WITH AN EAR TO THE DRONE.
“What needs there be sae great a fraise
Wi’ dringing, dull, Italian lays;
I wadna gie our ain strathspeys
For half a hunder score o’ them;
They’re dowf and dowie at the best,
Dowf and dowie, dowf and dowie,
Dowf and dowie at the best,
[Wi’ a’ their variorum;]
[They’re dowf and dowie at the best,]
Their _allegros_ an’ a’ the rest.
They canna please a Scottish taste
Compared with Tullochgorum.”
Dr. Johnson—Inspiration of Scottish music—Professor Blackie—Highland
music simple—Scottish airs once Highland—Age of Highland music—
Capability of the bagpipe—How it has suffered—Peculiarities of the
pibroch—Pipe music not fitted for inside—How it troubled the
pressman—Chevalier Neukomm—Professor Blackie again—A Chicago jury’s
opinion—An ode to the pipes.
Dr. Johnson, who was in several ways a bundle of contradictions, found
at least one thing in Scotland that he enjoyed. When on his tour through
the Hebrides, he was on various occasions entertained by the bagpipe
music of his host’s piper, and he liked nothing better than to stand
behind the performer and hold the big drone close to his ear while the
instrument was in full blast. He was not so affected as some of his
country men and women nowadays, who say the sound of the drone is
unpleasant, forgetting, or ignorant of, the fact that it is simply the
bass A of their fine church organs sounded continuously by a reed on a
wind instrument. But to them the organ is refined and represents
culture, while the bagpipe is the barbarous instrument of a barbarous
people, whose chief end is to act as custodians of a part of the country
that provides good sport after the Twelfth, but is best forgotten all
the rest of the year. So they scoff at the national music and the
national instrument of Scotland, with the spirit of prejudice, half
affected, half real, which induces John Bull to deny his neighbour north
of the Tweed the possession of any good thing. And besides, as Gilbert
says:—
“A Sassenach chief may be bonnily built,
Wear a sporran, a hose (!) a dirk and a kilt;
He may in fact stride in an acre of stripes,
But he cannot assume an affection for pipes.”
The Scots were always a musical people. Their national airs, if nothing
else, prove this. But music to Scotsmen, still more to Highlanders, was
always more than music; it was something which inspired and intensified
all their thoughts, and, combined with the impassioned lays of the
bards, was to them their principal intellectual food. The bards, whether
leading their countrymen with naked bodies and bared broadswords,
against their foes, or reciting in the festive hall, endeavoured by
means of the choicest language, wedded to the tenderest and boldest
music, to impart to their listeners all that was noble and heroic. With
harp and voice they poured forth music and words that stirred the very
depths of courage and fervour in the enthusiastic nature of the Gaels.
And the music which they composed was, like the people, rugged but
whole-hearted, “the music of the great bens, the mysterious valleys, and
of deep crying unto deep,” a music which showed that the people who
could live on it were not a people of sordid and sensual tastes, but a
people who were by nature and circumstances fitted to appreciate the
grand, the awe-inspiring, and the true. They traversed daily a country
of the wildest and most diversified scenery, mountains and forests and
lochs, their minds partook of the sublimity of their surroundings; they
mused continually with glowing imagination on the deeds of their
forefathers and their own exploits, and the music to whose rhythm they
were bred was but the reflex of their character and life. “That is what
makes all your Celtic music so good,” wrote Professor Blackie. “It is
all so real; not tricked up for show, but growing out of a living root.”
Highland music was always different from Lowland, in that it was based
largely on memories of the past, and connected by undying tradition with
events that had left their impress on the country or the clan. It was
always simple and unaffected, and the Highlander always preferred the
simple strains of his countrywomen and the grandeur of the pipes in
their native glens to the finest opera. Besides he liked variety, as the
existence of marches, pibrochs, quicksteps, laments, reels, jigs, and
strathspeys testify, and he was equally at home with the grave, the gay,
or the melancholy. The melancholy, however, was the predominating note.
One can recognise a Gaelic air among a thousand. Quaint and pathetic, it
moves on with the most singular intervals, the movement self-contained
and impressive, especially to the Celt.
Scottish music as it now exists has been derived largely from the
Highlands. No man did more to acclimatise Celtic music in the Lowlands
than Burns. By wedding Highland airs to his own incomparable poetry he
gave them a new lease of life, albeit he helped to destroy them under
their old names while preserving them under the new. The music of “Scots
Wha Hae,” “Boy’s Wife,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Of a’ the Airts,” and “Ye
Banks and Braes,” has no counterpart across the Border or among the
Saxon race. It is the ancient inheritance of the Celt, made national by
the genius of a national poet.
The age of Highland music is another guarantee of its excellence. It has
stood the test of time, the severest of all ordeals. We have not much
English poetry which can, with any certainty, be ascribed to a date
earlier than the time of Chaucer, but the Scots were celebrated for
musical genius since the beginning of history, genius which, an early
historian says, could not be found elsewhere on this side of the Alps.
We have, for instance, a “Song of the Druids,” though, to tell the
truth, we cannot prove its Druidical origin; we have “Somerled’s
Lament,” composed on an event which took place in 1164, though not
necessarily at that date; we have a piece of pipe music composed in the
middle of the battle of Inverlochy in 1427; the “Rout of Glenfruin,”
which refers to a desperate engagement between the Mac Gregors and the
Colquhouns in 1602; and a “March to the Battle of Inverlochy,” and “The
Clans’ Gathering;” both composed on the battle fought at Inverlochy in
1645. These do not prove that the pipes themselves were capable at that
time of rendering such music, but they prove that the music existed.
There are some pipe tunes—_Cogadh na Sith_ and _A Ghlas Mheur_—for
instance, so ancient that their origin cannot be traced, but they have,
by means of their own merits, and in spite of the want of the printing
press, lived all through the centuries. In the beginning of the twelfth
century, Giraldus Cambrensis said of the music of the Irish Celts that
it was above that of any nation he had ever known, and in the opinion of
many, Scotland at that time far surpassed Ireland, even while her people
were sunk in misery and barbarism.
As to the question whether people of good musical taste can appreciate
the music of the great Highland bagpipe, it is a fact that people who
have the keenest appreciation and intense enjoyment of the music of such
composers as Mozart and Handel, of the great singers and great
musicians, can at the same time enjoy a pibroch or a strathspey when
played by a master hand. Mendelssohn on his visit to the Highlands was
favourably impressed by the pibroch, and introduced a portion into one
of his finest compositions. The pibrochs are remarkable productions; all
the more remarkable that they were composed by men who, we may safely
assume, were of an humble class, and not blessed in any way with the
advantages of education—least of all with those of a musical education.
The great Highland bagpipe is not fitted for executing all kinds, or
even many kinds of music. Its compass is only nine notes, from G second
time treble clef to A, first ledger line above clef. The scale may be
called a “tempered” one. The C note being slightly flattened admits of a
greater variety of keys than could otherwise be used, and for its own
purposes the scale is perfect. The notes are G natural, A, B, C, D, E, F
sharp, G natural, and A. It is this G natural, or flat seventh, which
gives the scale its peculiar character. The A is that of any other
instrument in concert pitch. The so-called imperfection of scale,
together with the somewhat harsh tone, is the cause of the unpleasant
effect on the accurately sensitive ears of those accustomed to music in
the natural diatonic scale, but these also account for the semi-
barbarous, exciting stimulus the instrument exercises on the minds of
Highlanders, especially on the battlefield. The chanter of the Highland
bagpipe has an oboe or bassoon reed broader than that of the other
kinds, whence that loudness of sound for which it is known. This is a
valuable quality in a military instrument, and when heard at a
sufficient distance, when the faults of scale are not so noticeable, the
music is very agreeable. Besides, compass and variety are not always the
highest qualities of music, and, although the chanter of a bagpipe is
almost devoid of expression and beyond the performer’s control, the
suitable execution of simple airs is equally practicable, and of equal
value with music obtained from other instruments. Simple airs may be
performed on simple instruments, and a master hand can bring from
imperfect materials results better than those produced by the amateur
with materials of the highest class. But we should not expect from one
instrument the music proper to another, or blame the one because it
fails to please those who are used to the other. The bagpipes have all
along been subject to the criticism of the stranger, who knew neither
them nor their people, but who came to criticise and went away to scoff,
not remembering that a Highlander suddenly imported into a London
drawing-room would have as poor an opinion of the music there as the
Londoner has of his. They have suffered too from the well-meaning
efforts of their friends. Some have invented contrivances and
modifications for bringing the instrument nearer to all-round music.
Others have adapted for the pipes pieces never intended for them, and
which only show up their deficiencies, in the hope of bringing the music
nearer to the pipes. Neither has succeeded to any great extent, and
neither is likely to succeed. The Mac Crimmons of Skye, the greatest
masters of the bagpipe, never violated the principle of using only music
specially composed, and they succeeded beyond all others in
demonstrating the powers of the instrument. Those who have since
departed from their principle have failed to justify the departure, but
they have proved, what they might have known before they began, that an
instrument cannot produce what it is not constructed to produce. The
Highland bagpipe is the exponent of Highland music, and of that only.
And there is enough and to spare without invading the realms of other
instruments. There are reels, strathpeys, and marches out of number, and
there are, above all things, pibrochs, or, to give the proper spelling,
_piobaireachd_ (“pibroch” is simply an attempt made by Sir Walter Scott
to spell the word phonetically, so as to make it pronounceable to his
south country readers; but it has come into such general use that its
correctness passes unquestioned.)[3] The word does not, properly
speaking, denote any class of tune—it means pipe-playing—but it is
generally applied to a class which in itself includes three classes—the
_cruinneachadh_ or gathering, the _cumhadh_ or lament, and the _failte_
or salute. The pibroch has been called the voice of uproar and misrule,
and its music that of real nature and rude passion. It is the great
specialty of the Highland bagpipe, and no piper is considered a real
expert unless he is a good pibroch player. It is the most elaborate of
the compositions devised for the pipes, and is difficult to define
otherwise than as a theme with variations. Dr. Mac Culloch, a rather
cynical traveller, who wrote books on Scotland in 1824, which still pass
as standard, considered it “of an extremely irregular character,
containing a determined melody, whereon, such as it is, are engrafted a
series of variations rising in difficulty of execution, but presenting
no character, as they consist of commonplace, tasteless flourishes,
offensive to the ear by their excess, and adding to the original
confusion instead of embellishing the air which the ground may possess.”
“It has,” he adds, “neither time, rhythm, melody, cadence, nor accent,
neither keynote nor commencement nor termination, and it can therefore
regulate nothing. It begins, goes on, and ends, no one knows when or how
or where, and if all the merit of the bagpipe is to depend on its
martial, or rather its marching, utility, it could not stand on a worse
foundation.” But Dr. Mac Culloch, strangely enough, himself says a
little later:—
Footnote 3:
The proper name of “classic” pipe music in the Gaelic is _Ceol Mor_,
the Great Music, a word which includes gatherings, laments, and
salutes.
“The proper music of the bagpipe is well worthy of the instrument.
They are really fit for each other, and ought never to have been
separated. The instrument has suffered in reputation, like the ass in
the fable, from making too high flights. It is, properly speaking, a
military weapon (_sic_), and the pibroch is its real business.”
A pibroch is generally in triple or quadruple time, although many are in
two-fourth and six-eighth time. It begins with the _urlar_ or groundwork
of the composition and its doubling. Then comes the high A or thumb
variation, after which the music proceeds:—
(1) _Siubhal_, with its doubling and trebling.
(2) _Leum-luath_, Do. Do. Do.
(3) _Taor-luath_, Do. Do. Do.
(4) _Taor-luath fosgailte_, Do. Do. Do.
(5) _Taor-luath breabach_, Do. Do. Do.
(6) _Taor-luath a mach_, Do. Do. Do.
(7) _Crun-luath_, Do. Do. Do.
(8) _Crun-luath fosgailte_, Do. Do. Do.
(9) _Crun-luath breabach_, Do. Do. Do.
(10) _Crun-luath a mach_, Do. Do. Do.
It is finished up with the ground or _urlar_ as at the beginning.
The pibroch is not a mere voluntary, played as the taste of the
performer may dictate, though it seems so to those unacquainted with the
nature of the music, especially when the player is inexperienced. All,
however, are not so ignorant or confused as the listener of a story told
by the late Duke of Gordon. A piper in a North of England town had
played a pibroch which wonderfully excited the attention of his hearers,
who seemed equally astonished at its length and the wildness and
apparent disconnection of its parts. Unable to understand it, one of the
spectators at the conclusion anxiously asked the piper to “play it in
English.”
The pibroch is properly a “pipe tune,” and its most legitimate form is
the “gathering.” The gathering is a long piece of music composed on the
occasion of some victory or other fortunate circumstance in the history
of a clan, which, when played, is a warning to the troops to turn out.
The lament and salute originated in a similar way, but should be used on
specific occasions only. The three classes are now, however, treated as
one, propriety being frequently so much discarded that the pieces are
called marches, an entirely unwarranted change, considering the nature
of the music. The bagpipe has its military music mostly composed for
itself, and generally employed by regimental pipers for marching
purposes, and there is no necessity either for using pibrochs as marches
or for adapting for regimental purposes the music of other instruments
as has been done to far too large an extent.
Bagpipe music has also suffered greatly in popular estimation through
the efforts of well-meaning but mistaken people to lift it out of its
proper place and graft it on to city life and inside entertainments. It
is not pleasant chamber music even to Highland ears unless played on
chamber pipes. There are times and circumstances for everything, and
there are few pleasures that will admit of being transplanted out of
their own sphere. The “Haughs o’ Cromdale” was a grand thing at Dargai,
and a sonata by Paderewski is all right before a fashionable audience in
a big city, but to exchange them would only make both ridiculous. The
old pipers could indeed so regulate their instruments as to make the
music almost as sweet as that of the violin, but sweetness is not the
outstanding feature of the bagpipe, and it is not fitted for private
houses or any but the biggest of public halls. The hills themselves are
its appropriate concert room, and among them it pervades the whole
atmosphere, and becomes part of the air until one can hardly tell whence
it comes. It makes rhythm with the breeze and chimes in with the rush of
the torrent, and becomes part of the world in which it is produced. It
suits the bare heath, the solitary cairn, the dark pass, the silent
glen, and the mountain shrouded in mists as no music ever did or can do,
and it is at its best floating across the silent loch or over the
mountain stream, or round the rugged hillsides. It is a military and an
outdoor instrument, and there is no justification for comparing pipe
music with classical productions. It is like comparing taties and
herring with wine jellies, or hoddin’ grey with broad cloth.
Playing within doors is a Lowland and English custom. In the Highlands
the piper was always in the open air, and when people wished to dance to
his music, it was on the green they danced. The pipe was no more
intended for inside than are firearms. A broadside from a man-of-war has
a fine effect when heard at a proper distance, but one would not care to
be sitting by the muzzles when the guns went off. That the large pipes
are still used in halls for entertainment purposes is accounted for by
the strength of association, as much as by their appropriateness.
Highlanders would not consider a gathering at all complete unless they
had their pipers present—a feeling which is easily understood, and which
no one wishes to see die out. But that does not alter the fact that, in
a small apartment at any rate, they are entirely out of place. The
writer is not likely soon to forget one experience of his own, which
helped to confirm him in this opinion. It was in one of the big Glasgow
halls at a Highland gathering, where I was, in a professional capacity,
doing a “special” of several columns for a Highland paper. To catch that
week’s issue, my “copy” had to be posted before I slept, so, as soon as
the chairman had finished his speech, I adjourned to one of the very
small rooms behind the platform to “write up” while the musical part of
the programme proceeded, expecting to be pretty well through before the
turn of the next speaker came. But the “association pipers” were there
before me, and what must they do but shut all the doors to keep the
sound from reaching the platform, and start practising the marches and
reels they were to play later on, marching from end to end of the little
apartment. In five minutes the big drone seemed to be vibrating all
through my anatomy, while the melody danced to its own time among the
crevices of my brain. It was impossible for me to take my fingers out of
my ears—a position which did not lend itself to rapid writing or careful
composition. But the pipers did not think anything about it (they had in
fact stopped conversation and started playing because they “did not wish
to disturb me”), and I soon made an excuse to go out. I tried the
artistes’ room, but the soprano was doing up her hair, the comic man was
arranging his somewhat scanty habilaments, the old violinist was telling
funny stories, and I seemed so obviously out of place that I could not
possibly start working. Next I tried the stair, but the draught was too
much for me. Then I tried the concert hall itself, but the applause was
so frequent that the desks were always rattling. So I came back to the
pipers, and braved it out for half an hour, after which I went back to
the concert hall and did it on my knee. Anything more indescribably
disagreeable than that half-hour in the ante-room it is difficult to
imagine, and there seems, when I think of it now, to have been no
relation whatever between that “music” and the harmonies which used to
float across the bay in the days long ago, when the piper at the big
house tuned his pipes and played to the gentry as they sat at dinner,
the while we boys lay prone on the grass and drank in all the twirling
of his notes. But in the one case there was a mile of sea between and
rocks and fields around, and a blue sky above. In the other, I seemed to
be caged in with some mad thing that hammered at every panel for
freedom.
It was the Chevalier Neukomm, a very distinguished musician, who said,
when asked for his opinion, “I don’t despise your pibrochs; they have in
them the stirrings of rude, but strong, nature. When you traverse a
Highland glen, you must not expect the breath of roses. You must be
contented with the smell of heath. In like manner Highland music has its
rude, wild charms.”
And our own Professor Blackie puts it even better when he says:—
“The gay ribboned bagpipes moaning away in melancholy coronachs, or
rattling like hailstones to the clash of claymores on the backs of the
fleeing Sassenachs. In this case at least—
‘’Tis distance lends enchantment to the sound.’
On this point no Highlander of good taste will disagree with you. The
bagpipes belong to the open air as naturally as heather belongs to the
hills and salmon to the sea-lochs. Men do not mend pens with Lochaber
axes, or employ scene painters to decorate the lids of snuff-boxes.”
As to the man who practises the ordinary pipes in an ordinary city
apartment, with but the thickness of a brick dividing him from
neighbours on either side, he is the worst enemy of his craft and worthy
of all execration. The wise enthusiast will get a smaller set made for
home use, having the lower part of each drone and the top of the chanter
turned large enough to fit the stocks of the full-size pipes, so that
one bag and the stocks in it does for both sets. These will not sound so
loud as to disturb neighbours, and the performer can enjoy himself as
well as with pipes of full size. It must have been of neighbours of a
player on the large pipes that the Chicago jury was composed which tried
an action for damages in 1899. A Scottish society was parading the
streets to the martial skirl of the pipes, when they met a horseman,
whose horse took fright and bolted, throwing the rider through a shop
window. The subsequent action turned on the question of whether or not
the pipes were musical instruments, and the jury decided that they were
not. After which it may be well to conclude with the following verses by
Mr. Patrick Mac Pherson, New York, contributed to the _Celtic Monthly_,
always remembering the open air and giving allowance for the poet’s
license:—
“Away with your fiddles and flutes,
As music for wedding or ball,
Pianofortes, clarionettes, lutes—
The bagpipe surpasses them all.
“For polkas, the waltz, the quadrille,
There’s nought with the pipes can compare;
An anchorite torpid ’twould thrill,
Such glorious sounds in the air.
“So tuneful, harmonious, and sweet!
The very perfection of art,
Lends wings to the tardiest feet,
And joy to the sorrowing heart.
“Upheaved, the fair dancers would feel
Like birds, poising light on the wing,
As nimbly they trip in the reel,
And roll off the steps of the fling.
“No requiems grand I assail,
Like Handel’s Dead March, played in ‘Saul,’
But yet I maintain that the Gael
In coronachs vanquishes all.
“In music, in warfare, in song—
With bagpipes and banners unfurled,
Like a torrid simoom borne along,
The Highlanders lighten the world.”