Reading about historic recordings

When I suggested to the committee of the Friends of Wighton back in the spring, that I could do a gramophone session for one of the regular Wednesday lunchtime concerts in the Wighton Centre in Dundee, I just thought it would be a bit of light-hearted fun, but actually it has become quite a serious task for me! From planning the sides and running order I’ll play, to opening and cleaning and oiling the machine, to reading up on the music so as to have something useful to say during the presentation, it is taking up a lot more time than I expected.

I have been reading some interesting books or at least sections of books. In Scottish Life and Society, A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, volume 10: Oral Literature and Performance Culture edited by John Beech, Owen Hand, Fiona MacDonald, Mark A. Mulhern and Jeremy Weston, (John Donald in association with the European Ethnological Research Centre and National Museums Scotland, 2007) (phew!), there is a very good chapter by Stuart Eydmann, ‘Diversity and diversification in Scottish music’. Eydman gives as a subtitle ‘Sketches for a Scottish musical-historical map’, and then gives a couple of pages in turn to a half-century or so, starting with “before 1840”, and then progressing, “1840-1900”, “1900-1945” and “post 1945”.

Of course it is the “1900 to 1945” section that is most relevant to the Scottish 78rpm gramophone records, though the late 19th century observations are useful as well. Eydman deals clearly and concisely with the different types of musical activities which different parts of society took part in, including domestic performance on instruments, both working class and ‘bourgeois’, as well as the music hall, one of the most important contexts for the gramophone records.

It seems to me that there were two different backgrounds from which musicians would come forward to produce a gramophone record of “Scottish music” in the teens, twenties and thirties: music hall performers, and “concert artists”, i.e. classical musicians. Harry Lauder is of course the best known music hall artist performing “scots songs”, and on the disc of his I have he is very much playing up all of the negative racial slurs of the Scotsman as a foolish, drunken, untrustworthy figure of fun. Both on this disc and on another, a record of Jock Mills from 1914, there is a similar vocal style, with slighty hysterical-sounding swoops down onto certain stressed notes, and a very curious extended rolled R in the middle or end of many words – I’m not aware of this sound as a part of any Scottish dialect and I assume it is a music-hall comic convention.

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser is the best known “concert artist” in this field. Her “Songs of the Hebrides”, ostensibly arrangements of traditional Gaelic songs, but in reality pretty much newly-composed pastiches, were very popular, and many classical singers specialised in them, such as Joseph Hislop (I have a 1933 disc of him). But other classical musicians turned to what we would consider genuine traditional material, and performed it in a pretty interesting straight classical style, such as Archie Anderson singing “Jock O’Hazeldean” (Walter Scott’s tidying up of a traditional border ballad) in 1914, or Kenneth MacRae singing “Òran Mòr Mhic Leoid” (a Gaelic song composed in the 1690s by Rory Dall Morrison) in 1931. The text is straight, the accompaniment is simple, and the vocal style is the classical norm of its time.

David McCallum was a leading violinist with the Edinburgh symphony orchestras, and you can hear his classical learning on his record (c.1929) with its extensive slow portamento sliding, but he has a lot of very distinctive Scottish fiddle ornaments as well – this is not just a straight classical performance of the tune, such as we hear today from players like Jordi Savall. McCallum very much has a foot in both camps. I almost said if indeed there were two camps then but of course there were, and we can hear the other “traditional” style on the archive recordings. But the old traditional fiddlers would never have made a gramophone record in the 1920s or 30s!

John MacDonald of Inverness on the pipes, playing “Lament for the Children” in 1927, does fit into this model, but perhaps not as obviously as first seems. Obviously he is not a “music hall performer” or indeed a “concert artist” in the classical sense, but his playing style, and the Pìobaireachd Society score he is working from, represent the height of high modernism, to the point that the traditional tune is barely identifiable in his extremely mannered playing.

The use of sliding as an articulation in classical music is a fascinating aspect of performance practice that is almost completely lost today. Robert Philip’s book Performing music in the age of recording (Yale 2004) documents in huge but fascinating detail the changes in performance style which were brought about in the 20s and 30s by the development of recording technology. This book reminds me of why I love the late 20s recordings so much – they are after the invention of electrical recording in 1925, so the sound quality is much better than pre-1925 
records, but they are before the big changes in style and presentation which quality recordings drove forward.

I also read Susan Motherway’s paper ‘Mediated music? the impact of recording on Irish traditional song performance’ in the interesting collection Ancestral imprints: Histories of Irish traditional music and dance ed. Thérèse Smith (Cork 2012). Apart from the rather silly pomo writing style of the title and introductary paragraphs, this is a very insightful article that considers commercial recordings of traditional singers from the 1990s on. Apart from the good comments about the way in which  different recordings place themselves very differently in the market, I was most struck by the comments about the amount of control that recording and sound engineers now have over the sound and the music of the singers.

It almost seemed reading this article that similar issues dealt with by Phillips for classical music in the 1920s and 30s, are currently playing out in traditional music. Perhaps these things are always playing out to some extent, but I am fascinated by that constant tension between the musician as a performance artist, standing in front of or even better alongside an audience of their peers, and presenting a musical performance as a personal interaction, saying something to the listeners; and the recording as a product, a manufactured good, that is to be kept on a shelf and admired as an artefact.

Deskford “carnyx”

I was up in Aberdeen yesterday, interviewing for an education project themed around the Deskford carnyx. As part of my preparation I was reading up on the Deskford find as well as on carnyxes generally, and some ideas crystallised in my mind about this object specifically, as well as about the whole theme of reconstructing archaeological objects more generally. And the recreation of ancient music is perhaps the most difficult strand of reconstructing ancient objects, because the musical instrument is not merely a decorative item or a functioning tool, but is the living substrate of a whole other creative art, i.e. music making.

I was chatting with Maura Uí Chróinín in Kilkenny, about the “BC/AD” music-archaeology theme of this year’s Galway Early Music Festival, and she made the point that most music archaeologists seem to work on their own, outside of both the musical and the archaeological mainstream. The reasons for this are obvious enough, since archaeologists most often don’t have music training and musicians don’t have archaeological background, and so the majority of scholars on both sides feel un-qualified to judge or participate in music-archaeology work.

The late Iron age object from Deskford (my photo shown on the right, in the NMS) was excavated in the 19th century and so is, by modern standards, poorly recorded and conserved. It is in the form of a sheet bronze hollow boar’s head, and has with it a number of associated sheet bronze items which seem to form the palate of the boar’s mouth, its lower jaw, and a circular plate which is often assumed to have closed the open back of the head. The original descriptions also mention a wooden tongue mounted on springs but these are lost.

Early suggestions of its function were perhaps as a headdress. In 1959, Stuart Piggot published a paper suggesting it may have been the bell of a distinctive type of Iron Age long trumpet, called carnyx. At that date, the carnyx was known from classical art and literature, and Piggot drew attention to a lost example excavated in Tattershall, England, in the 18th century.

Piggot’s article included a speculative reconstruction of the Deskford boar’s head mounted on a long vertical tube, and despite his reservations and cautions, this image and the idea of the only extant carnyx surviving from North-East Scotland captured the public imagination. In the 1990s, John Purser led a team to build a working reconstruction of the boars head as a long trumpet bell, following Piggot’s drawing. This modern carnyx has been played extensively by trombonist John Kenny – I remember seeing him play it at a concert in Edinburgh some years ago.

In all this excitement, people forget that Piggot’s suggestion was just that – a speculative suggestion made at a time when very little was actually known about the carnyx. Now we have a lot more information available, especially since the publication of detailed information of the set of almost complete carnyxes excavated in 2004 in Tintinac in France. Looking over the depictions, the Tintinac examples (illustration left from Wikipedia) and the River Witham drawing publiushed by Piggot, I see a number of important features that could be said to characterise the carnyx. The tube is tapering along its whole length like a horn, and flares gently but markedly towards the animal head, which is not seperate in shape but forms a smooth continuation of the bore flare. The animal mouth is wide open, not constricting the bell of the instrument. In contrast, the Deskford head tapers the other way, severly constricting the bell of the reconstructed instrument – a recent acoustical study notes that it acts like a “trombone mute”. Also, the use of the circular dished plate to close the back of the boar’s head requires a thin tube, with a sudden step in profile as the tube meets the head. Again this has an adverse effect on the harmonicity of the instrument in contrast to the smooth expansion of the other extant and depicted carnyxes.

These considerations alone make me instantly very suspicious of this idea, that the Deskford head represents the remains of a musical instrument. I can see no specific evidence to support this interpretation and I can see a number of problems, ways in which the Deskford head is markedly different in form from all of the other extant and depicted carnyxes. I would go as far as to say, the Deskford boar’s head is not a carnyx.

A number of descriptions of the reconstruction Deskford carnyx are at pains to point out that it involves a large amount of interpretative or newly-invented design, but that nonetheless it represents a fascinating working instrument that can “result in
instruments capable of playing a valuable role in the musical culture of the present day.”  (M. Campbell & J. Kenny, Acoustical and musical properties of the Deskford Carnyx reconstruction, Proceedings of the Acoustics 2012 Nantes Conference). This is the rub – you invent a new instrument, give it an ancient name and hang it on an ancient cultural icon or artefact, and so set off in a new direction. This is not music archaeology; this is modernist cultural creativity, re-imagining ancient symbols for new purposes. If the purpose was really to get the ancient carnyx up and running, then there are the Tintinac examples ready to be exactly replicated; compared to that, a new instrument using a copy of the Deskford boar’s head as its bell has virtually no archaeological or music-archaeological value. Clearly it is not intended to do music-archaeology work; instead it is designed and produced for present day national-cultural reasons, to provide a newly-invented iconic “ancient” Scottish sight and sound.

We are not so far away from the invention of the gut-strung lever harp in the 1890s, and the neglect of the historical Gaelic harp…

One final thought: many modern depictions or recreations of carnyxes emphasise its long S shape, with a vertical tube topped by a 90 degree bend to hold the animal head, and with another 90 degree bend at the bottom to hold the mouthpiece horizontal while the tube is vertical. It seems to me that all the ancient carnyxes did not have this 90 degree bend at the bottom – some may have had an oblique mouthpiece cut in the lower end of the vertical tube, but the normal arrangement seems to have been a plain mouthpiece on the end of the long tube, as seen on the Tintinac example illustrated above. So the player has to tip their head right back and blow almost vertically into the instrument. A very different playing position with all its implications for sound production!

Tutor book 2nd edition

I have completed the revision of my harp tutor book. “Progressive Lessons for Early Gaelic harp“.

The 1st edition was published in 2009 and I was starting to be unhappy with some of the text and instructions, and also with the music notation. When I first wrote the book, I was really unsure about including notation of the tunes. I seriously considered just omitting all the notation, and I did just that when I re-wrote the book in simplified form as “Clarsach lessons for young harpers“.

I feared that people would put the book up on their music stands and start sight-reading from the notation – and I have seen that happening.

So for the 2nd edition I am making a brave experiment – I wrote to Queens University Belfast to request permission to reproduce facsimiles of Bunting’s manuscripts, and so the music notation of the first edition has now been replaced in the 2nd edition with manuscript facsimiles. This has forced me to explain the music more clearly in the text, but the idea is that the text explanation plus the recorded examples on the CD will make everything clear.

So “Progressive Lessons” has become more serious and hardcore – but I feel OK with that because “Young Harpers” is available as a more easy and accessible introduction to the material.

I haven’t announced the 2nd edition yet – I’ll update the web pages for the 1st April update. But any orders placed from now on will get the 2nd edition.

Ceòl mór or pibroch for the clarsach

Right from the very beginning of my harp studies I was fascinated by the idea of ceòl mór on the harp. I started studying the first tunes (Fair Molly, the Butterfly and Burns March) from November or December 1999, and I think it was just a couple of months later that I found a cassette tape copy of Ann Heymann’s Queen of Harps in an Oxford Celtic/New Age shop. That recording, apart from eternally smelling of patchouli, of course has Ann’s 30 minute performance of her version of the pibroch, Lament for the Tree of Strings.

I think I was taken by the intricate repetitiveness of the music, like a journey through a landscape, or perhaps more pertinently like the folded geometric patterns in medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells. I was also interested in the abstract nature of the tunes, which are very different from the more “tuney” tunes more commonly found in traditional music nowadays.

I made a page on my old website about ceol mor, where I searched for inspiration and information.

The first ceòl mór tune I played on the harp was Cumh Easbig Earraghaal, the lament for the Bishop of Argyll, the manuscript source for which is reproduced in Alison Kinnaird’s and Keith Sanger’s book Tree of Strings. I think it took me a long time to get to grips with this tune but in some ways it made perfect sense to me – this is exactly what ancient harp music is meant to sound like, the contrasts between the different variations, and the opportunities for exploring different timbres and idioms as the variations progress. I continued to play and develop this tune and included it on my first CD, Clàrsach na Bànrighe, in 2008.

Ceòl mór is a genre of music that is best known nowadays as pipe music, played on the great highland bagpipe, where it is known as pibroch or pìobaireachd. I say “best known” though in fact you rarely hear pipers playing this type of music; it is rarely included in concert programmes, living instead in a rarefied world of piping competitions. I worked for a while with historical piper Barnaby Brown, on projects including promoting both piping and harping on the internet and developing online teaching resources. His unusual insight into the historical pibroch traditions gave me some useful understandings of the nature of this music and how it might live nowadays. Traditionally it belongs to the pipes and the fiddle and the old Gaelic harp with metal wire strings, and I feel each of the three instruments brings something different and unique to the music. None of them is “imitating” the other, each wholly owns the music and expresses some true deep spiritual essence of it in its own way.

I have continued to work on Gaelic harp ceòl mór; my latest CD Tarbh is entirely pibroch tunes (and I wonder if it is the first CD ever to be 100% harp ceòl mór). It is hard to market; it is serious music but it does fall between stools – too serious for traditional music followers, too traditional for classical and early music people. Pipers who play pibroch seem intruiged by it. When I perform concerts and include a big 10 minute ceòl mór tune, I am always nervous as to how the audience will react – will they be bored and restless? But afterwards I find people come up and say, that was the best piece of the whole concert!

Ceòl mór is such a huge world for me, I think I could spend the rest of my life just studying and playing this repertory. There is something truly meditative about the power of the music. More than one person has said how it is reminiscent of Indian Raga music, and I think it is the way that it selects just two or three notes and then cycles meditatively around them. There are points in some of the pibroch where a new tone appears and hits you with the force of emotion and power – I find it fascinating that such emotional intensity can be built up from such apparently simple material. Perhaps it has that intensity because of its deliberate, austere simplicity.

Just intonation

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!

Click on the picture to get all 3 charts as a PDF

Some thoughts on replicas of old instruments

To me the extant surviving instruments are like treasure-houses of detailed specific data about not only the historical instrument design and construction, but also about all other aspects of the historical music-making (because of the presumption that the original instruments were commissioned by discerning musicians).

So I would regard every last detail about the old instruments as having something important to tell us. And as a player investigating the old music traditions, I want a replica harp that is as close as humanly possible to the old museum examples.

Of the two oldest Gaelic harps, the Queen Mary and the Trinity College harp, I would say they are remarkably similar in design and construction, and that similarity points to a shared conservative instrument-making tradition and a shared conservative music-making tradition, covering Ireland and Scotland. Similarities between them I take to be confirmation of that shared tradition; differences between them become specific individual features of that particular instrument. (you can do the same exercise with the later harps but there are more differences then. The Trinity & Queen Mary are by far the most similar pair I would think).

The Queen Mary harp is far easier to consider since a lot more info has been published on it, mainly the study in 1904 by R.B. Armstrong and more recently Karen Loomis’s ongoing study of it which is published in interim in the Galpin Society Journal 2012.  The Trinity College harp is far less well studied or published; the information in Armstrong’s 1904 book is a lot more sketchy and has as I understand it at least one misleading error; and there has not been any further more recent published work than that.

When I commissioned my own harp (which is a copy of the Queen Mary harp) I insisted that my maker simply copy every aspect he could see with as much fidelity as possible, from selection of timber through to decoration and even the idiosyncracies of individual fittings and adjustments. The idea being to end up with a new instrument that was as close as possible to handling the real thing in as many respects as possible. Since then, Karen Loomis’s work producing 3D X-ray models of the instruments and materials analysis, has revealed important structural and decorative information that would have led to some different decisions being made with my copy, but that is part of the learning process, and Karen’s study has directly addressed certain questions which were raised by my commission.

When I worked with David Kortier on the HHSI Student Trinity Harps, this was a somewhat different project. The initial aim here was simply to obtain a set of affordable harps for use in summer school classes. We were not satisfied with any commercially available models so we approached Kortier to discuss options and he ended up making a custom student model for the Historical Harp Society of Ireland. The main design criteria for this student harp were that it be affordable and quick to make, but that it present a student in class with the string count, string spacing, ‘feel’, and overall ergonomics of the original harp. So you see there was no attempt made to reproduce the subtleties of construction or decoration; but from the beginning the exact geometry and ergonomics of the strings were the most important thing. This was so that a class student given one of these harps would instantly be learning the finger movements and playing techniques exactly as on a proper replica (i.e. exactly as on the real thing!), even if the nuances of sound and response were not as accurate as could be obtained by a proper replica.

We based the first HHSI Student Harp on the Trinity College harp because it is the Irish national symbol and this seemed appropriate. Kortier had visited Trinity College and inspected and measured the original some time before, so he was able to use a lot more than just the published data; even so there were a number of details that had to be guessed or interpolated simply because the data about the original is not available. I mean the data is there, it exists, but it is locked away inside the fabric of the instrument itself and would need a long term detailed programme of scientific analysis like is happening in Edinburgh, to discover it.

So in summary, reconstructing an instrument from the surviving old instruments really needs a partnership between high-tech scientific analysis of the original, and a highly skilled sensitive craftsman-artist. In practice, you have to compromise and make do with what you can get – most of the compromise to date being on the analysis side I have to say. I hope that the recently published ongoing work in Edinburgh will soon feed into the work of the artist-craftsmen and we start to see really high quality accurate replicas that take on board and accurately reproduce these important new discoveries about the detailed features of the old harps.

Every level of data is vital – from the large scale measurements of height, width, string count and string lengths etc, down to tiny details of alignment and adjustment and profiling, all combine to give a very particular playing experience of the musician with important implications for what is and is not idiomatic for that particular instrument – and as our mission is to rediscover the lost old historical idiom, it seems to me that the idiom of each specific historical instrument (or rather, the imperfectly recreated idiom of each attempted reconstruction) is a vital tool for this. And that means that each reconstruction has to be as close as humanly possible to the specific museum original to have any value in that process.

Music as architecture

Music is seen at different times and by different people in different cultures as different things. Working so intensely with the ancient Northern European traditions, I am more and more interested in the idea of music as architecture.

In earlier medieval and back through to classical times, music was seen as part of the quadrivium, the four mathematical or scientific subjects that formed the major part of a liberal education. The placing of music as a mathematical discipline alongside geometry, astronomy and arithmetic highlights the importance of number, ratio, and structural understanding in the ancient conception of what music truly was.

Vitruvius in his treatise points out how architecture depends on many other subjects, including geometry and music, to provide its essential numeric and structural grounding. But interestingly, he also says that an architect needs to know other subjects such as law, more humane subjects that we would now associate more with the emotional and expressive needs of musical creativity. I would think that this gives us a clue as to how music and architecture are related.

I see both as being first and foremost arts which create formal public spaces, which provide an environment for a person to be in. And being created environments, both a building and a musical performance are expected to be artificial, displaying their artifice, rather than natural and organic. Hence the rigid squareness and geometric layout of formal buildings. Yet, as Vitruvious is keen to point out, architecture must be rooted in natural forms, but I think this is more concerned with the supposedly natural nature of simple harmonic numbers, which are also found as the basis of ancient musical thought, scales and tunings.

I have often held up Caniad San Silin as a great example of a piece of medieval music that is gloriously architectural in its form. With 12 major divisions, grouped into four sets of three, each division having three sections, each section having four phrases, and with the four-fold sonorities of I O I I repeating, fractal-like, at every level, the conceptual basis of this music seems to me to be less like the intricate winding of an early medieval carpet page from one of the illuminated gospel books, and more like a cathedral (see the photo above of Carlisle cathedral, with its superimposed rows of arches upon arches from the wooden choir stalls up to the gilded ceiling).

So, if this kind of music is considered in architectural terms, what principles can we consider to help with performance and creativity? Well, one thing that seems interesting is the idea of a building having multiple uses and functions. It has to be formally beautiful and well proportioned, so as to be appreciated in detail as an art object, withstanding and rewarding close and intense scrutiny. But it also has to be a practical place for humans to be in whilst they do other business, in other words it has to provide a discreet, ergonomic ambience. This to my mind parallels music’s dual function as a focussed and concentrated art form as well as providing a background hum for distracted activity.

The other thing that buildings have to have, according to Vitruvius, is permanence, continuing solidity through time. Now this is the exact opposite of music, which by its very nature emphasises the transience of time and experience. But I am wondering if a single, unique musical performance can somehow express that timeless permanence through the memories of the people who listened to it. And if it can, does the concept of a “piece” of music have any part to play in this, or is it a hinderance instead?

Notation

“Nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni, pereunt, quia scribi non possunt”
for unless sounds are held in the memory by man they perish, because they cannot be written down

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, III, XV.

This quote has often been held up as evidence for the start of musical notation; because (so it seems), once notation is invented in the form of neumes and the musical staff, sounds can be written down.

This is of course a false, or at least very naive view. Notation only writes down certain lexical or semantical parts of the musical sound. I think Isidore was perhaps contrasting the world of sound, with the world of language – language is by its nature organised in semantic or lexical units, which can be assigned graphic symbols and so utterances can be preserved in writing.

But the world of sound is a sensory continuum. For the past century or so, sound has been able to be written down by the use of mechanical transponders, i.e. microphones; the written sound is in the form of a waveform etched onto wax or shellac or vinyl, or more recently chopped up and represented digitally. But even a stereo recording only captures the sound world at two specific points – sound is a 3-D phenomena filling a room or a space, and so far no way has been invented to my knowledge of writing down the totality of sound phenomena in any enclosed space.

I was, I now realise, very lucky to have been brought up in a living indigenous music tradition that to this day does not use conventional staff notation at all. I have seen fragments of performances transcribed into staff notation, but never for the use of practitioners – it is simply irrelevant, not done. The musicians do use a couple of different geometric and numerical tablatures, but these are not used in performance, only for composition, teaching, memorisation and record-keeping. The performance is entirely free from any written notation.

Chords, harmonies, and other types of music

I’m currently working on a fragment of one of Robert Carver’s 16th century masses, for a music and poetry event in Edinburgh on 24th November. This lush polyphony has led me to think about and read up on counterpoint, harmony, and chords. I have long considered the dominance that chordal harmony has held over peoples understanding of music; for example, Amy Murray’s account of her discussion with an eminent composer on her proposed presentation of the Gaelic songs she had collected out West from unaccompanied singers. In response to his enquiry as to what accompaniment she would use for the songs, she replied:
“none, I think”
“That’s a mistake” said he. “My ear, as I listen, supplies the harmony. But you won’t find them making much of an effect generally unless you give them some sort of a background”. (Father Allan’s Island, p.128)

Of course, he was the one who was out of line, because the old Gaelic singers on Eriskay would not have ever used harmony with these songs, and none of their forebearers in the tradition either. But he, I imagine, was unable to imagine music without “common practice” functional harmony – his ear, he tells us, supplies it, regardless of its appropriateness.

I think that there is a case to be made – perhaps a manifesto to be composed – for a music theory and a music aesthetic of non-chordal, non-harmonic music. It could be a modern equivalent of the work of the Florentine Camerata; Galilei’s Dialogue gives us a useful model of the application of historical research into lost musical traditions informing new developments in performance and composition.

I imagine the first challenge might be nomenclature. The early baroque innovators developed the style that came to be called monody. Perhaps we are more fussy nowadays about terminological exactitude. But this can help define the bounds of what is and is not under consideration.

I would think that the main concern of such a manifesto would be to organise and promote the appreciation of unaccompanied monophony, heterophony, and drone music. It would especially be interested in unaccompanied music – the art of a single performer, which has become somewhat transgressive nowadays, with the ever increasing pressure for collaborations. But not exclusively; heterophony is intrinsically communal music, such as Gaelic psalm singing, or the kind of instrumental performance you might hear at a pub session. And the inclusion of drone music allows us to consider consonant and dissonant intervals.

As a manifesto, our text would of course have to include a critique of the old order – of common practice, chordal harmony, and of counterpoint. It would advance moral and ethical issues and arguments in favour of change.