by Kirsty Gunn
11 Of course this refers to the significance of the Little Hut – as a hidden and secret place John Sutherland could go to and feel himself there to be in the complete state of physical isolation that he believed matched his psychological state. Yet, as we have seen throughout ‘The Big Music’, the theme of loneliness can also sound out in the most social passages of the book – when John is living in London, say, or hosting house parties – and in this he follows exactly the manner of behaviour and sensibility established by his father before him. Nevertheless, the hut was built to be a place apart from the House and its dichotomies of intimacy and separation, sociability and emptiness. The Little Hut exists apart from all this.
12 As before, this is a cassette recording found at the Little Hut. We hear repeated phrases and some notes and sequences practised over and over – all taken from the line represented in manuscript at the back of ‘The Big Music’ and including the following sequences:
‘F’ to ‘G’
‘F’ to ‘A’
‘F’ to ‘G’
‘E’ to ‘E’
(the final opening bar of the second line that was used in the final composition)
As well as:
‘F’ to ‘G’
‘F’ to ‘G’
‘F’ to ‘G’
‘E’ to ‘E’
And:
‘E’ to ‘G’
‘E’ to ‘G’
‘E’ to ‘G’
‘E’ to ‘E’
(both unused)
13 Also referred to as the little sitting room and the Study, the Music Room is favoured for its intimacy and acoustic – allowing for both chanter and pipe playing, when the door down to the hall can be left open and the piper can go up and down, from the room down the hall and back. It was first established as an important focus in the House by ‘Old John’ Sutherland, John MacKay’s grandfather, who first gave lessons there and called it the Music Room, even though at that point it would have had additional more general use.
14 All the themes above are explored and developed fully in the various pages of the Urlar movement in particular. See especially the following passage taken from p. 5 onwards: ‘For it’s a tune for her, is what it is. The smallest, gentlest song against the broad and mindless hills. He can hear it in his own “Hush”.’
15 This, like other notes not attributed to JMS and often marked NB:, appears in the same computer font and on the same paper stock as many of the pages and inclusions provided by Helen MacKay that were also written by her. The project of organising these files and stories and accounts is, to an extent, ongoing, and only a selection of a large volume of material finally could be used for ‘The Big Music’. The Foreword notes: ‘The more I read into these pages, the more deeply involved I became in their provenance and meaning. Were the sections part of one journal? They appeared to be, a large portion of them – as the reader will come to see – with all of a journal’s quality of the personal, of something direct and urgent that needs to be told. Yet other sections of the file were more like transcripts, or notes for stories, or finished stories, some of them …’ and relates how the pages were placed in sequence, over time, to reflect the shape and structure of the piobaireachd the various pages were referring to throughout. The fragment shown above in this Crunluath A Mach movement of the music indicates something of the process of the pages’ – and inevitably the book’s – composition.
16 It is significant to the structure and theme of ‘The Big Music’ that there is no sequence of notes, no single note even, that has come to represent John Sutherland’s son Callum, named for his father who, though he was christened Roderick John, was always known as Callum. In this there is a kind of absence to the music that reflects, exactly, the relationship between father and son – and indeed, plays back to the relationship between John Sutherland and his own father. The three generations do ‘meet’, however, in ‘Lament for Himself’ in the sense of the use of the singling and doubling variations of the Urlar theme both in the manuscript of the music and in John Sutherland’s perceived meeting with both his father and his son up on the hill: ‘He’s stopped./ Waiting./ For it’s Callum./ It is. It’s Callum there./ And very close./ Up there with the dogs, for they’re his dogs, they’re Callum’s dogs … / Callum./ ‘How are you, boy?’/ And with him … Yes. It’s his father too./ Come up with Callum, he must have, and now they’re both here together, just over that hill./ His father./ His son … Enough to turn the theme.’ The last phrase suggesting how the use of the dithis singling and doubling will ‘lift’ the music, open it out and set it in a broader context outwith the theme of ‘Himself’, prepare the composition for the Taorluath and Crunluath movements that will follow.
17 It is not entirely clear to what notes John is referring here. No doubt he intended to hide the theme of Margaret within ‘Lament for Himself’ as she was hidden in the earlier composition ‘The Return’ – however, as has been noted earlier, the use of the High ‘A’ and its role as a note of confirmation, of statement, in the ‘Lament’, as a note claimed by the piper himself that is also Margaret’s note, suggests that she comes to have a fuller role in this composition than one may have initially expected. Certainly, this is played out in the structure of ‘The Big Music’ itself – in the way Helen MacKay has presented those papers that refer to her mother and her mother’s life as being key to understanding the structure of John Sutherland’s composition. Perhaps it was intended by John himself to have a section of the music that celebrated his coming together with Margaret – by creating a leitmotif to represent a part of the House he always associated with safety and love. It would have been a great thing if he had been able to fully express that in the manuscript – but as it stands, this must be a theme that the music moves around, as do the pages of ‘The Big Music’ move around this love story without ever alighting fully upon it. In the end we must be content with the idea that a certain sequence was in the composer’s mind, even if he was not able to express it. Perhaps we may imagine the sequence as containing the Low and High ‘A’ and the ‘F’, as being three notes with great significance and therefore emerging in a range of ways throughout the composition, bringing together in different patternings the notes of love, lament and return.
18 Various pages and documents sampled in this Crunluath A Mach show the intervention of Helen MacKay in this fashion as one who is piecing together a narrative from these various fragments – here, shown by a separate piece of her notepaper attached by paperclip to John Sutherland’s diary, in other places using Post-It notes, additional computer-written documents stapled to the back of an original file, or inserting handwritten notes into a file that also contains John Sutherland’s original material. In all instances it describes a highly original and intuitive approach to managing and responding to John Sutherland’s work and life. Each of her insertions seems to suggest a question more than an idea for reaching a conclusion. Each is like an opening door. As she writes herself, ‘Perhaps it [i.e. the scrap of paper that has been found] really is where the whole book begins.’
APPENDICES
How to use the Appendices in this book
As noted in the Foreword of ‘The Big Music’, additional material is provided for the reader by way of various appendices and lists of information that relate to various aspects of the story that is being told. This ranges from background notes and a general history of the area of Sutherland in northern Scotland, where John Callum MacKay and his family have lived for generations, to details of the House there and its Piping School as well as information about bagpipes and bagpipe playing generally and its place in this book and in music and in art.
It is by no means necessary to read all or any of this material, it is simply a way in, for those who want to go there, to the landscape and world of ‘The Big Music’ – to indicate the hills at your back or the view that stretches ahead. As the preceding book was a place in which, for a time, you have lived, so may these pages extend its boundaries.<
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Appendix 1: Notes on history/landscape of the North East region
i
Historical geography
In geographical terms, the Highland area refers to the north-west part of Scotland that crosses the mainland in a more or less straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven – with the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire often excluded, as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states ‘You are now in the Highlands’, although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, is also often excluded from the ‘Highland’ definition for the same reason of appearance – although the Hebrides are not. None of these definitions are, however, emotionally based, that is, giving a meaning carrying its own particular truth that can be just as descriptive as geographical precision, and when one refers to the Highlands as part of conversation or in a book or in a song or when pointing the way to a part of the country that feels remote and lost and far away … One is referring to a Highland region that is not so-defined by any geographer’s manual or map. To be high up, on a hill or mountain, surveying the whole empty sweep of the country below you – this is to be in the Highlands. As it is to be in a car or on foot upon a road that twists and turns and thins to the finest thread on an Ordnance Survey map that marks the topmost area of the British mainland … Then you are in the Highlands, too.
Another way the definition of the Highland area differs from the Lowland region is by language and tradition, as there are many Highland regions that have preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after Anglicisation. This has also led to a refining of that cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander that was first noted towards the end of the fourteenth century. Even so, there are many areas in the Highlands where Gaelic is not spoken but a great sense of regional difference prevails nevertheless, a sense of being Highland more to do with manner and way, a certain turn of phrase at times or a weighting and a rhythm in the speech and syntax. These kinds of sentences and attitudes, this sensibility, mean more in Highland terms than the actual language spoken.
Inverness is traditionally regarded as the capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire, which look more to cities such as Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee and Stirling as their commercial centres. Nevertheless the phrase ‘gateway to the Highlands’ is often used in association with Inverness, and the roads that open out from that city take the traveller off and away, to the North, to the West, to the Islands, to the Pentland Sea.
Finally, to add to the complexity of the term ‘Highland’ and its meanings, the Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Even so, ‘Highlands’ is sometimes used as a name for the council area, as in ‘Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service’, and consists of the Highland Council area and the Island Council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. There is much talk as to the use and relevance of these terms and Highland Council signs at the Pass of Drumochter, between Glen Garry and Dalwhinnie, saying ‘Welcome to the Highlands’ are still regarded as controversial. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that whenever any of us say ‘I’m off to the Highlands’ we know what we mean. For though there will always be different definitions in different contexts throughout the region, the emotional resonance referred to earlier that sounds from the word ‘Highland’ will always strike a particular note.
ii
Geology
The Scottish Highlands are largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian land shifts. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the north-west are up to 3,000 million years old and amongst the oldest found anywhere on earth. These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillins of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology that describes when the entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
iii
The North East region
Map showing Highland region in relation to the rest of Scotland
Appendix 2: Local history and geography – Mhorvaig/Luath district
i
General information
The area in which ‘The Big Music’ takes place is in the central region of Sutherland, north-west of the coastal villages of Golspie and Brora, and set inland somewhat from the better-known Helmsdale and Naver and Halladale Straths. This is a remote region, not easily accessed by road, even to this day; nevertheless it is served by a rail link that has a ‘request’ stop that is a forty-minute drive or so to The Grey House.
The map here may be of interest, showing an earlier configuration of the county that is described in ‘The Big Music’, its land mass in relation to the rest of Scotland.
Today, Sutherland is within the Highland local government area, the regions of which sit well outwith that represented here and which in Gaelic is referred to according to its traditional areas: Dùthaich ‘Ic Aoidh (NW), Asainte (Assynt) and Cataibh (East). However, Cataibh can often be heard used as referring to the area as a whole.
The county town, and only burgh of the county, is Dornoch. Other settlements include Bonar Bridge, Lairg, Brora, Durness, Embo, Tongue, Golspie, Helmsdale, Lochinver, Scourie and Kinlochbervie. The population of the county as at the most recent census was 13,466.
The name ‘Sutherland’ dates from the era of Norse rule and settlement over much of the Highlands and Islands, which is why, though it contains some of the northernmost land in the island of Great Britain, it was called Suth-r-Land (‘southern land’) from the standpoint of Orkney and Caithness and those lands further north.
The north-west corner of the county, traditionally known as the Province of Strathnaver, was not incorporated into Sutherland until 1601. This was the home of the powerful and warlike Clan MacKay that had connections in those earlier times to the Sutherland family of ‘The Big Music’. Even today this part of the county is known as MacKay Country, and, unlike other areas of Scotland where the names traditionally associated with the area have become diluted, there is still a preponderance of MacKays in the region and nearby, settling further east through marriage, into the interior of Sutherland.
As well as Caithness to the north and east, Sutherland has the North Sea (Moray Firth) coastline in the east, the historic county of Ross and Cromarty to the south, and the Atlantic coastline in the west and north. Like its southern neighbour, Wester Ross, the county has some of the most dramatic scenery in the whole of Europe, and for the purposes of this book it should be noted that the great hills of Mhorvaig and Luath have come to dominate the central strath, the so-called ‘corridor’ through which the sheep were driven in the early nineteenth century and so became the place where the Sutherland family of ‘The Big Music’ established themselves. The emptiness and sense of isolation in this part of Sutherland is acute – more so, even, than in the neighbouring straths of the North East – which no doubt is part of the reaso
n, after a long period of habitation in the area by the same family, the land was initially let over to the first John Roderick MacKay of ‘Grey Longhouse’ as recorded in the Taorluath section of the book, and then subsequently claimed as his own by his son’s son for the family to therefore inherit. Mhorvaig and Luath are the two hills that most dominate this area of the landscape, side by side as they are, set into the hills around them, to the left-hand side of the strath and what is now called The Grey House.
So this part of the world is remote enough. Despite being Scotland’s fifth-largest historic county, it has a smaller population than a medium-size Lowland Scottish town even though it stretches from the Atlantic in the west, up to the Pentland Firth and across to the North Sea. As would be expected, much of the population is based in seaward towns, leaving large swathes of the inner portions of the land utterly uninhabited – or where there are small settlements they are quiet and during the day can scarcely be seen from a distance against the grey-green land and at night lit just enough to show themselves as pinpricks against the endless dark.
And those hills of Mhorvaig and Luath? It’s where this book begins: with these hills and the other hills all around them, sitting as they do against the sky and not changing but for the shapes of clouds upon their sides or the runs of water that flood them in the spring melts or at times of heavy rain. ‘The hills only come back the same’, remember? The first line of this book. As it is also its conclusion.