Piobaireachd and Place

by Kirsty Gunn

Start with a note. The low A. Then its octave above – A to A. The pipes’ scale will give it. Even with its own strange low G that is the start of the tuning, the sound of the octave will come up through, open and large hearted and true. And… 

There it is. 

The clear tonic note. 

Hear it? 

The low tone held in the bass drones and playing through to A, and to the A, and to A… 

Is here at the beginning of this essay as it is here at the beginning of the music’s tune. After which will come in the scattering of notes for the main body of the scale - every piper has a tuning system of his own. There are some more shared than others, and I could even hum you the version I’ve heard more times than I can imagine - do re mi re do mi sol do  - and then the drones are adjusted, adjusted some more, the pipes turned again, just a fraction, the bass to the mid to the treble, done here, and here… Then is all come together in the same long note of the A that is the beginning and so will be there at the end… 

The tune itself starting up now, the first notes of the Urlar* sounding out into the air…

Is one way to open this piece: The tuning. The sound.

But here another: The moment before, when the piper hits the bag...

Or another: In the seconds before that, when the instrument is first picked up, the body of it tucked under the arm before the chanter is blown…

Or the moment before that, even: When the piper moves towards the small stage that is set up on the grass, the judges’ tent before it… And there is the whirl and crowd of a Highland Games gathering all around, the cries of children and the fun fair and the loudspeakers announcing field sports, and the feel of the sunshine in the air, and the warm breeze… But all of this is only scattered behind the piper by now, around him maybe but at a distance - for there is only this moment to be lived in, here. At this moment. Of this small day. With these boards set up to make a platform upon which the piobaireachd can be heard.  At this place. A stage. A world. Is this be when it all begins? The music? Upon this moment of stepping in?

I am writing an essay on how piobareachd is connected to geography, and so to time. For how can one disconnect Scotland’s hills and open ground, its edges of waters and places of castles or battlefields or barracks…From history, and history’s rhythm and beat?  I am thinking about how this music of the Highlands is connected to the land and the past, of course it is - intricately bound up to the places it was fashioned for, came out of, was made from, sung to – but not to address those wider contexts so much as to consider instead piobaireachd’s time in terms of what happens to time in the actual present tense of its performance.

That same A. That low G.

Come out of the past and arrived with us here on a wooden stage in the bright air; a piper before us and playing a tune.

So not an essay about the place of composition, then – musicians and scholars have written about the origins of the tunes and most can be traced to a handful of composers and the parts of the country they came from or lived in… No. I want this piece to be more about the connection of a tune to the town or village where it might be heard here and now, out in the open air every summer of the Highland year. As much part of our high, light filled months, I might say, as the sun on the hills and the coolness of the river after a long day out under the sky. As much a part of the season, the piobaireachd, as the Highland Games. As much a part of those Games as the Green.

Yes, I do want to start there. At Dornoch, say. And at Tain. And at Nairn and Bonar Bridge and Halkirk and Drumnadrochit. All places that host Games every year and so allow a space amidst them for the Big Music of the Highland Bagpipe. I want to think about where piobaireach belongs – to the location of the tunes, yes, for how can the two not be connected? But to have in mind, as well, the locations where the music is actually played, now, here, at a certain time of year: A piobaireachd sounding out while sitting on the grass at Helmsdale or Dunkeld or Drumnadrochit... And to think about how these places where it is performed may figure, too,  in a memory of a piobaireachd - become played into it, even? - and how, for so many years, when he was younger, and finishing up with the great competition at the Northern Meeting for the most serious piping honour of them all, my father would compete at Games all over the Highlands and have stories about them, the tunes particular to each becoming part of his thinking not only about past performances but about the subsequent playing of those same tunes…

So, the memory of a certain judge, say, in Drumnadrochit. His words about a tune…

That might be part of his future thinking about how best to come at “Lament for Mary MacLeod”, for example, or “The MacKay s Banner”.

Or the recollection of a bit of a “Spree”, following a win at Halkirk for the playing of “Salute on the Birth of Rory Mor MacLeod”... 

Could well lend verve and bite to that same Salute when he plays it now.

And the thought of a friend’s appreciation for a piobaireachd given at Blair Atholl...

Might seem to fill his pipes more soundly, more sweetly, when the tune is played now, in that same friend’s memory.

I hear these various thoughts of his, these recollections, as musical nuances and forms of instruction, even, giving fresh shape and definition to something my father is studying or planning to play - now that he is 95 and no longer the musician he was once, though he still plays every day and thinks of piobaireachd every day and listens to it and reads it and hums it and dreams it…. And what it is, I wonder…

To be …That young man. Inside the tune. Who he was then. As he thinks about his playing now.  And thinks, too, about who he might be, the same young man living inside him still to wonder about it, who he might become that he would play the tune, remember it through and play it well …The memory of those far away Highland Games at which he played and competed tall those years ago the same then – in a way – as now. As though no time at all has passed between the two. 

And no need to think otherwise, is there? For the format seems to be the same; he says it is the same. The competition rules, the set up…It hasn’t changed much to my eyes, either. There’s the wooden platform. The small desk at which the judges sit before it, part enclosed to protect against any weather. The pipers milling around the periphery set off to one side of  the stands of candy floss and the tents selling teas and local produce, and, with the helter skelter somewhere, the thump and drone of a distant disco beat, the sound of their own instruments being tuned and practised into the air…I remember all this – my father remembers it - and when I go back to Helmsdale and Halkirk and Dornoch, it is the same, it is the same…

The low A, the high A…

The scattering of the tuning notes…

The instrument being picked up, its heft adjusted… 

The strike to the bag and the sound beginning…

And, before that, the other kind of beginning: the stepping up onto the stage, the salute to the judges: The leaning down to give a name and to give or be told the name of the tune… “Most judges will select the tune” a piper tells me this past year, at Tain, “of a number we have practised and that have been given.”  How many?  I ask. “Oh, three or so, but maybe more” How many? I ask again, this time two years ago at Dornoch. “For today, there are three” the piper says now. “They’re the same tunes that have been set this year for the Northern Meeting.” And he gives them. What were they? I try to remember. Where are my notes from that summer’s day? “I gave a kiss to the King’s Hand”, maybe? “The Old Man of Shells” ? I try to remember. “Lament for Donald Dugal MacKay” ? Let’s call them now, those three great tunes. “Oh, they’re all great tunes” my father says. “My first ever Competition was at Dornoch and I think I played Donald Dugal then. Yes, I did. And it was a great day.”

So yes, l will call them, such piobaireachds and their places… For how this music – for yes, it does do this – carries with it the landscapes and details of Borreraig and the Ballindaloch Manuscript, and Loch Sligachan in Skye, and Strathnaver, all associated with these three big tunes. But how it also brings onto the page the paddocks and fields and grounds where it is performed. One idea laid upon another, as though the map of one is laid upon the map beneath. Two kinds of past, informing the present. Knowledge and fact and history and geography and musical mansucript, and the memory of a summer green… All placed together, a palimpsest, showing through the layers both a landscape and a score, a music and the music’s story of being played. “I remember playing that tune, ‘A Kiss to the King s Hand’ at Portree, says my father now, and he is at once layering upon his memory of that tune and everything he knows about it, from its composition, to the thinking about it from other pipers, to the canntaireachd version of it he would have heard when learning it…This other place. This place of its performance jumped forward in his mind: The younger man sprung up within him and here he is in Portree, his name next on the list to play, and so he is walking through the summer air to the boards of the stage right now… 

In this way, I think, the definition of a town or village, its setting for the Games, its locale, might show through here, in my own writing, as though to deepen the colour of the notes and sharpen their outlines. The accidentals of the music, its siubhals and doublings, becoming a doubling of place, the music itself giving back to Tain or Helmsdale or Portree, or Dunkeld or Halkirk or Fort Augustus, or anywhere they have Games in the summer and where the music is played, a complication, an addition, intricacy, a translation, that makes of these places so much more than the sum of their parts. A region of the country, a town, a village, become changed, deepened, through its associations to that other landscape** where the piobaireachds’ first came from and where they were composed, and first sang out their stories. 

How Inverness, then, to give one example of what I am trying to get at here, seems to become another sort of city altogether when I think of it as the home of the Northern Meeting – for there is a piping competition that comes written with such gravitas and significance for a piper and their music that the town itself seems to fall away behind it. The Gold Medal…How many times have I heard of it? Local Games are used as testing grounds for this last and greatest competition of the summer every year; the finest player the one who played the finest tune…

“Ah, yes” says my father. “There is always that…” 

Inverness, for him, such a place. A place of the Castle and the Sherrif’s Invitations to play there as a young man, fresh out of instruction by the late Pipe Major Donald MacLeod. A city of Recitals, then, of the formalities and duties of performance and competition, and for musical education and for pleasure…And so somewhere far removed, in his mind and in this essay now, from the busy urban centre into which we may drive and park our car., go shopping or meet our friends for lunch. Inverness is all of these things, of course, but as a place to host the Northern Meeting? How then does it seem to change. As much as the Argyll Gathering and Braemar and Blair Atholl are places out of deep history for the pipes, their customs and traditions drawing musicians out of the present tense and into the centre of an ancient, highly sophisticated music? Oh yes… There is always that. Such competition draws golden outlines around these places on a map. They shine, these certain points of location. The quality of the sound of the notes like the latticework at the gateway of a castle. Or the multi-faceted gleam of leaded glass, or a tower’s gilded spire…These places are a-glitter with the glory and the history of a grand tradition…And Inverness, yes, with its Northern Meeting, it takes the crown.

But even there, lit up in the dark lights of Eden Court, how the moment of that competition winds back at the same time to the other places… 

The villages, the towns. The fields. The Green…

To those moments of the piper walking across the grass in the blowy sunshine, dressed in the traditional kilt and doublet and hose, a plastic cape over all that if it is raining, and over the pipes as well if the weather is really coming down… Walking across the ground as the ground beneath his feet… 

As pipers have always done.

For a music that was made to be played outdoors, upon the ground; the feet upon the ground the first moments of the tune – and there, I’ve found it – as it was right at the start of my essay, after all. 

Hear it?

In the spacing of the tune, its rhythm, measured out in those same footsteps on the ground? On the grass and across the wooden boards… 

The first seconds of it…

The Urlah. The beginning. This ground of ours upon which we live and where now the piper stands. 

*

Notes:

* Piobaireachd is a music made out of place. The first movement of it is named for the ground itself, Urlar. All of the tune will come from ground’s first few ideas, and will return to it. For further details on Piobaireachd and its structure, including its various movements and how these relate to the initial theme, see “The History and Structure of Ceol Mor” by Alexander John Haddow, also “Piobaireachd and its Interpretation” by Seumus MacNeil and Frank Richardson.

** The Highland writer Neil Gunn referred constantly in his work, and in a novel by the same name, to another kind of reality that sat within the Highland landscape that is all around us, illuminating it with past and future possibilities and lending to its qualities of restraint and sometimes austerity a numinous and mysterious light.