Leafing through Angus MacKay’s book this evening, combing the pages for something far less interesting, I stumbled across the word Cadenza. Surely not!

The word appears above the last “D. C. Thema” in four tunes - MacCrimmon will never return (PS 57), Hector MacLean’s Warning (PS 182), The Menzies’ Salute (PS 218) and The Marquis of Argyll’s Salute (PS 157) - and twice in The MacLeans’ March (PS 77). That’s on pages 17, 38, 52, 55 (twice) and 62. Turning back to MacKay’s page of Instructions (opposite page 1), there is a list of Italian terms to which I have turned a blind eye for 20 years. Tonight, for the first time, I read this:

Cadenza, imports a pause which gives the opportunity for the introduction of an extempore flourish, according to the taste and fancy of the performer. It has a peculiarly happy effect at the close of a variation, in serving to introduce the thema, or groundwork, Urlar, before Da Capo.

Wow! I wish I’d noticed that before. What a wonderful opportunity to make a mark and do something exciting - an unexpected burst of happiness. Angus MacKay, you are a hero!

Back to my task: preparing a dictionary of Gaelic Terms. This is mostly tedious, compiling source spellings, but going through the material closely yields some important discoveries. Last week, I spotted this:

Not exactly a discovery, but despite the fact I regularly consult Roderick Cannon’s edition of Joseph MacDonald’s treatise, this line on folio 25r (and Roderick’s paragraph on it, p. 107) had failed to register. I completely omitted fridh from my recent discussion of words to use when describing cadences. Oops!

For frith, Dwelly gives: “Small, little, trilling”. The plural would be frithean. Colm Ò Baoill suggested that it could be a different word: frìde (plural frìdean). For this, Dwelly’s meanings include “Small pimple” and “Gnome, pigmy, elf”. Joseph used the word “Introduction” for anything from a single grace to a 4-note run, so perhaps the word’s meaning in piping was similar to “grace” and “grace notes”.