Yesterday I was at the Wighton Centre in Dundee, helping organise the 10th anniversary events. I was in charge of displaying some of the books from the main Wighton Collection as well as new acquisitions from the Jimmy Shand Collection and the Alice Palmer Collection.
After the concert and the presentation some of my students joined in the informal music making.
I was contacted recently by a descendent of Alexander Grant of Shewglie, the early 18th century poet, piper, harper and fiddler. Alex Grant was a very interesting character, heavily involved in the Jacobite risings. He is said to have been a good poet or songwriter, but as far as I can see none of his poems survive. We know some details about two of them, but we dont have the text of either.
Grant composed a song in welcome to Charles Edward Stewart; it begins
Do bheatha Thearlaich Stiubhart,
Do bheatha do ar duthaich
which means basically, “welcome, Charles Stuart, welcome to our place”. Keith Sanger (West Highland Notes & Queries 20, March 1983) suggests it may be in a manuscript belonging the National Library of Scotland (no. 6 of the MacNicol collection, MS Acc2152), but this manuscript appears to be missing from the library.
Grant also composed a song, a “contest betwixt his Violin, Pipe and Harp”. The tune of this, and also an English paraphrase of the words, was published in Simon Fraser’s book in 1816. We are told that the fiddle is addressed as “Mairi nighean Dheorsa” (Mary the daughter of George), and this seems to have been also a title of the tune.
I think the tune is an older traditional song air; Allan MacDonald in his Thesis connects it to the pipe “March for a Beginner” in Joseph MacDonald’s Complete Theory. Perhaps more intriguingly, the tune is said to have been used for other songs in the 18th century, a poem by Ardnabi in praise of a fiddle, Mairi nighean Dheorsa, and another famous poem in praise of MacCrimmon’s bagpipes. What is the connection between this tune and the name Mairi nighean Dheorsa given to a fiddle? The later Ardnabi poem not only uses the name for the fiddle but also says that the air to be used when singing the poem is “Mairi nighean Dheorsa”. Did both Ardnabi and Grant pick up an older tune called Mairi nighean Dheorsa and use it to praise their fiddles, or did Grant pick up an older generic song air and attach it to the Mairi nighean Dheorsa name and theme?
Here’s my version of it. I decided to pick up on the themes of Fraser’s paraphrase of Grant’s song, so the first and fourth of my verses are fairly straight from Fraser’s fiddle score; for verses two and three I have improvised a pipe-style and a harp-style interpretation of the melody.
It’s also interesting to think that Alexander Grant, of Shewglie in Glen Urquhart, was a contemporary of Raghnall Mac Ailein Óig, of Morar; both are said to have played pipes, fiddle and clarsach.
Almost! One of my very slow long term projects is to learn to recycle broken silver harp strings. I have long been drawing wire, and today I took a first step at the other end of the process – melting a bundle of broken wires down into an ingot.
I would count this as an “interesting experiment” so far. I’ll need to do a few more melts before I have an ingot good enough to forge down into a rod ready to draw into wire.
For my concert last month in the Wighton Centre, Dundee, I tried to find tunes from as many different countries as I could. I was particularly keen to get an Inuit tune, because of the bowed zither traditions from Baffin Island and Northern Labrador.
I read up as much as I could about the various different traditions, and I have updated my Jouhikko web pages to include information on these different traditions. I also made a map to try and show how the different regional traditions of “bowed-harp” playing relate to each other:
The different numbered groups are my attempt to divide the different traditions. Group 1 is the bowed zithers of Canada and Iceland. Group 2 is the narrow-handhole bowed lyres from Northern Scandinavia. Group 3 is the wide-handhole bowed lyres from Southern Scandinavia, and group 4 is the fingerboard bowed lyres from Britain (though there are Continental examples of this type as well)
In the middle I have put Shetland, because no-one really knows what the form of the Shetland gue was. I like to think of it as being part of group 2, but some scholars have argued quite strongly that it should be in group 1.
I managed to get hold of the article by E. Y. Arima and M. Einarsson, Whence and Where the Eskimo Fiddle? published in the journal “Folk”, vol 18 1976. This has some very useful information about the Inuit bowed zithers including photos of a number of museum examples and alsoa photo of a soapstone carving of one being played. However it is not really clear to me exactly how these instruments were played and fingered.
The article also refers to an archive recording from the 1950s, after the tradition had died out and come to an end, when an Inuit person from Northern Labrador made a couple of instruments and played them. I am currently in negotiations to try and get hold of a copy of this recording to listen to it.
Professor Fergus Kelly will present the 2013 Statutory Public Lecture of the School of Celtic Studies on Friday 15th November at 8pm, Thomas Davis Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
What do the early Irish texts tell us about the history of music in this country? The main emphasis in this lecture will be on the period between the coming of Christianity in the 5th century and the Anglo-Norman invasion in the late 12th century. Topics to be discussed include the identification of the stringed instruments crot and timpán, the use of wind-instruments in military contexts, the development of bag-pipes, the functions of percussion instruments, and the various styles of singing mentioned in the texts. There will also be an account of the evidence for dancing in early Christian Ireland.
The lecture will conclude with a summary of the role of music in early Irish society, and a discussion of the Church’s attitude towards different types of music, as well as an account of the frequent association between music and the supernatural in early Irish literature.
Admission is free and open to the public; there is no need to register.
Part of Tionól 2013. Thanks to Maura Uí Croínín for passing this on.
I have been interested in just intonation as a way of tuning the harp since 2009 I think. Recently I was chatting about this and I was asked, is there a simple instructions or directions about how to tune the harp just?
It is not possible to have every interval on an instrument like a harp perfectly in tune. As soon as you make some intervals perfect, others become sour or dull. There are various solutions to this, and I wrote in 2009 describing some of the possible tunings for early Gaelic harp. Equal temperament is the modern scientific solution, making every interval a little bit equally out of tune. Historical systems that are usually used include Pythagorean tuning, which makes all the 5ths and 4ths pure but leaving the 3rds very rough, or Meantone which makes all of the major 3rds pure, leaving the minor 3rds and the 4ths and the 5ths sour. Just tunings on the other hand make different intervals of the same “class” different sizes, so some 4ths, 5ths, minor 3rds and major 3rds are pure, whilst others are out.
Just tunings are the most obvious solution for a diatonic instrument, because you can maximise the amount of consonance without having to take account of all the sharps and flats and key changes that you find in a chromatic instrument.
I have made up three instruction / demonstration sheets which show three possible just tunings that you can try on the harp. The first is pretty much the way I have been doing things, deliberately since 2009 and “accidentally” for somewhat longer I think. This one is pretty easy to tune on the harp, as the 5ths are all pure except the 3rd one in the sequence from a up to e, and if you listen to the sympathetic hum of the harp it is not hard to sound this 5th and tune it narrow so the e sounds pure against the sympathetic g drone of na comhluighe.
The third one is based on Highland bagpipe scales presented by Seamus MacNeill and also by Barnaby Brown. It is tuned exactly the same as the one above except that when you start the cycle of 4ths you push the c wide to make it sound wild and scary, just like on the pipes.
The middle one is a kind of half-way house I have made up. I think it’s harder to tune because your narrow 5th is the second in the sequence, d up to a. The a is not speaking so clearly against the sympathetic drone of the harp, so even though this tuning has more consonances than the other two I don’t think I will end up using it. But it’s in there as an option to think about. You’ll notice that it is a transposed version of the first: scale 2 with f natural is the same as scale 1 with f#.
The circles showing the consonant intervals are also useful if you want to think about the properties of different modes. You might think that the pentatonic scales c-d-e-g-a and g-a-b-d-e and f-g-a-c-d would all sound the same, but a glance at the chart will show that this is not the case at all!
Here’s a photo taken by one of the Museum staff, of my concert the other week.
The turnout was bigger than I had expected, at least 50 people in what is a fairly small gallery space. As usual I was slightly nervous of presenting the big, complex, intricate ceòl mór style pieces to a general audience, but afterwards people came up to me and said that the piece they loved best was Caniad San Silin – about 13 minutes of repetitive geometric variations.
For me it was such a thrill to present the music in this glorious setting. I chose pieces that were closely connected in to late Medieval contexts, all of them secular instrumental tunes. The structure and style of the music really fitted well with the decoration and craftsmanship of the medieval maces.
You can see some of the maces behind me. From left to right, Glasgow, Heidelberg x 2, Tübingen, Erfurt, and Bishop Fox’s crozier from Corpus, Oxford.
Dammit they are just so shiney!
From Tobar an Dualchais:
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches is today announcing a special fundraising campaign to support our ongoing work to develop online access to some of Scotland’s most important audio archives.
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches is a landmark project to digitize, catalogue and make available online thousands of hours of folklore and folklife recordings made in Scotland over the past century. Most of these recordings come from the Sound Archive of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, which contains a wealth of traditional songs, music, tales, poetry, oral history and information on a range of traditional customs and beliefs, from weather lore to second sight, and much more.
Already an invaluable cultural and linguistic resource, Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches contains a great deal of material in Scots, English, and Gaelic, including many hundreds of recordings made in the Hebrides by John Lorne Campbell of Canna (1906–1996), starting in the 1930s. Our archives are also an important documentary source of information on the enormous social and economic changes that occurred in 20th century Scotland, with ordinary people across the country describing the last days of centuries-old working practices and the corresponding effects on their communities.
Although our website now contains many thousands of such tracks, several thousand more hours of recordings from the School of Scottish Studies Archives and Canna Collection are still waiting to be catalogued and added to the site. To help us achieve this goal we are inviting members of the public to donate to our new crowdfunding campaign, hosted by Sponsume at http://www.sponsume.com/project/tobar-dualchais , and running until the 15 December 2013.
Donors can choose from a range of fantastic rewards, including limited song releases from our recent Gaelic and Scots Artists in Residence, traditional musicians Julie Fowlis and Chris Wright, short-courses at the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig college on Skye, and Lifetime Membership of the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland.
For more information on Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches and our new fundraising campaign, please contact Mairead MacDonald (Director) on 01471 888 600 / md2.smo@uhi.ac.uk, or Chris Wright (Crowdfunding Campaign Manager) on chris.wright@ed.ac.uk.
This week I was visiting harpmaker Natalie Surina in Oughterard. My photo shows the early morning mist rising between the hedgerows.
This engraving from Brook’s 1892 article in PSAS about the medieval Scottish university maces shows the head of the Glasgow mace, which was made in Scotland in the 1460s. When I was in the exhibition in MUSA looking at this mace, I was struck by the foliage designs on the panels in the central stage (these six panels are illustrated on the engraving).
The leaves on these lovely engraved silver plates are similar to the late 15th century forepillar leaves on the Queen Mary harp, However the leaves on the mace are not identical, and to me they looked a bit later. There are similar leaves on the 16th century Ballinderry harp metalwork.
Brook suggests that the plates are not original to the 1460s construction of the mace, but may have been late 16th century post-reformation replacements of figures of saints. The St Andrews Arts mace and Canon law mace both have very similar designs and both have saints in these middle panels.
The leaves are not easy to see on the mace in the museum as they are above eye level and the silver is very highly polished. However I am looking forward to comparing them with the leaves on my replica of the Queen Mary harp at my concert tomorrow.
