To raise the point, it is first necessary to set the scene by quoting from a paper by Eric Hamp published in Eriu vol 51 in 2000.
‘Although Old Irish orthography is ambiguous, it is not as bad as has been claimed. We must remember that it was originally devised and used by natives. They knew (a) the words and (b) the grammar , ergo the orthography tends not to indicate pronunciation (phonetics) but rather to render the basic forms of each word, so that it may readily be recognized and distinguished. If the readers, as native speakers, know what word is intended, they can easily pronounce it’.
Now, that was directed at trying to pronounce the script in old Gaelic manuscripts, but with a little modification it can also be applied to the Campbell Canntaireachd, again a written script produced within a living piping environment and noted down by native Gaelic speakers.
Whether the Campbell Canntaireachd reflects Gaelic speech patterns or not is outside this particular post, although it should perhaps be noted that the question was addressed by several speakers at some of the early Piobaireachd Society Conferences, most notably Morag NicLeod and Jake MacDonald, with very inconclusive results.
The first real problem is that while it is undoubtedly inspired by a sung vocal form, it has been adapted to a written text. In turn in more modern times it has been adapted to another ‘written’ form: the conventional notes on lines musical notation, albeit usually using modern piping ‘shorthand’. Based on comparisons with tunes already in the known piping repertoire, those unique to the CC have also been interpreted and transcribed into conventional form.
However, and to justify the title of this piece I at least have to be a little impish; this whole process would have been foreign to the original creators of the manuscripts. If they were capable of reading and writing conventional music they would not have needed to come up with this written form of a ‘verbal notation’.
So how did the Campbell Family use their own manuscripts? Well, we do have an answer to that question: an account by J F Campbell of Islay whose ‘nurse’ was John Campbell, the son of the manuscripts’ original writer. J F Campbell describes how he had often seen his ‘nurse’ John Piper reading and practicing music from an old paper manuscript and silently fingering tunes.
Now comes the question which in turn relates back to the quotation at the start - If you had taken away John Campbell’s practice chanter and instead asked him to ‘sing’ the tunes (that is, turn them back into an original vocal form), would he have actually sung it as written in the manuscript?
I rather doubt it.
And so we have to accept that even when bypassing modern transcriptions and working directly from copies of the original manuscripts, there is still a very large ‘unknown’ which may be impossible to answer.
Isn’t this just different ways of conceptualising music and notation? I have seen plenty of traditional musicians on fiddle, box or piano, who can’t sight-sing from notation but can sight-read on their instrument, playing an unknown tune from a book and saying “oh that’s a nice tune”. And plenty of others who can’t play the tune on their instrument without sight-singing it through off the page first. And plenty others who can do both but prioritise one.
Well the short answer is no and I tend to cringe when I see the current academic ‘in word’ use of conceptualizing everything, especially when as in this case the point has been missed. ‘Conceptual’ is a word best used in the form when conjoined with nebulous.
The ability of traditional musicians to interpret conventional written music is not really relevant. The point being made is that the CC is a written form and that John Campbell no matter how good or bad at singing he was, would like all pipers at that time have used an oral canntaireachd but not exactly as written in the CC. Barnaby somewhere I think made the suggestion that it would be preferable not to refer to the CC as canntaireachd at all, (at least if I am quoting him correctly). It is an interesting and sensible idea although getting it adopted would be swimming against a very strong tide.
‘Traditional piano’? It depends I suppose on the elastic use and miss-use of the word ‘traditional’, but you would not find any pianos around much before 1800 in Scotland and then only in the hands of the upper end of society. Even then they mostly actually rented their pianos judging from the early 19th C accounts of Gow and Shepherd. Much the same situation certainly applied circa 1900 or so as I noted when I looked out the accounts of the music business of Logans for the late Geoff Hore.
Whether renting their pianos was purely an upper class Scottish thing I do not know but few pianos were actually sold and even less likely to have fallen into ‘traditional’ hands. It does though point the direction in which the early 19th C publishers of piobaireachd were trying to aim their sales.
Another bolt of lightning, Keith. Yes, swimming against a strong tide, mainly because some pipers have used a crowbar to make the CC “fit” the Postmodern way of playing pibroch. (How do they get a long ‘e’, short ‘d’ and a triplet (burl) in two strong beats out of “hiharin”?) If we acknowledge that there is no way of knowing for sure what the CC is, then can it mean just about anything we want it to? There must be a base set of assumptions that we can act upon with confidence.
‘There must be a base set of assumptions that we can act upon with confidence’, well yes. I often feel that the early stalwarts of the PS get criticized unfairly for simply being ‘of their time’ rather than sitting on the more recent empirical knowledge base we now have.
The method used by them on bringing the CC back to life was at the time both logical and sound. Taking tunes they knew, albeit played in modern settings and using them to work out the patterns in the CC then to identify tunes which existed in the CC under different titles and finally to transliterate (in musical terms) those tunes unique to CC worked as far as the general ‘framework’ is concerned.
Since you have invoked a bolt of lightening I will introduce a rainbow, there are no arguments regarding the primary colours, the areas of difference surround the point at which one shade of colour changes to another. However in retrospect the assumption that the CC was the actual verbal form has proved a bit of a red herring. It is certainly now widely used, mainly down to some good work done by John MacLellan who produced a booklet with accompanying tape back in 1977.
I still have my copy but not really having a need to vocalize any canntaireachd it is just useful as a research tool. However, as anyone who knew Roddy Cannon would be aware you would often listen to him ‘singing’ you examples using it. Indeed while working on the Donald MacDonald MS and it’s comparison with the early MacRa version and while discussing Gesto, I would mischievously chide him when of necessity, when making points relating to those he departed from the ‘orthodox’ version.
Likewise those early academics who were asked by the PS to look at the CC within a Gaelic context were faced with trying to explain it as written text based on original Gaelic vocables rather than as now understood as a written form in its own right. That changes the perspective since it is very unlikely that it reflects written Gaelic orthography. Few Gaelic speakers at that time would have been literate and those that were were more likely to be literate in Scots rather than Gaelic.
However, Scots written orthography was used by a number of literate Gaelic speakers to phonetically express a written Gaelic. The Book of the Dean of Lismore for example was written in that way but again most of these writers were professional men, Ministers, Lawyers and so on, bilingual with a good grasp of spoken Scots and therefore in a good position to use the spoken phonetics of Scots to correlate with a phonetic spoken Gaelic. Unfortunately the Campbells do not fall neatly into that category, but any attempt to relate the CC back to an original verbal form still needs to be based on that scenario.
What is really needed to resolve the question is an example of one of the Campbells either playing on the pipes or chanting using an original canntaireachd one of the written tunes. But of course we cannot possibly do that so it is a case of as the CC is a written form to a certain extent treating it as a written form. That however introduces a considerable number of additional complications. For example most people until fairly late actually read allowed, even when alone, ( think all those monks reading their books and mumbling away). So the written word was intimately connected to its spoken form.
This presents problems even with just reading any old document. For example say one has some text which is undated. Some idea of date can be made by its ‘style’ but even that is a grey area with styles overlapping. With the CC there is some parts which suggest as I think, that Colin the writer was taught by his father because of some of his usages look more 1730 ish rather than when he was actually writing the MS.
But to return my original construct used with an example of the problems in this hypothetical ‘text’ Say it included a reference to a ‘Mr McMaster’, (leaving aside that we could probably conclude that he was a minister). Well ‘Mc’ is a shortened ‘Mac’ but they are both pronounced the same so not a real problem. That comes with the ‘Mr’. These days it is pronounce as ‘mister’ but during the 18th C and into the 19th it would still have been in its original form and meaning as ‘Master’and even that with a local Scots accent.
Looking at it bearing in mind that the CC gives no real indication of ‘length’ (time), we have a choice with the example above of a narrow or short ‘i’ or a broad or longer, (much longer if drawled) ‘a’.