quite apart from the propensity of human beings to become irrationaly tribal about the most obscure matters, we should remember that ordinary Christians experienced God through the Church’s liturgy and in the devotional intensity which seized them in holy places. Once they had met the divine in such settings, having absorbed one set of explanations about what the divine was, anything from outside which disrupted those explanations threatened their access to divine power. That would provide ample reason for rage and fear.

I was taken aback by the level of rage and fear which Allan MacDonald and I provoked in some quarters of the pibroch establishment; particularly by the deafening silence in the pages of the Piping Times when Dastirum was released in July 2007.  When I phoned the editor, a year after handing him a review copy, to ask why there had been no mention of our product, he explained, “I don’t have a good word to say about it. It would lead people astray”.

I admire his honesty. Nearly all 2000 copies of Dastirum have now been sold and, partly because I believe that a monopoly of interpretation is bad for any tradition’s health, and partly because Dastirum still sells steadily on zero marketing, I am about to publish a second edition. From the vigorous discussion of Dastirum at bobdunsire.com in 2007, here are two posts that round out the picture. The first is from Andrew Berthoff:

It never ceases to amaze me how people can feel so threatened by art that is different. I recognize that judging art requires some sort of basis, and piobaireachd competitions inevitably follow familiar guidelines for what’s “good” and what’s not.

In time, these guidelines change, but, as Allan notes, that does not happen overnight. It will happen incrementally, as judges have the courage to reward what moves them rather than what is “correct” based solely on 20th century styles.

But why should people not readily embrace and appreciate the sound research and conclusions from Allan, Willie Donaldson, and even Jimmy MacColl, who decades ago espoused heretical notions that piobaireachd should be played with passion and pace? Their findings have little if anything to do with piobaireachd competitions, so why put it down just because it goes against conventional contest-thinking?

The second is from Graineag:

When I was studying abroad in Glasgow about nine (gasp!) years ago, I had the great fortune of being able to get a few lessons from Allan, so I guess you could say I’m among the “converted.” The penny dropped that he was really on to something when one night at the Piping Centre, Allan was teaching me about different methods of playing cadences (as illustrated briefly on p.34 of the notes to “Dastirum”). As we sat playing our chanters, P/M Angus MacDonald walked in and said “Ach, that’s lovely. You know, I can remember my father used to put wee flourishes like that in his pibrochs when I was a wee boy… Only when he was playing for himself, of course. He never played that way in the competitions.”

A couple of years later, I was doing lessons by tape with Jimmy McColl and, curious about his own theories on ceòl mór, I asked him to put down a few of the same tunes that I had learned from Allan (such as “Mackintosh’s Lament”, “Salute to Donald”, etc.). When I compared the tapes, the interpretations were near-identical, the only substantial difference being that Jimmy played the urlar about 8-10 beats slower.

What Allan has done through his research and his undisputedly fine playing is to provide another angle from which to view this music and the social environment from which it arose. Nobody, least of all Allan himself, it seems, is advocating that everybody should play this way. If you’re satisfied with playing and listening to ceòl mór in the modern competition style, then that’s wonderful. If modern pibroch doesn’t satisfy you, then this is one possibility of an alternative. Is it exactly as the MacCrimmons would have played? Of course not. Is it perhaps closer to that than what is played at competitions the world over now? I think there’s a substantial body of evidence from Allan and several others to suggest that it is. Whether you like Allan’s style of playing or not, I think we can all agree that a bit of debate is a perfectly healthy thing.

I opened with a quote from ‘The Christian Background’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch, found in the National Theatre programme for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Emperor and Galilean (London, May 2011). Ibsen’s play “raises the question of whether human beings have the power to shape history, or whether history has a will of its own”. Either way, history is inevitable. When human beings sense the rigidity, or lack of spirituality, that results when any good thing gets organised, evolution is provoked.

Several parallels may be drawn between pibroch competitions and organized religion, but poisoning and slaughter are thankfully not among them! I wonder if the Piping Times will review the second edition of Dastirum…

Ronald Black is now retired from his position as Senior Lecturer in Celtic at Edinburgh University. It always dismayed me that he was never given a personal chair. The reality is that he belongs to a different educational tradition than the mainstream of our more anglicised universities.

That mainstream, resting on the Oxbridge and public school model, is one in which the function of education is to further refine and advance the specialised interests of an elite. It was this ethos that pushed Gandhi to say that his life’s greatest disappointment was “the hard-heartedness of the educated.”

Like in colonial India, Oxbridge has too often been aped in Scotland. Celtic studies were OK so long as they could be managed, like Macpherson’s Ossian, into classical mode, or buried in desiccating and under-funded anthropological archives.

Celtic studies could be paid lip service only where they did not emancipate a colonised cultural spirit. That spirit, as Jim Hunter points out in On the Other Side of Sorrow, had been successfully inferiorised through cultural invasion, thereby internalising its own supposed backwardness.

http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/2005-ronald-black.htm

Refusal to collude with the myth of backwardness is vital; there is still considerable distance to travel, emancipating the cultural spirit of pibroch. But, at another historical resolution, backwardness is no myth: Oxbridge is no longer the enemy. It is our own piping institutions who persist in aping a managed, dessicated order long after the South has moved on.

Stirling Head 20 (detail). Palace of King James V of Scotland, c. 1540

The more interrogation this circular sequence of numerals receives, the better. If it is music, then it could be compared to jazz musicians following a chord chart or lead sheet, rather than being told exactly which notes to play.

Given striking parallels between Welsh cerdd dant (‘string music’) and music from northern Britain built on double-tonic grounds, I suspect court professionals in 16th-century Scotland had clearly-articulated ideas about musical structure. If they expressed these in writing — for the benefit of students or for ensemble performance — then Is and Os would be appropriate: more appropriate than staff notation or tablature. Memorisation, improvisation and accompaniment in a largely unwritten musical tradition require understanding (conscious or unconscious) of a substructure. In jazz, as in the Renaissance, this often takes the form of a harmonic ground. Verse to verse, variation to variation, performance to performance, the surface details are ever-changing; it is the underlying harmonic patterns which, hallowed by usage, are more relevant to fix in writing.

For me, the prime difficulty in seeing this inscription as music is the third numeral. We are not dealing with a sequence of Is and Os, as in the twenty-four measures of cerdd dant, but of Is, Os and IIs. A further distinction may be drawn between serifed and unserifed Is, but this may have been introduced by the carver rather than whoever laid out the design. Although Renaissance music often moves between three fundamental chords, the body of Welsh manuscripts which suggest a musical interpretation of Stirling Head 20 are consistent in using only two ciphers to represent units of opposing harmonic quality. These typically represent stability (I, open strings) and restlessness (O, in tension with the tonic or drone). 

One of the twenty-four measures of cerdd dant (c. 1562).
AB MS 17116B (Gwysaney 28), f. 61v

The case for the inscription being music is possibly strengthened by the fact that cerdd dant, pibroch and the dance music of northern Britain all share a preference for double-tonic grounds built from units of 4: although units of 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13 are present, 4 is the norm in the earliest source material. In this inscription, an internal sequence of 8 numerals (I  O  I  I     I  O  I  II) recurs four times, separated by sections of 16 and 4 numerals. The significance of this recurring ‘phrase’ may not be musical, but I doubt it is accidental, as the level of care invested in the layout and carving of this roundel is of the highest order.

Stirling Head 20. Oak ceiling boss, possibly representing one of the Nine Female Worthies

It would be wonderful if the media attention of the last three days brought a better explanation to light. This pattern gnawed at John Donaldson‘s brain for three years and a musical solution was balm, but perhaps Renaissance experts should examine it thoroughly for other possibilities.

A folder of resources relating to the interpretation of Stirling Head 20 is at www.box.net/shared/q9oejdv98i

MP3 of Greenhill 2

In this recording, I tune a wire-strung harp – an Ardival ‘Kilcoy’ – to Greenhill 2, following my own route. There are other ways of ending up with Greenhill 2; my principle designing this route was to minimise movement of the tuning key.

Hi,

I make Renaissance and French Baroque Lutes.  Often, while I’m working I listen to piobaireachd.  The performance of ‘Hioemtra Haentra’ from Campbell Canntaireachd is sublime.  My attempts to track down a copy of this music in standard notation has led me to this email address.  I would very much appreciate any help you might offer in locating a copy (pdf or ?) of ‘Hioemtra Haentra”.

Thank you

~Ken Wryn

The Piobaireachd Society editor, Archie Kenneth, made an emendation with which I disagree. In this recording, I insert “hiotroao” in the second half of the phrase b’. This restores the Urlar to a more orthodox Well-woven structure:

a b A  B A
b’ a’ B’ A  B”

The following mnemonic gestures were developed for my students during a Dudelsack-Akademie canntaireachd workshop, organised by Thomas Zöller in Hofheim, 30 November 2008: