Scotland's Music: Working with Martin Dalby on a BBC radio series

Martin Dalby had retired as head of music and Hugh MacDonald was his equally benign successor, and Martin was once again free to produce.

Martin is – well, alas, was – a bird. Being of the human persuasion, one might have claimed him as flightless but that would not have been true. He flew light aircraft and his imagination was in constant flight.

When we worked together for BBC Radio Scotland on the 30 90-minute radio programmes of Scotland’s Music (1991-92) there was no penny-pinching or, if there was, Martin somehow kept its effects concealed.

These were crafted programmes. Has any radio station anywhere commissioned that many of that length pursuing the one topic? – the history of Scotland’s music from prehistoric times to the present day. I was to research, write and present and Martin was to produce, though his role went a lot further than that.

We had wonderful fun and we trusted each other – and I should say here emphatically that the BBC trusted Martin. Neil Fraser, head of BBC Radio Scotland, told us we had a 90-minute slot on Sunday afternoons. Hugh’s idea was to offer 26 half-hour programmes outlining the history of Scottish music, to be followed by 26 hour-long recitals of relevant music, not necessarily Scottish. But Neil wanted 26 90-minute programmes about the history, he wanted them Scottish, and he wanted them crafted from start to finish without a break.

Frankly, we were scared. We were not sure if there would be enough material. Besides, nobody, but nobody, had ever crafted 90-minute programmes. Sixty minutes, yes. But a whole series of 90 minutes – no ads of course (this was the BBC), no breaks for news, no trailers for other programmes. Nothing half-hearted.

There was even a huge poster on the walls of Hillhead Subway and a splendid launch with Nigel Boddice, the BBC SSO trumpeter in costume playing the 2000-year-old Caprington Horn. What an opportunity!

READ MORE: A behind-the-scenes insight into the world of radio at BBC Scotland

In the end we kept discovering so much material that we needed more programmes. Twenty-six fits into two quarters of 13 weeks. Any more would screw up the schedules. Instead of telling us to go and boil our heids, we were given four more.

We had every facility and Martin knew better than any how to make use of the amazing human musical and engineering resources to which the BBC gave him access, all wonderfully supported by secretaries, studio managers, and sound engineers. It was teamwork and Martin was the benign leader of the team. News announcers came in and acted out voices from many different centuries, a German orchestral musician came in and was Mendelssohn, Martin himself took on several “parts” – for there was much re-creation of scenes throughout history, mini dramas in music and sound fed by material from the BBC’s own sound archives from their glorious pre-digital days.

Martin being a bird, much of our communication was in avian terms and full of friendly banter. I recall upbraiding him for not knowing of certain recordings of Scottish music. I described him as “a down-feather of some misbegotten chick: a plucked buzzard: a whimpering whimbrel; a pheasant without a crop; a chicken without a gizzard; an oyster-catcher without protest” – and so on.

Martin was thoroughly entertained. On one occasion I asked him to find a better recording than the one most available. I shall keep the piece and the performer anonymous but part of Martin’s response (below left) wittily demonstrated the performance’s failure to take off.

Martin and I were born in the same year. We were both composers but we both loved words as well as music and in our different ways we loved to play with both. Martin was a great fan of limericks of the “There was a young lady of ...” variety but memory fortunately fails me.

He was, however, much more disciplined than I and also accomplished, so we complemented each other, because I was more unruly. Martin never slapped me down for it – you could almost say he used it. He was, of course, a BBC man, a proper employee.

I was freelance.

But we both lived and worked together at a time when the BBC was still a true cultural leader in the best Reithian sense and for all that there were bitter battles, especially when the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra was threatened with dissolution and the Scottish Radio Orchestra was indeed dissolved, there were opportunities and joys given to few in the world of broadcasting, never mind the arts as a whole. How to begin? We started with a bird. The snow bunting.

They still nest on the high tops in Scotland and we reckoned theirs was the first music heard in our land as the ice retreated.

As a composer himself, Martin was acutely aware of the series as not just a history and series of performances but as a soundtrack. Such were our freedoms that I remember spending hours trying to keep Mary, Queen of Scots audibly at anchor off Leith in a haar, debating the creaking of rigging, the slapping of water against the hull of her ship, deciding with which lute piece she would pass the time until they could land, and arguing as to whether you could have a wind at the same time as a haar – which of course you can.

READ MORE: John Swinney urged to commit to culture as brief scrapped in reshuffle

We recreated the drowning of a piper in the River Clyde; we went to sea in whaling ships; and we accompanied Tobias Hume on his viola-da-gamba with the sounds of early 17th-century warfare. When I say “we” what I really mean is the sound engineers. Yes, we fed them the ideas but it was they who realised them.

In those days the studio was properly manned. There was Martin as producer; his secretary who handled the telephone and the timings; the studio manager who ensured the whole set-up and the presence of the necessary equipment; the chief sound engineer and the assistant sound engineer.

This meant Martin and I were free to concentrate entirely on presentation and artistic outcome, relying on the expertise and incomparable hearing of the sound engineers in particular, whose sense of timing when it came to bring in voiceover against effects, or raise the howling of a gale at sea to match the climax of a whaling song, was perfect. Tony Kime (in the studio with Martin Dalby, below) was a regular in these sound escapades.

They were always alive to possibilities, full of suggestions, creating every kind of atmosphere so that the studio receded and became the world we were evoking. One of our best efforts was when we gave an entire 90 minutes to one obscure composer, James Oswald. Many pieces were recorded specially, including a Freemasonic Anthem which I insisted on slotting in on the very day we were to record my script.

Instead of getting a bollocking from Martin, he asked what forces were required to record it. “Three male voices and a harpsichord,” I replied. Martin consulted his diary and declared that Paisley Abbey Choir could squeeze it into a forthcoming recording schedule. It was always “can do”.

We took Oswald out of his 18th-century music shop and on a London walkabout, complete with the correct church bells, and street vendors featuring in two specially recorded Oswald satirical cantatas.

We got a Sony Gold Medal for that one. I remember at the big bash in the London Grosvenor Hotel the people from the Classic FM table against whom we were competing, coming over to congratulate us.

The other finalist to lose out was BBC Radio 3. Nobody came over from their table and Martin’s boss and head of music UK didn’t send a word of congratulation to him either. Duke Hussey wrote to us both but how Martin’s own boss could have turned his back on him at such a moment is ... but enough of that.

Above all, there was Martin’s faith in the music. His open-minded readiness not only to embrace the unknown but to get the orchestra and soloists to record ravishing beauties from such as Mackenzie’s The Rose of Sharon. It’s an eastern love story – in the Bible it is The Song of Solomon.

Martin loved love – and he himself gave love the most beautiful expression in his Nozze di Primavera composed for his wife Hilary. There are not many wives who can take a gift of such sensuality and tenderness into their widowhood. Her care of him in the last years was her own tender response.

Martin had a dry wit, accompanied often by a quiet chuckle. For a lad born of Yorkshire stock it was remarkable how utterly Scottish he was, though his choral works have echoes of that great English inheritance of church music which Scotland has rarely enjoyed.

But Martin’s voice, its north-east clarity and precision, and his capacity for intellectual rigour were as Scottish as his love of Scotland’s music in all its glorious multiplicity, along with a readiness to accept sentiment and even vulgarity as natural and proper parts of the whole.

Scotland’s west coast called to Martin as strongly as the east and often he flew over the Highlands to obscure landing strips out of a love of that freedom of flight which paralleled his love of birds.

He was extremely knowledgeable to the point where we would be walking along a beach with little flocks of anonymous waders and he would separate the knots from the sanderlings, the sanderlings from the plovers, the ringed plovers from the common plovers, and the whole lot from the redshanks.

The Delichon Dalbica

WHEN Martin Dalby won a British Academy of Songwriters Composers & Authors Gold Badge Award in 1998 he asked that I write the required accompanying eulogy. 

Here it is, The Delichon Dalbica, Delichon is the genus of swallows and martins. The Mary Bean referred to is the title of one of Martin’s pieces. The poem is reproduced from There Is No Night by kind permission of Kennedy & Boyd.

The delichon dalbica is a gentle bird
shy
modest
few have seen it
preening on the perch
but they have heard
more than a gentle trilling
or mild alarm call
from its secret
singing post
indeed its velvet viola
its kindly consort of strings
are prelude to
brash bands
songs its mother
never taught it
whole symphonies of sound
crashing upon the coasts
in extravagant waves
– as they withdraw
we find cast up
upon the shores
of hearing
a mary bean
Molucca mascot
warm and sensual
hold it in your palm
smell
the spice islands
hear
the sweet sung sentences
of love.