room kept ready for a guest and it would always be there and waiting.
So as John grew taller his mother still wanted to bend him to the shape of her arms. She wanted to have him on her knee for stories and for kisses, though by now he was four years old, five years old, and he was not a baby any more. She’d go into his bedroom and never want to say goodnight, stroking the hair back from his forehead as he talked to her about his day and all his fears, endlessly she would listen to him, looking deep into his face as she had done since the day he was born for all the love she would ever think about or need.
‘My Little Bonnie Boy’ she sang to him in the dark. ‘My Little Darling Johnnie …’
He grew up, though, was taller, louder. She could no longer fit him in her arms. That had been a secret anyway, that she’d done that, had him for so long to hold on to and she knew that if her husband found out she had ever had the boy to her in that way he’d be in a rage against it. By then Ca
llum Sutherland had started his son on the chanter and to make a man of him had him practise two hours a day from when he was six years old. Then he’d have him sent away to school, he told Elizabeth, to be with other boys and in a more disciplined environment was what he needed – but unbelievably his wife managed to hold out against him. It was that same instinct came out of her again, fierce! A quality of love that challenged even her husband then. That the child would not go, she said! That she would not let him! She would teach him herself, she told Callum: in the same way he was tutoring the boy music – well, then, so would she be his teacher here. There was a room unused at the top of the House, under the eaves, and it would make a Schoolroom, she said. She would teach John there, in that little room at the top of the House, and he would learn everything he needed from his mother in that place where his father never went and it was quiet there and gentle with his mother’s ways all about him. Protecting him and caring for him and making him feel safe.
embellishment/2b: domestic history: the Schoolroom at the top of the House
Under the eaves, where the roof slants sharply from top to base and where the floorboards are smooth simple planks laid down from one end to the other, there is a long room with windows at each end where the gables of the House mark its particular shape against the sky.
This is the room known as the Schoolroom, dating back from the 1930s when Elizabeth Sutherland taught her son John there, creating a part of the House that he would associate as a place where just he and his mother would go – this when he was between the ages of seven and eleven, before he was sent away to finish his education in a more formal way and his mother had to let him go.
So it wasn’t for long, then, that the room was used in this way, and after that, too, when Elizabeth for some years taught the local children here, but even so the Schoolroom it has always been called – by any who know the House, who come to visit. For though it has been a long, long time since a child was brought up to this room to sit at a little desk before the blackboard easel, take books from the low shelf beneath the window to copy from or read aloud … Still there are a few decorations in place that marked it as a special place for John, when he was a boy, that held gentle memories for him of time spent with his mother as she went through his lessons. There’s an alphabet chart on the wall, a pinboard that has stuck on it his drawings and painted pictures. And there are a few toys that were always there, that John was allowed to play with when the sums and reading and writing were done – his bat, dusty, in boxes, his wooden ship and his ball.
The room never achieves much light, it must be said, because of its length, and the fact that the windows at each end are north- and south-facing so the sun that gets in there, through the high windows that themselves are long but not large, is not direct but oblique and slanting.
Yet the room is lovely to sit in. Like a museum now, is how it feels, with everything still in place from childhood – the shelf with the books upon it, the armchair where his mother sat to read. There is still some chalk that sits ready at the ledge of the easel where John’s mother would correct his spellings, have him write out times tables and sums. And there are, when you lift up the lid of the desk, paper books inside that have a boy’s handwriting across their pages, dated and signed and with coloured pictures as though the child has just finished the work and run out of the room.
So there are these things in this place, the desk and the easel and the toys, and then down at the other end of the room beneath the north window is a bed that was moved up here when the boy had grown up and was a man. The covers are still on this bed. The sheets beneath the blankets, the same sheets, the pillows are the pillows that have always been used here.
And strange to see. In this room for a boy, that was laid out for a boy with a boy’s needs, a man’s bed. Strange to touch it, sit upon it beneath the cold north light, this bed that was brought up here for a man and a woman to use, when they came to be together, for a few nights every year, but those years went on and on and they came here no longer.
Yet both stories are contained within the same room. The Schoolroom. The Bedroom. A room at the top of the House that has a boy’s desk in it and his toys, and a man’s large and open bed.
three/third paper
John MacKay Sutherland of the Parish of Rogart was the sixth generation of Sutherland pipers that are recorded in local histories and papers as having a role in society as teachers of piobaireachd, as well as being great musicians and composers of that same music. As early as the eighteenth century, as we know from the Taorluath section of ‘The Big Music’, there were versions of a piobaireachd class that took place at the original longhouse that makes up the foundation of The Grey House as it stands today. These were conducted by John Roderick MacKay Sutherland (1736–1793) and by subsequent generations as verified by the dating of certain domestic records and the entry in his book by Angus MacKay of Raasay, who refers to ‘the piping of the Sutherland Family so showes such mastery and fullenesse that it might teach any one who would heare it how to playe’;53 but there is indication, too, that a more informal ‘school’ of piping had been available to those living in the area of Sutherland north-west of Brora long before then, with certain documents54 referring to ‘one schoole that does give lessons in canntaireach, and has always done so; that is provided by one Sutherland, of the Grey Hill that is east of the river Blackewater … and accommodation also there’.
Thereafter, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have more detailed information available regarding the frequency and nature of the various classes and schools that took place in the Grey Longhouse, as it was initially, and afterwards, following the extension and additions to the side and rear of the building. Examples of these classes – dates and duration, details of numbers of pupils etc. can be seen in Appendix 5/iii at the back of this book. A Visitors’ Book kept in archive also includes remarks made by, in the early first half of the twentieth century, George Gunn, John Williamson and, in the second half, Iain MacKay, Roy Gunn and Donald Bain when the Winter Classes of Callum Sutherland were at their height, and of international renown. Thereafter, following his death and an elapse of some years, John MacKay, his son, revived the tradition of The Grey House being a place for music and tuition – particularly in the winter months.
Perhaps the best way to convey the spirit and ethos of those classes that were held in The Grey House and conducted, most famously, by Callum John Sutherland – with a much spoken-of recital that was held outdoors on a certain date in February when it was deemed that the season was turned from winter to spring – would be to reproduce here in full the Foreword from a book on piobaireachd55 that was published anonymously, first as a pamphlet in 1957 as a record of one of these classes and then later as part of the current project. In this piece the writer makes clear his enthusiasm for the tuition and the benefit gained from detailed, concentrated study that took place under one roof, for a consecutive number of days and weeks. The concert, too, held in the cold open air during the scant hours of daylight available in the winter and that was the culmination of such intensive training and learning, is described here with freshness and clarity:
Most had gathered on the first Friday night to hear what we now are all calling ‘The Sutherland lecture’ when Callum Sutherland ‘Himself’ drew comparisons between Gaelic song and Piobaireachd. There can be few with as much knowledge in both spheres, and his words, and fine singing to accompany them, were enjoyed by all. Roy Gunn and Iain MacKay had the unenviable task of striking up and going straight into their Piobaireachd after this address – not a drone to be touched – and both rose to the challenge.
The classes started in earnest on the Saturday morning. ‘Transmission of piobaireachd’ could well have been the theme. In summary, there were talks about John MacKay of Raasay and John MacGregor from Perthshire. Both had key links to the MacCrimmons, and both were central to the onward spread of piobaireachd. There was a presentation by Callum Sutherland of a style
of playing that is almost never heard now, but which was common fifty years ago and that his own father was a great exponent of, that shows how phrasing and a slight sharpening of the high A can create a style of playing that is dramatic and with a powerful effect upon the listener. A subsequent chanter class showed musical ideas being given to two young players, and in the last session two experienced pipers, both from the district, demonstrated the tunes that were to be rehearsed by all for the competition and recital in two weeks’ time, in open air: ‘Lament for the Earl of MacDonald’, ‘I Had a Kiss from the King’s Hand’ and ‘MacKay’s Lament’.
Details of this concert, and others like it, were kept in a special file comprising handwritten or typed sheets of paper with some notes recorded by Callum Sutherland in a form of shorthand collected together in one folder. No doubt there were many nights when John Sutherland would have gone through these papers, playing through the various manuscripts on his chanter and in the order of their representation those tunes that had been selected for the competitions of the past. He would have educated himself, to a large extent, after his years away, by using his father’s papers as instruction and inspiration. For it must have been with a great sense of his inheritance when he came upon these, and other records like them. The papers would have kept him company, you might say, as he got older and sat alone all those nights in the Music Room of his father’s House. The words of his father’s frail notes become as conversations with him he himself might have had.
third return/composition: lullaby; the Little Hut; loneliness
‘Piobaireachd music is difficult for the ordinary person to understand,’ began Archibald Campbell, editor and author of the Kilberry Book of Ceol Mor, in a paper delivered to the Piobaireachd Society of London in 1952. ‘It may never become really popular,’ he went on to say, ‘but there seems to be a feeling nowadays that enough attention is not given to it, and lovers of bagpipe music seem more disposed than they were, to take pleasure in hearing a well-played piobaireachd on a well-tuned pipe.’