As part of our series discussing the future plans and directions of the Club, we touch upon what we believe to be our markers of success

 

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BB - Brendan Rogers, transcribing wax cylinder recordings of Irish pipers from 1898-1900 in Belfast, made the following observation:

The Pipers’ tunes were played with[out] any strict observance of rhythm except in dance music. They dwelt in notes at starting and ending of phrases and always played a prelude which was the same to all tunes. This I have not transcribed. (An Píobaire 11/15, p. 3)

That’s just a little note at the bottom of his first transcription of an Irish piper. This “without any strict observance of rhythm” is also what was reported by Patrick MacDonald in his 1784 preface, where he says:

Chiefly occupied with the sentiment and expression of the music, they dwell upon the long and pathetic notes, while they hurry over the inferior and connecting notes, in such a manner as to render it exceedingly difficult for a hearer to trace the measure of them.

This is why Joseph MacDonald wrote out the Highland Vocal Airs with irregular bars. Unfortunately, Patrick MacDonald felt he couldn’t put the music before the public written out like this. So he edited Joseph’s manuscript and what he published has been put into regular bars. And sadly, Joseph’s original manuscript of the Highland Vocal Airs does not survive.

JDH - Oh, interesting! So there’s no way we can compare. Interesting.

BB - So, Colin Campbell’s manuscripts and Peter Reid’s manuscript give us very very important data, evidence for this rubato style of playing, without strict observance of rhythm.

JDH - What Allan MacDonald said was, quoting a German (don’t know who), “the most intuitive mathematician is a musician”. He did that with respect to the underlying feel of the music. You don’t worry about the metronome. But it adds up intuitively. But it doesn’t have to add up mathematically-perfect every time. There is a structure, there is a rhythm, but it’s free.

It’s a full phrase. You worry about the content and context of the phrase. But when you are done, you start again. And all that makes intuitive sense, but when I get on the pipes, I just crash and burn.

BB - Basically the notation in front of us can really get in the way, because we become fixated on the surface detail of what we see.

JDH - Well, you like saying that. I’m not sure if I agree 100%. I don’t have as much of a problem with the transition from orality to literacy as you seem to have. The thing that I think is unfortunate is, people coming to the notation make assumptions about the notation that need to be addressed. I can look at staff notation and go, “Here’s the rhythm, here’s the structure, here’s the phrasing.” I can get from it something I cannot get from the Campbell (namely, the rhythm). Campbell gives me notes, but gives me no sense of the relative values of these notes to one another at all. That’s okay, I guess, until the time comes to put values to the notes. And staff notation gives us that: it gives us the relative relationship between notes: this note is longer than that note. Okay. That’s useful to me.

BB - When you listen back to this recording, I invite you to observe yourself, first how you responded to your lesson with Allan, then stating what you just said about me having a “problem” with notation.

JDH - <laughter> I am just making you aware, my friend, that you have a bias against notation.

BB - And I respond by saying that the difficulties you are just going through, the realization that you have so much to learn that Allan’s lesson gave you, are the same thing. You see it as a problem and a bias that I have, because you are on the cusp of crossing a bridge.

JDH - I get it. I think what I value about staff notation is that without it, we would have nothing, we would not be playing this music. It would be gone.

Orality does not survive.

We’re in position now where the technology allows us to record (a kind of “secondary orality” has returned as a result of technological advances), but even that technology will be gone in 50 years.

Orality does not survive.

BB - Just pause. “Orality does not survive.” So what are you getting from Allan?

JDH - A derivative. There is no assurance whatsoever that what Allan is doing can trace itself back beyond a generation or two.

BB - That’s right, we don’t know. I am completely in agreement. We have no proof that it can trace itself back further. With Allan or with anyone else! Unless we have the snapshot of an audio recording, which I’d class as an even more detailed form of notation.

JDH - So the value to my mind of the effort to capture in notation (the term “capture” is instructive, I will admit) is that we otherwise would not have pibroch. It would be gone.

It’s like the thousands of languages that have been destroyed because they had no literary history. A language is lost every 2 weeks. 90% of the 7,000 languages in the world will be gone by 2050. Many, if not most, have no literature associated with them. And with their loss, the richness of cultural perspectives is growing ever more pale.

I tend to value literacy tremendously, because of its ability to keep evidence of knowledge and experience that we otherwise wouldn’t have, even if that evidence is a bad echo of the oral original.

I think, because I’m enough of a post-modernist, that it is fully possible for me as a reader of these notes to appreciate, understand and do what Allan does with those notes otherwise.

BB - I wonder if we can draw a parallel with the spelling of words. Looking at words like crunnludh, crulive or crunluath as written down on paper, we view those spellings from a modern perspective, with approaches and expectations that come from a world populated by dictionaries and printed books, a world in which mass production and stability of spelling is normal, not to mention education at school and university. So we expect consistency.

JDH - The Gutenberg Galaxy. Walter Ong and Malcom Mcluhan reflect on this.

BB - And so when we see the 1700s spellings and notice the randomness and instability, we interpret that in particular ways, shaped by our environment and upbringing. We see three different spellings and the first reaction, a very reasonable one, is that these three spellings point to different pronunciations and to different meanings.

Now, to challenge that (and this follows through Keith Sanger’s point, raised after my Piobaireachd Society talk on ‘Settings’, p. 18), we have to take on board that when you are a native speaker and you don’t have dictionaries or printed books to refer to, and you write something down, consistency in the writing and spelling of a word is kind of irrelevant. Or certainly a lot less relevant than it is to us. Because many of these writers had had no written education in their mother tongue, neither at school nor at university. Instead, they were educated in English or Scots orthography. So, when someone like Colin Campbell comes to write out his everyday language, he doesn’t have anything to refer to: nothing that he was taught at school, no book on the shelf to check, no computer spellchecker. The result is that he might in the course of the same day spell it three different ways - exactly as my 6-year-old son does. And when we read those three different ways, knowing that it was an adult and not a 6-year-old, we presume a level of authority that we are familiar with today, we take it as hard evidence and treasure it, drawing out a meaning and implication: “Oh, this means X pronounced it like that. And that spelling reveals that he didn’t mean ‘crown’, he meant ‘round’.” Actually, there may be no linguistic significance whatsoever. It’s just like my son writing ‘colde’ (called), ‘becaus’ (because), ‘confyoosd’ (confused), ‘brumsticks’ (broomsticks) and ‘shoogry mooslye’ (sugary muesli). It’s revealing something about the human brain and the way we represent complex sounds in notation.

JDH - I think a couple of things happen when we see these things. First, we may dismiss them as products of ignorance or poor education. The other thing is, we need to remind ourselves that Shakespeare spelled his own name three different ways.

The view of language in an early-typographical world, a world where typography hadn’t worked it’s way down through the population and the vast majority of the population were illiterate or barely literate: in such a world, spelling was fluid, malleable.

Even my teenage son and daughter today, in our secondary orality world, spell in ways that do not take into account the rules. They spell just enough to communicate. Example: texting.

BB - So my point here is, if we understand that conceptually - that the spelling of words might be analogous to musical notation - then how do we approach it when three different people write the same thing down in different ways; or when one person writes it down three different ways? Our modern instinct is to interpret it in three different ways, as evidence of three different types of performance. There may, in fact, be no significance - just three different ways of spelling the same thing.

JDH - There may be no significance, but the different forms may also be an indication of the very malleability of the performer’s art itself.

Again, my post-modern approach to language is, you think there is a singular authoritative meaning to any given sentence, but there isn’t. Natural language has so many reverberations: historically, personally, culturally, contextually, socially. You cannot authoritatively point to a particular person or dictionary and state, “This is what this person means.” Case law proves this: even in the most exacting legal language, ambiguity of intent can be found.

The same thing should be done with music. The notes are there. They are guides. It is up to YOU as the performer to bring them to life. Your particular experience and insight must be brought to these notes.

BB - I like that. I think it is very helpful. The idea that in either a spelling of a word or in the notation of a motif in music, we don’t necessarily have a single meaning, but multiple reverberations.

JDH - Just take the three simple words, “I love you” on a chalk board. Then watch an actor bring multiple meaning to them. Or listen to different song writers and how they shape their meaning. It can be a statement of tenderness, of fear, of desperation, of loss, even of hatred and obsession.

We see this all of the time in music: I’ve listened to a ragtime Delta-blues interpretation of a song originally created by a heavy metal band, and it brought whole new worlds and vistas of meaning and experience to the music.

There is no one, definitive interpretive performance of a tune. It can always be explored, with new perspectives bringing new ideas and feelings and receptions. Some performances may be bland. Some performances may bring nothing particularly insightful. But they can nevertheless be performed uniquely.

And the notes on a page allow for this. They do not lock us into a single interpretation. They do not limit us. They preserve opportunities for exploration, opportunities which otherwise would have been lost forever if those notes had not been written down on a staff.

BB - If we can spread the idea that there isn’t one path, that all these things have a broad semantic spectrum, or multiple interpretative possibilities; if we can reduce the amount of judgement and bigotry, insisting upon this or that line, then we are doing something useful. If we can create an environment of excitement in what’s “fresh” so that when someone is listening to a pibroch performance their minds are open to things they have never heard as well as alternative approaches to what is familiar - so that you can take the same piece of music, the same notation, and put it into a “blue light” rather than a “yellow light” not with trepidation but with confidence that aficionados will derive pleasure from your initiative - for me, that would be the greatest marker of success.