From Allan MacDonald:
(Read along here.)
What do you notice? Among other things:
- Cadences serve to contribute to the flow of the melodic structure.
- Hiharins are crahinins, not birls.
The result is quite a memorable tune
I’ve never understood why, when I hear performers play a pibroch tune, they allow themselves to so severely disrupt the flow of the melody by unnecessarily holding onto a cadence. Certainly, cadences can be held for effect, thereby adding drama and tension to the flow of music. But not every cadence need be performed that way.
I remember watching last year’s Winter Storm and hearing a competitor interpreting “Old Men of the Shells” (PS 225). He started off really well and then, for no particular reason, halted the flow of the tune in order to insert a held-E cadence. It was both musically counter-intuitive and ugly.
I understand why he performed it that way: The MacKay’s (both Angus and John) clearly wrote a fermata over that held-E in the cadence. But stylistically, that was their own interpretation of it, and it’s not very pretty. It’s also not clear that whether what they were doing wasn’t simply mechanistically copying the mirrored phrase.
Compare their scores with Donald MacDonald, who is perfectly capable of adding fermatas when he wants to, but in this case doesn’t. In fact, his cadences look pretty straight-forward, and when you play them that way, the tune is allowed to flow naturally and quite memorably.
The style of cadence to be performed is voluntary and flexible according to the interpretive insights of the performer. Mechanical reproduction of the same appoggiatura style is both unnecessary and sometimes quite unpleasing.
Allow cadences to contribute to the melody, not disrupt it.
I would go even further and say that in Donald MacDonald’s setting of ‘Bodaich na Sligachan’ (The Old Men of Sligachan - possibly a reference to the losers of a battle, as in ‘Bodaich nam Brioghais’) there are NO cadences in the first two lines. We have been programmed to see them as such by Angus MacKay’s setting; but DMcD’s setting shows the first motif ending with a sort of drum-roll, ‘HIO hin hindindin’. The next motif BEGINS with a slightly different effect: HIN dindin Din edre, another drum-roll introducing the EDRE and the leap up to F. Somehow, these two motifs have been separated from the larger phrases each is part of, and have coalesced into a ‘Hiharin Hiharin’ phrase; Donald MacDonald points to an alternative, possibly older, concept of the melody. In this, the urlar consists basically of two contrasting phrases, which are played twice, then reversed, so that the urlar concludes with the first phrase, or at least its ending: HIO hin hindindin.