The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  John Sutherland took note of these words, it seems. He must have attended the meeting of the Society that night – despite having left The Grey House and his father behind him and with no intention in the world of picking up his own pipes again – for scribbled in a notebook that was found in his Little Hut up in the hills is the following: ‘spoke to AC afterwards about my father. Asked after him –’ and then appears in a margin the phrase ‘agree entirely re. human voice’, followed by something else at the bottom of the page that has been scored out. The paper delivered by Campbell appears in more detail in gracenotes that embellish the Crunluath movement of ‘The Big Music’ and will follow in due course. For now it is enough to note the lonely tone of that opening remark of his that appears in John’s stained and worn jotter, the words copied onto his page: Difficult music to understand.

  ‘This difficulty must be recognised,’ Campbell goes on, ‘and in learning piobaireachd what will matter most will not be the time spent on it on a chanter but the hours spent turning it over in your mind note by note and thinking how you lengthen one note here and shorten another there, or quicken up a little in one variation, or slow down in another. Many of the piobaireachds which we play nowadays have words attached to them. Angus MacKay gives some in his book but it is not always easy to fit the words exactly to the notes of the piobaireachd ground. This fact seems to indicate that what we now know as a piobaireachd was at one time known in somewhat different form as a song.’

  These remarks appear here because they seem to describe so aptly the various elements of the particular piobaireachd that is John Sutherland’s ‘Lament for Himself’, containing within it those themes of song, abandonment and loneliness that are captured in the metaphors of the Lullaby and the stolen child, the open hills exposed to the weather and the secret sheltering place hidden within them, and the end of life and the inevitable hope for life’s return, as imagined in the image of the newborn baby held in the arms of an old man who is dying.

  These musical ideas that come together in the Lullaby Sutherland hears as the second line of his Urlar, music that has already been written down and is safe on the desk in the Little Hut up in the hills, could only have been brought together in a place he’d created himself to be as lonely and as far away from others as he was. The meaning of that Lullaby, along with themes of breathing, of remembering, of holding on, just, to the condition of living, that are also captured within the sound of his Lament, as well as notes of exultation, of hope, of defiance, only comes to be understood by him following, not during, his composition. As far as John Sutherland was concerned – and as we know by now in ‘The Big Music’ – his piobaireachd was left, in manuscript, unfinished.

  three/third paper (cont.)

  ‘The Big Music’ has already given something of the history of John MacKay Sutherland, in terms of his business activities and musical endeavours – in relation to his taking leave of and then returning to The Grey House. There is, too, an understanding of how John MacKay came back to the music of his father after a period of time away, rejecting the pipes and all they stood for – principally isolation, misunderstanding, a lonely kind of wilfulness – and embraced those qualities fully. Even the way he came to establish his home to be a place of teaching, giving up aspects of a private life for a public one, making of his home a School … These indicate how close John Sutherland was to the family who had preceded him, his father, and his father before him and before him. For in all of these representations of music and of education and of art there is loneliness that sounds out as a kind of silence in all the activities, in the midst of the lessons and the recitals and the competitions. A loneliness that some might describe as a quality of mind that won’t let anyone in, come close. A loneliness that may be described as a quality of heart that can’t admit love.

  Of course, in John MacKay’s case, as with his son Callum Sutherland, recently returned to The Grey House himself, it is unknown whether or not it is the quality of the music itself – ‘difficult to understand’56 – that contributes towards this state of mind or whether it was fixed in the men by birthright. Either way, there can be no doubt that a certain kind of individual emerges here, in these pages. He is present in the room’s laughter and brightness, but also he is far away.

  There is no doubt, from all records and accounts that are available to us, that the family home of the Sutherlands – whether in its earliest configuration as a simple longhouse or later, by John Sutherland’s father’s day, as a large establishment fully set up to accommodate twenty people at a time, with rooms for entertaining and dining, for recitals and competitions and so on – had always been used as a centre for music. Nothing lonely about that, one might say – to have a home that invites people in. And no doubt there was a great deal of enjoyment to be had, much entertainment along with the seriousness of study of musicianship – so how can one describe silence in the midst of all that, laughter and music and whisky, and the lamps lit and no sense ever that morning might come?

  And yet …

  There sits Callum Sutherland at the fireside, his wife silent beside him.

  There sits his son, in his favourite chair.

  And they are in the same room where, not that long ago, there were parties and conversation.

  It’s the same House, the same room.57

  ‘One night we had nothing but conversation’ reports one visitor, recounting an evening with Callum Sutherland and a group of wellknown pipers, in a radio programme that was produced for the popular BBC series PipeLines. ‘None of us played at all – but it was of instruction, to our playing, to hear what was said, and interesting in its own right, and of course great fun.’

  Another instalment of the same programme and we hear this: ‘On a visit to Raasay last year Iain MacKay told us he stopped for a rest to look in the graveyard, where he was excited to find the grave of John MacKay of Raasay, father of Angus MacKay. The tombstone describes the contribution John MacKay made to the furtherance of piobaireachd. He took out paper and made a rubbing of the inscription and decided to gift it, then and there, to Johnnie Sutherland and we had to raise our glasses to that. But he went on to tell us, on a more serious note, that he believes that there’s a connection between the Raasay MacKays and the MacKays of Gairloch. This is something his own grandfather used to talk about, and he’s researching this now, at the College in Glasgow.’

  ‘Then there was the fact of my discovery in the National Library of Scotland’ says another contributor to the same programme. ‘I found papers telling of the pipers of the Breadalbane Fencibles, with particular emphasis on John MacGregor. The Fencibles began recruiting in 1793 – and John wasn’t too keen to join as he didn’t have a bagpipe. Perhaps the incentive to him of having the regimental pipes to play, together with the promise of adding land to the family smallholding, was enough to persuade him. In any event he soon had his own pipes and took them straight to the Sutherland family of Rogart, to have them seasoned and treated. He went on to win the prize pipe at the Highland Society competition that year.’

  A further programme introduced an American piper, Jim Brown, who had attended several years of the Winter Classes in succession, and considered himself something of a regular on these nights that would go ‘well on into the small hours!’ He talks of one evening when he remembered his Highland grandfather, a piper from Gairloch, saying that his father often said that the old pipers in Scotland all played almost in the same way except for preferential differences and he then finished with a quotation by Duke Ellington – ‘If it sounds good, it is good.’ ‘They laughed at that, some of these guys that didn’t know what jazz was, let alone the Duke! They’d been so deep in their chanter practice all their lives they had no idea what I was talking about! But of course seriousness was at the heart of my remark, too. Because that’s my litmus test’ he finishes by saying. ‘If it sounds good – then no matter what you’re adding and taking away in rhythm and phrasing, and so on – it is good. That and a perfectly – a
nd I mean perfectly – tuned pipe, of course!’

  Another transcript has John ‘Bobby’ Bain remembering a Big Night with Callum Sutherland presiding at The Grey House, in November 1968. It is the same Music Room where later John Sutherland would describe his father and his mother sitting in the evenings, in the line: ‘I’ll not come back to crouch at their cold fireside!’ Yet how hard it is to imagine cold and quiet, that sort of solitary life, in the following piece. The interviewer is David Graham, a young piping student of the time who was compiling a programme 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. It was as though the tune had been made to be played right then, by him, I mean, 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, after that was played, the next one got up then, and played, and the next – we all got up – just 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, we were roaring! For 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 that 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.

  And here is Roy Gunn remembering classes with Callum Sutherland, conducted in The Grey House over four consecutive winters, 1953–56, appearing in a later programme also compiled by David Graham.

  RG: Well, he was just a great teacher, and that’s all there is to it. He had a natural instinct, for what was right, how a tune should be approached. I remember I went to him – this was one of my first lessons with him, you understand – and I had a tune, oh I thought I could play this tune. It was ‘Lament for the Viscount of Dundee’. And I got up, and I started to play and he sat there for a minute or two and then he just put up his hand. I stopped, of course, straight away – but he said as gently as anything: ‘We’ll just set that tune aside for the time being, Roy.’ That was his way, you see. Not to say anything critical at this point. I was a young man, I suppose I was a bit nervous – those first lessons with him. But he was gentle. He had a nice way with him. That’s not what his son said, of course. His son has another version altogether, and never took instruction from him. I understand he left home quite young. That was something we young fellows couldn’t get over. That you might have a teacher like Callum Sutherland and he’d be your father as well. Because that would be something. That would really be something.

  And Roy finishing with: ‘That House of the Sutherlands, what an atmosphere it had. Full of people, and music – is how I remember it. A real piping school atmosphere to it that made us all think of those great schools of the past, and what it must have been like then.’

  gracenotes/piobaireachd: the history of its teaching, the MacCrimmons

  The history of schools of piping in the Highlands of Scotland begins with the famous ‘Piping College’ of the MacCrimmons, who were musicians, composers, teachers and pipers to the chiefs of Clan MacLeod for an unknown number of generations. The College, as we know by now, was established at Boreraig near the Clan MacLeod seat at Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye and was famous from at least the sixteenth century onwards – and probably earlier – as a centre at which young men could be taught and trained in the art of piobaireachd.

  The College was like any university college of the time in that it provided billeting and provision as well as tuition, and pupils’ period of residency went for a year or more before they were deemed fully educated in musicianship and could leave.

  Records are provided from the seventeenth century on that give indication of the arrangements made for young men – much the same as we may read for those entering Glasgow or Oxford or any of the great universities of the time. See the following notes by way of example.

  An order from John Campbell, Earl of Breadalbane to his chamberlain, Campbell of Barcaldine, reads: ‘Give McIntyre ye pyper fforty pounds scots as his prentices with McCrooman till May nixt as also provyde him in what Cloths he needs and dispatch him immediately to the Isles.’ The order seems to relate to a statement written by the mentioned Earl of Breadalbane on 22 April 1697 at Taymouth in Perthshire: ‘Item paid to quantiliane McCraingie McLeans pyper for one complete year as prentyce fie for the Litle pyper before he was sent to McCrooman, the soume of £160’ (modern translation: ‘Item, paid to Conduiligh Mac Frangaich [Rankin], MacLean’s piper, for one complete year, as apprentice fee for the Little Piper before he [the Little Piper] was sent to MacCrimmon, the sum of £160’). The MacCrimmon instructor that is referred to may well be Padraig Og.58

  The College was closed and the teaching finished with the Proscription Acts of the eighteenth century – which also brought about the beginning of the end of the great MacCrimmon dynasty of musicianship. However, the idea of the place lives on in pipers’ minds to the present day and, as various pages in ‘The Big Music’ indicate, provided the ‘blueprint’ for piping schools that were set up, at first secretly, throughout the Highlands, and then more openly, in the West, in particular, and in the North East where the classes of the Sutherland family had become well established, right up to the present day when certain schools of piping have national status – such as the Army School of Piping in Edinburgh and the National College of Piping in Glasgow.

  Certainly, the sense of history that attends the teaching of piobaireachd in Scot
land today is what gives it its special place in musical education. Here is the idea of a music school that was established before any known music schools were founded in the United Kingdom and it was a school run according to its own strict principles and beliefs. To the present day – whether piobaireachd is being taught in a one-on-one class or in a tutorial at a festival or in one of the many classes available throughout the world – the memory of the College at Boreraig, set amongst the rocks with the sound of the sea and the wheeling gulls overhead … And at its centre the teachers who represented the pinnacle of a musical tradition that was being passed down, from generation to generation … This is carried in the minds of all pipers everywhere, old and young.

  three/third paper (cont.)

  The following information indicates John Callum MacKay’s position in his father’s family as only son, bearing his father’s name, and his role as husband, father – as well as giving some details regarding his endeavours and education. It may be noted that there is also a section devoted to domestic life and the history of the Sutherland family in relevant Appendices at the back of this book – but for now, here is how the life stands at the time of ‘The Big Music’. Here is John Callum MacKay Sutherland, of The Grey House, Brora region, Highlands of Scotland, presented, at the end of his life, by way of a history: the boy who left, the man who returned.

  1923: Born to John and Elizabeth Sutherland of The Grey House, Mhorvaig, Sutherland. Mother: Elizabeth Clare Nichol; Father: John Callum Sutherland