From Edinburgh to Illinois
by Dr William Donaldson
B&F November 2006
The help I have received from the readers of the Box and Fiddle has been invaluable and I have been much encouraged by this and by the good wishes of composers and others for my collection. The links between the different parts of the instrumental tradition have always fascinated me. As a small thank you to the B&F and your readers I have gathered together some of these connections into an article.
Scotland’s Box, Fiddle and Pipe Music
From his home in Monikie on 15th May 1908 the great fiddle virtuoso James Scott Skinner wrote to an old friend:
Dear Colin Cameron,
Pray learn this and put on the flutterin’ blades as only pipers can.
Scott Skinner
Attached to the note was a score. Written in Skinner’s characteristically flamboyant hand was a new pipe march The Lovat Scouts, one of many that Skinner was to write for that instrument.
Colin Cameron (1843-1916) was head of the legendary Cameron piping dynasty, eldest of the three sons of Donald Cameron and Margaret Mackenzie (after whom the strathspey, Maggie Cameron, is named) who enjoyed immense prestige and influence in the piping world. Sixty years later my own piping teacher, Bob Nicol (1905-1978), would recall his meeting with Colin’s younger brother, Sandy Cameron (1848-1923) at the Northern Meeting in Inverness in 1922. Bob had played The Battle of the North Inch of Perth, had left the hall and was standing with an older companion who was no relation. An old man with a white beard approached them and said, “I liked your tune”. Assuming the companion to be Bob’s father he added, “He’s going to be some player that laddie of yours”.
The recent inclination to treat the pipes as separate from the mainstream of Scottish tradition has tended to cut pipers off from much of their musical past. A wider view reveals how strong are the links between all the strands of our instrumental and song tradition.
It is often forgotten how common multi-instrumentalism has been in the performer community. At a country dance in the old days the call might go out for the Highland piper, the small pipe player and the fiddler, and a single person would walk through the door. A century ago Allan MacDougall Bayne reported an interview with Mrs Norman MacCrimmon, a representative of piping’s most illustrious family who said, “It was a mistake to think of the MacCrimmons only as pipers; they were also fiddlers, and she almost inclined to say harpers, but drew back….” (‘The Glenelg MacCrimmons’, Oban Times, 6/8/1910, p3). Hector MacAndrew (1903-1980) was taught both pipes and fiddle by his father who was piper to Lord Leith at Fyvie Castle and included the great piper, Charles MacArthur, as well as William Marshall and Niel Gow among his musical ancestors.
Bob Nicol’s own piping teacher, the famous John MacDonald of Inverness (1865-1953), also played the fiddle. On one occasion he refused to play for his pupils from an advance copy he had just received of a new collection of pipe music. It would not be right, he said, before publication. Eventually he acquiesced; it would be okay, he supposed, to play the tunes on the fiddle instead. The MacDonalds were a musical family. Johnny’s brother Andrew was also an outstanding piper while his youngest sister Helen (c.1884-1975) was organist at the Kirk of Craigellachie and composed the 3rd and 4th parts of the strathspey The Caledonian Society of London.
The historic contribution of women to Scottish music is difficult to access because of their restricted public role, especially in piping. But the main teacher of Pipe Major Willie Ross (1878-1966) himself one of the greatest editors, composers, players and teachers of the 20th century was his mother, Mary Collie of Monar, another multi-instrumentalist who as a girl had played the concertina for hours at a Highland Ball when the pipers got too drunk to play.
The earliest published pipe music came from the MacDonald brothers, Joseph (1739-1763) and Patrick (1729-1824) of Durness, both of whom were also fiddle players – Patrick sufficiently so to stand in for the maestro Stabilini at one of the latter’s Edinburgh concerts. Using the manuscript Joseph had transcribed before leaving for India as a gift for his sister Flora (c.1734-1805), Patrick brought out A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs, Never hitherto published, To which are added a few of the most lively Country Dances or Reels from the North Highlands, Western Isles; and some Specimens of Bagpipe Music (Edinburgh, 1784). The text was engraved by James Johnston, Robert Burns’s collaborator on The Scots Musical Museum and with a subscription list of over 1,000 seems to have comfortably outsold the first volume of Niel Gow’s Collection of Strathspey Reels which was issued the same year. Highland Vocal Airs was a musical landmark and a further five editions were issued during Patrick’s lifetime. But Patrick’s occupation (he was minister of Kilmore near Oban) protected him from the loss of respectability attached to being a mere musician. As a fellow clergyman, Rev George Forbes, wrote from Aberdeenshire in about 1792 to his son in India, “Poor Miss Fairbairn married a concert fiddler, they are both in Aberdeen – and much looked down upon……”
To be a musician in 18th and early 19th century Scotland was to have the status of a servant and the pioneering publications of Scottish music were often undertaken at considerable personal cost. Donald MacDonald (c.1767-1840) established the modern method of writing pipe music, publishing two pipe tutors in 1808 and 1817 and followed this in 1818/19 with The Ancient Martial Music of Caledonia, which almost bankrupted him. The greatest song collection of the period The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1819-1821) from writer and fiddle player James Hogg, (1770-1835), met a stormy reception. Hogg wrote angrily;
The Secretary of the Highland society refuses to pay me my £50…I have made a collection which no man on earth could have made but myself, for (Sir Walter) Scott could not have collected the music…There is no reason why I should be gulled and cheated by everybody in this manner after the pains I have taken.
But the commercial pressures on fiddlers were less intense than they were for their piping colleagues in one important respect. The complex system of ornament used by pipers meant that pipe music occupied a lot of space, even with the gracenotes set in reduced type. This meant that it cost a lot to engrave or typeset and the resulting publications were expensive. Editors of fiddle music could get half a dozen or more tunes into the same space occupied by a couple of two-parted pipe tunes. This expansive and expensive notation was even more of a barrier in publishing piobaireachd and it was the musical heir of Donald MacDonald who devised an ingenious system of tackling this.
Facing financial ruin following the failure of his Ancient Martial Music of Caledonia Donald, in desperation, sent the manuscript of his intended second volume to a gentleman pupil J. W. Grant of Elchies on Speyside. Grant presented a transcript of this to his grandson Charles Simeon Thomason (1833-1911) when the latter was commissioned into the Bengal Engineers in 1852. This was the dawn of the great age of communication, the urge to include everybody within print media. The leaders of the ‘cheap music’ movement would soon begin to drive down prices so that printed music would no longer be the preserve of the wealthy. The pipers were well abreast of this, the main figures being Donald MacPhee (1842-1890), William Ross (1823-1891) and David Glen (1853-1916). The most brilliantly innovative of all, however, was C. S. Thomason who was dedicated to making the whole piobaireachd repertoire available at a price pipers could afford. He devised a form of musical shorthand to get round the problem of scale and engraved the plates himself to keep costs down. His epoch making edition Ceol Mor was published in 1900 and remains one of the great Scottish music books.
But changes in the institutional climate in piping barred all but the ‘official’ scores for competitive purposes and the great Victorian editions were allowed to go out of print. They remained virtually unknown for much of the 20th century. When Bob Nicol directed me to Ceol Mor in the late 1960s the book was not available anywhere. Bob’s own copy had been stolen from the pipers’ room at Balmoral Castle and the local university at Aberdeen had never heard of it. The enterprising Wakefield firm, EP, brought out a reprint in 1975 along with several of the classic old piobaireachd collections. But after their takeover in the early 1980s there was nobody in Scotland to continue the work. However, since 2000 Steve Scaife of Ceol Sean in Springfield, Illinois, has issued many of the great pipe music collections on CD at prices which match the cheapest the Victorians were able to achieve and with a compactness and ease of use that signals a new era in pipe music. Amongst its titles Ceol Sean makes available, for the first time in 100 years, David Glen’s mighty 17 volume collection of light music for the pipes Highland Bagpipe Music which contains more than 1,000 tunes. As I write I have 16 classic collections sitting on my mantelpiece occupying the space of a moderately sized tea-caddy.
A glance at these older collections shows how rich were links with the fiddle and song traditions. David Glen published pipe settings by himself and Colin Cameron of several Scott Skinner tunes, including the strathspey and reel Mrs. David Glen. His cousin John Glen’s Early Scottish Melodies (Edinburgh 1900) remains another seminal book in the history of Scottish music. As well as being bagpipe makers, the firm of J. & R. Glen were at the centre of the early music revival in Scotland, making the first clarsachs to appear for centuries. As ever, Skinner was never far from the centre of things. At his funeral in Aberdeen in March 1927 his coffin was surmounted by his fiddle in its open case draped in black. It bore the inscription ‘Presented to Mr James Scott Skinner by Mr William Grant, of Elchies and Carron, 1873’; William Grant was the uncle of C. S. Thomason. Skinner’s friend, the great pipe composer George S. McLennan played at the graveside. His scarcely less brilliant cousin, the piper and dancer William McLennan (1860-1893), had toured North America with Skinner in 1893, dying of meningitis in Montreal.
There are still Aberdonians who recall Skinner concerts. One described him as “a nippy wee mannie” and said that if Skinner was playing in the Music Hall he would quit the stage if the audience began to clap or tap their feet. He would not let the audience dictate the tempo. The tremendous speed which he seems to have played is a frequent subject for discussion and there has been speculation that this may have been caused by the limited playing time of early acoustically recorded cylinders and discs. But in Harp and Claymore (1903-4) Skinner explicitly recommended 20 seconds for a two-parted strathspey and 15 seconds for a reel. These timings coincide with those specified by George Farquhar Graham in The Songs of Scotland Adapted to their Appropriate Melodies (Edinburgh, 1861) and by John Glen in The Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music (Edinburgh, 1891)
There are implications for piping once again. In 1971 I recorded Bob Nicol playing competition marches, strathspeys and reels at his home at Birkhall, Ballater. His strathspeys and reels Delvinside, Lochiel’s Away to France, Tullochgorm, Iain son of Hector’s Big Reel, MacBeth’s Strathspey, Pretty Marion, Arniston Castle, Charlie’s Welcome, The Shepherd’s Crook, The Flagon, Blair Drummond and Cabarfeidh, heavy ‘competition’ pieces though they were, were played with tremendous dash and fire, taking the equivalent of 26/26 seconds per two parts in his strathspeys, and 18/19 seconds in his reels. The speed, the accuracy, the way the ornamentation was played as part of the melody rather than a separate department was far indeed from the typically dull and over-cautious approach of modern competing pipers. Bob ended with a chuckle. “Aye”, he said, “I was fair travellin’.”
Scotland’s Box, Fiddle and Pipe Music
From his home in Monikie on 15th May 1908 the great fiddle virtuoso James Scott Skinner wrote to an old friend:
Dear Colin Cameron,
Pray learn this and put on the flutterin’ blades as only pipers can.
Scott Skinner
Attached to the note was a score. Written in Skinner’s characteristically flamboyant hand was a new pipe march The Lovat Scouts, one of many that Skinner was to write for that instrument.
Colin Cameron (1843-1916) was head of the legendary Cameron piping dynasty, eldest of the three sons of Donald Cameron and Margaret Mackenzie (after whom the strathspey, Maggie Cameron, is named) who enjoyed immense prestige and influence in the piping world. Sixty years later my own piping teacher, Bob Nicol (1905-1978), would recall his meeting with Colin’s younger brother, Sandy Cameron (1848-1923) at the Northern Meeting in Inverness in 1922. Bob had played The Battle of the North Inch of Perth, had left the hall and was standing with an older companion who was no relation. An old man with a white beard approached them and said, “I liked your tune”. Assuming the companion to be Bob’s father he added, “He’s going to be some player that laddie of yours”.
The recent inclination to treat the pipes as separate from the mainstream of Scottish tradition has tended to cut pipers off from much of their musical past. A wider view reveals how strong are the links between all the strands of our instrumental and song tradition.
It is often forgotten how common multi-instrumentalism has been in the performer community. At a country dance in the old days the call might go out for the Highland piper, the small pipe player and the fiddler, and a single person would walk through the door. A century ago Allan MacDougall Bayne reported an interview with Mrs Norman MacCrimmon, a representative of piping’s most illustrious family who said, “It was a mistake to think of the MacCrimmons only as pipers; they were also fiddlers, and she almost inclined to say harpers, but drew back….” (‘The Glenelg MacCrimmons’, Oban Times, 6/8/1910, p3). Hector MacAndrew (1903-1980) was taught both pipes and fiddle by his father who was piper to Lord Leith at Fyvie Castle and included the great piper, Charles MacArthur, as well as William Marshall and Niel Gow among his musical ancestors.
Bob Nicol’s own piping teacher, the famous John MacDonald of Inverness (1865-1953), also played the fiddle. On one occasion he refused to play for his pupils from an advance copy he had just received of a new collection of pipe music. It would not be right, he said, before publication. Eventually he acquiesced; it would be okay, he supposed, to play the tunes on the fiddle instead. The MacDonalds were a musical family. Johnny’s brother Andrew was also an outstanding piper while his youngest sister Helen (c.1884-1975) was organist at the Kirk of Craigellachie and composed the 3rd and 4th parts of the strathspey The Caledonian Society of London.
The historic contribution of women to Scottish music is difficult to access because of their restricted public role, especially in piping. But the main teacher of Pipe Major Willie Ross (1878-1966) himself one of the greatest editors, composers, players and teachers of the 20th century was his mother, Mary Collie of Monar, another multi-instrumentalist who as a girl had played the concertina for hours at a Highland Ball when the pipers got too drunk to play.
The earliest published pipe music came from the MacDonald brothers, Joseph (1739-1763) and Patrick (1729-1824) of Durness, both of whom were also fiddle players – Patrick sufficiently so to stand in for the maestro Stabilini at one of the latter’s Edinburgh concerts. Using the manuscript Joseph had transcribed before leaving for India as a gift for his sister Flora (c.1734-1805), Patrick brought out A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs, Never hitherto published, To which are added a few of the most lively Country Dances or Reels from the North Highlands, Western Isles; and some Specimens of Bagpipe Music (Edinburgh, 1784). The text was engraved by James Johnston, Robert Burns’s collaborator on The Scots Musical Museum and with a subscription list of over 1,000 seems to have comfortably outsold the first volume of Niel Gow’s Collection of Strathspey Reels which was issued the same year. Highland Vocal Airs was a musical landmark and a further five editions were issued during Patrick’s lifetime. But Patrick’s occupation (he was minister of Kilmore near Oban) protected him from the loss of respectability attached to being a mere musician. As a fellow clergyman, Rev George Forbes, wrote from Aberdeenshire in about 1792 to his son in India, “Poor Miss Fairbairn married a concert fiddler, they are both in Aberdeen – and much looked down upon……”
To be a musician in 18th and early 19th century Scotland was to have the status of a servant and the pioneering publications of Scottish music were often undertaken at considerable personal cost. Donald MacDonald (c.1767-1840) established the modern method of writing pipe music, publishing two pipe tutors in 1808 and 1817 and followed this in 1818/19 with The Ancient Martial Music of Caledonia, which almost bankrupted him. The greatest song collection of the period The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1819-1821) from writer and fiddle player James Hogg, (1770-1835), met a stormy reception. Hogg wrote angrily;
The Secretary of the Highland society refuses to pay me my £50…I have made a collection which no man on earth could have made but myself, for (Sir Walter) Scott could not have collected the music…There is no reason why I should be gulled and cheated by everybody in this manner after the pains I have taken.
But the commercial pressures on fiddlers were less intense than they were for their piping colleagues in one important respect. The complex system of ornament used by pipers meant that pipe music occupied a lot of space, even with the gracenotes set in reduced type. This meant that it cost a lot to engrave or typeset and the resulting publications were expensive. Editors of fiddle music could get half a dozen or more tunes into the same space occupied by a couple of two-parted pipe tunes. This expansive and expensive notation was even more of a barrier in publishing piobaireachd and it was the musical heir of Donald MacDonald who devised an ingenious system of tackling this.
Facing financial ruin following the failure of his Ancient Martial Music of Caledonia Donald, in desperation, sent the manuscript of his intended second volume to a gentleman pupil J. W. Grant of Elchies on Speyside. Grant presented a transcript of this to his grandson Charles Simeon Thomason (1833-1911) when the latter was commissioned into the Bengal Engineers in 1852. This was the dawn of the great age of communication, the urge to include everybody within print media. The leaders of the ‘cheap music’ movement would soon begin to drive down prices so that printed music would no longer be the preserve of the wealthy. The pipers were well abreast of this, the main figures being Donald MacPhee (1842-1890), William Ross (1823-1891) and David Glen (1853-1916). The most brilliantly innovative of all, however, was C. S. Thomason who was dedicated to making the whole piobaireachd repertoire available at a price pipers could afford. He devised a form of musical shorthand to get round the problem of scale and engraved the plates himself to keep costs down. His epoch making edition Ceol Mor was published in 1900 and remains one of the great Scottish music books.
But changes in the institutional climate in piping barred all but the ‘official’ scores for competitive purposes and the great Victorian editions were allowed to go out of print. They remained virtually unknown for much of the 20th century. When Bob Nicol directed me to Ceol Mor in the late 1960s the book was not available anywhere. Bob’s own copy had been stolen from the pipers’ room at Balmoral Castle and the local university at Aberdeen had never heard of it. The enterprising Wakefield firm, EP, brought out a reprint in 1975 along with several of the classic old piobaireachd collections. But after their takeover in the early 1980s there was nobody in Scotland to continue the work. However, since 2000 Steve Scaife of Ceol Sean in Springfield, Illinois, has issued many of the great pipe music collections on CD at prices which match the cheapest the Victorians were able to achieve and with a compactness and ease of use that signals a new era in pipe music. Amongst its titles Ceol Sean makes available, for the first time in 100 years, David Glen’s mighty 17 volume collection of light music for the pipes Highland Bagpipe Music which contains more than 1,000 tunes. As I write I have 16 classic collections sitting on my mantelpiece occupying the space of a moderately sized tea-caddy.
A glance at these older collections shows how rich were links with the fiddle and song traditions. David Glen published pipe settings by himself and Colin Cameron of several Scott Skinner tunes, including the strathspey and reel Mrs. David Glen. His cousin John Glen’s Early Scottish Melodies (Edinburgh 1900) remains another seminal book in the history of Scottish music. As well as being bagpipe makers, the firm of J. & R. Glen were at the centre of the early music revival in Scotland, making the first clarsachs to appear for centuries. As ever, Skinner was never far from the centre of things. At his funeral in Aberdeen in March 1927 his coffin was surmounted by his fiddle in its open case draped in black. It bore the inscription ‘Presented to Mr James Scott Skinner by Mr William Grant, of Elchies and Carron, 1873’; William Grant was the uncle of C. S. Thomason. Skinner’s friend, the great pipe composer George S. McLennan played at the graveside. His scarcely less brilliant cousin, the piper and dancer William McLennan (1860-1893), had toured North America with Skinner in 1893, dying of meningitis in Montreal.
There are still Aberdonians who recall Skinner concerts. One described him as “a nippy wee mannie” and said that if Skinner was playing in the Music Hall he would quit the stage if the audience began to clap or tap their feet. He would not let the audience dictate the tempo. The tremendous speed which he seems to have played is a frequent subject for discussion and there has been speculation that this may have been caused by the limited playing time of early acoustically recorded cylinders and discs. But in Harp and Claymore (1903-4) Skinner explicitly recommended 20 seconds for a two-parted strathspey and 15 seconds for a reel. These timings coincide with those specified by George Farquhar Graham in The Songs of Scotland Adapted to their Appropriate Melodies (Edinburgh, 1861) and by John Glen in The Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music (Edinburgh, 1891)
There are implications for piping once again. In 1971 I recorded Bob Nicol playing competition marches, strathspeys and reels at his home at Birkhall, Ballater. His strathspeys and reels Delvinside, Lochiel’s Away to France, Tullochgorm, Iain son of Hector’s Big Reel, MacBeth’s Strathspey, Pretty Marion, Arniston Castle, Charlie’s Welcome, The Shepherd’s Crook, The Flagon, Blair Drummond and Cabarfeidh, heavy ‘competition’ pieces though they were, were played with tremendous dash and fire, taking the equivalent of 26/26 seconds per two parts in his strathspeys, and 18/19 seconds in his reels. The speed, the accuracy, the way the ornamentation was played as part of the melody rather than a separate department was far indeed from the typically dull and over-cautious approach of modern competing pipers. Bob ended with a chuckle. “Aye”, he said, “I was fair travellin’.”