Everyone knows who Dr. Jack Taylor is: President of the Piobaireachd Society, adjudicator, musician (including violinist). Most importantly, a thoughtful scholar of pibroch who has begun to open up new opportunities to performers and competitors by encouraging a deeper understanding of its history and breadth

 

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JDH - I heard you give a lecture which began with the question, “Is pibroch on it’s way out?” And, your answer was, “No, actually, it’s not. There’s a lot going on still.” You outlined several factors for its continued relevance, and one of them was the accessiblity of the manuscripts that we at the Alt Pibroch Club, and you at the Piobaireachd Society website, have made available to the public. That’s causing people to take a fresh look at these tunes, reconsider and get excited about these tunes. And, unsurprisingly, I think you are right about that.

The other interesting thing you touched upon was from an article by an ethnomusicologist that showed that within 5 to 7 generations, the original tale or song or tune had been so fundamentally altered as to render the original almost unrecognizable within it.

The reason I want to pick up with that is, I’ve been pondering the role of traditionalism in modern pibroch performance. Traditionalism is analogous to cultural “naturalism”: where socially constructed habits and actions and world views are assumed to be self-evident and “natural”. All that means is that the culture is so dominated by a particular world view, it doesn’t occur to its members that other world views can happen.

The same kinds of assumptions about “tradition” in pibroch seem to be the case: that what we are performing today can be traced directly back through a succession of teachers and students, and therefore what we are playing today “naturally” is the pibroch has always sounded. It is “traditional” for us to play it this way.

That got me wondering, “What is going on over in France or the Gallic regions of Spain?” Is it the case that these cultures assume a “traditionalism” about their music, and is that “tradition” the same or different when compared with Scotland?

Perhaps more to the point, does Scotland look out at the rest of the world, or is it assumed that the world only need look inward to Scotland?

JT - The world looks in, and then takes it out. That’s what the Bretons have done. They didn’t do any pibroch 50 or 60 years ago, I don’t think.

Do you know Anne Lorre ? She’s a very keen French musician. She always comes Piobaireachd Society conferences. I said to Anne once, “Why is it in France that you can set up a pibroch recital and you can get 150 people?” She hesitated for a moment and said, “Because, we are curious.”

It’s absolutely true. They love the musicality of it. Whereas, probably other cultures (I suppose) have taken it as it has come to be, such as yourselves, Canadians, and New Zealanders and others. Which is a shame. Copying. And you’ve got this narrowing down that’s so safe, you know? It’s fine. You can play it that way, you know? But…

JDH - I’ve been exploring and wonder about how the narrowing has taken hold. It’s like blinders are put on. How do we break those out, so that the rest of the world doesn’t just look to Scotland, but Scotland looks to the rest of the world and sees, maybe, if there are places that may bring something new?

Places like France: Do they bring something new to this? Do they bring a new musical, cultural angle to it? There has got to be some musical cross-pollination, one would think.

JT - Well, I think, the French in their pibroch interpretation are, you know, devotees of Bob Brown and Bob Nicole and all that stuff. So they are playing it, as you might say, “straight.”

But, I think just because of their curiosity and musical background, they are more willing to do different stuff. And people like Anne, Xavier B… and all these guys, they take MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart and they play it pretty well the same song, you know, but they throw in other stuff and that’s what helps it get a bit out there.

That song should never be, you know, the same song twice, should it?

JDH - Yes! If you take traditionalistm, if you take the idea that pibroch is something that’s important to maintain, but you compare to that ethnomusicology insight from that one article, one of the implications of it is that our ideas of a “traditional approach” is, in fact, a very modern thing, isn’t it?

JT - Yeah.

JDH - How can we break that open and embrace the possibilities that, maybe, going back in tradition will overturn our idea of tradition.

JT - That was actually a study of oral tradition and song; I think it was an Arab song or something like that. I tried to look for something that happens in a pure oral environment, and that whole thing decayed in the course of 5 generations. And the best people, the best performers were the worst teachers. They changed the song.

I thought that was very striking.

And what it really did for me about pibroch was that pibroch is not classical music. People call it the “classical music of the bagpipe”, you know. But it’s not. Call it traditional music, if you like. Call it folk music, would be even better.

Classical music, when we use that phrase, refers to music that was always written down. It was written down first by the composer.

Pibroch was oral: Simple pieces with straightforward embellishments with a simple sequence of variations. That’s all it was, and it got passed on and the pupil would do something new with it and do something new with it and all the rest of it.

But, of course, as soon as it gets recorded (and this is recognized in ethnomusicology) it changes because it’s recorded.

Interesting that that’s happened, isn’t it, with the written scores, the first ones, then Angus MacKay, and all that’s happened afterwards, and they are all a bit different (and that’s fine)? But today everybody thinks, “That’s they way it was played,” or “That’s the way it was played.” But it wasn’t meant to be seen like that at the time.

And then the dreaded tape recorder comes along, you know, and makes things even worse, because we all say we’ve got to play it the way John Macdonald as played it or Bob Brown or Rob Reid or any of these guys.

And we don’t. And we can’t. And we shouldn’t.

JDH - In graduate school in the late 80s and early 90s there was a movement in the humanities called Reader Response Criticism, which eventually became part of larger post-modern movements of literary interpretation that reached its apex with Jacque Derrida. The whole point of that movement was that a text is not the dead lifeless thing that so many people thought it was: texts had been viewed as limited, structured, definite in interpretive possibilities. But every reader brings her or his own world and history to a text and works together with the text to derive meaning. And those meaning may never have been intended by the author, but that’s not to say that the meanings couldn’t be justifiably derived beyond those intentions.

(That kind of thing happens all the time, actually, where people bring up new interpretations completely unanticipated by the original authors - hence, judicial interpretation, for example.)

That kind of point of view hasn’t happened in pibroch. Barnaby talks about this a lot, where he bemoans certain aspects of the rise of notational systems because it locks interpretive possibilities. But let me ask you this: as a classical musician, does that hold true for you?

JT - Well, if I look at Mozart’s clarinet concerto, and I know that Mozart wrote it down with all its dynamics and pizzicatos and staccatos and all that, you know: that, for me, is classical music. But, of course, you can interpret that score in many different ways, and that’s part of the joy of it.

JDH - Isn’t it? You can compare different performances of the Four Seasons and hear real differences and nuances between them. It remains recognizable, but new insights are brought. Because music is the white space between the notes.

The idea that notation locks us into an interpretive approach is mistaken. We do hear this in the overtones of the complaint that “you can’t capture pibroch with notes” - a recognition that there’s more to it than what the scores capture.

And yet, we really don’t like exploring too far afield.

JT - Peter Cook wrote very scathingly to the Piping Times that “It’s like not wanting to look beneath the surface of the earth because you wouldn’t want to be bothered with what you will find”.

It’s a bit like that, yeah.

But the way for it be learned and transmitted has to be a mixture of both now, because both are there today. But it to be transmitted effectively, and by transmitted I mean saying to the pupil, “Here’s the music, you’ve got to find the music in it…” you’ve got to use a combination of score and singing.

To get the pupil to understand it, they’ve got to get the music in the head and then throw the score away.

JDH - Yes. I don’t decry the advent of notation. How can I? I go through the Campbell Canntaireachd and realize that tunes like PS 10 or PS 29 or PS 33 and other “nameless” tunes are all we have, and only by sheer luck do we have them. If he hadn’t written them, and we didn’t find his manuscripts, they would be gone! Forever.

The same can be said about Socrates: there is no material evidence for his existence. It is lucky we had Plato or Xenophon to write things down, and lucky that those things continued to exist only in that form, or we would have known nothing about him.

So, it’s not as though words on paper, or notes on staff, kill anything. They don’t. They preserve it.

But we, as readers, or as musicians, have to bring it to life again, don’t we?

Likewise with the new post-literate world: new audio-visual capture: this is nothing to fear. Sure, it can be used as a way to stifle creativity. But, on the other hand, knowing that we have these performances, we never have to worry about losing them.

This frees us up to explore new interpretive dimension as yet unexplored. The burden of the keeping the tradition, lest it be lost forever, is now lifted. We can become living contributors to new traditions.

JT - I couldn’t agree more.

The first time it really hit me was after my first lesson with Bob Brown, actually. I had been taught for 8 years by a very good teacher and I played a little bit of pibroch. I went and Bob Brown played something simple, you know? A simple tune played very well. McFarland’s Gathering. And I came away thinking, “Oh yeah. That’s how you do it.” And I could do it for about 5 minutes going down the road in the car, singing to myself. And then I couldn’t do it. And you recognize that the brilliance was his.

Nobody plays the least like him. They try. But they don’t.

And similarly Kilberry said, very aptly I’m sure, that nobody played in the least like John MacDonald. All these people, they would say, “This is how old Johnny played it.” Well it wasn’t. It was the same outline and the same notes, but the spaces between notes were different.

And that’s the sort of thing: we’ve got to feel free to be individual.

 

More to follow…