BEFORE I returned to live in Scotland on January 1, 2001, a friend asked me, “Why do you want to live in Scotland?” I thought about it before I answered. “Because of the way people speak there,” I said.
That reply begs many questions but I could elaborate simply by saying I meant not only voices but the music of the country, the acoustics, what you can hear in this nation, if you open your ears.
Particular places have their different sounds. The acoustics of Orkney allow you to listen to whispers across water; the air of parts of Skye still howls with winds that sometimes sound like grief; when the sun shines, wherever you are, you can hear the natural world in its various forms of life. Rain has its own music, every downpour distinctive. Every city makes different tunes, each one a symphony, each town a concerto, each village a quartet and all of them can be translated into solo piano music.
On Saturday at 7.30pm as part of Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, the Elgin-born, Edinburgh-schooled pianist Christopher Guild will return to Stockbridge Church to perform a wide-ranging all-Scottish programme of 20th-century music by composers from across the country, from the Borders, Glasgow and Edinburgh to Aberdeen and Huntly.
Guild has so far released no fewer than eight CDs of glorious Scottish piano music, with more in the pipeline. His performance will take the form of a lecture-recital, that is, a brief sketch of each composer and short introduction to the piece of music to be played will be given before each item.
And what a programme it is!
Some, if not all, of these composers’ names will be unfamiliar to many readers, even of The National, but I commend each one of them to you.
I had not known of William B Moonie myself, but on the strength of the other composers, I have no doubt that his piece, “Perthshire Echoes” will be appropriately evocative and excellent. The others I do know a little about and John Purser and I have talked about them in past essays in these columns.
But let me say a few words about each of them.
The concert begins with Ronald Center’s “Sonatina”. Center was a Huntly man, a fine composer of solo piano music and string quartets and an astonishing choral prayer for peace, “Dona Nobis Pacem”. In some of his quartets, the sounds are as compelling and gripping as the paintings of Joan Eardley, which he knew and admired. Of the piano pieces, a clever, gamesome and mischievous meditation and romp, “Children at Play” is supremely descriptive while maintaining its self-sustaining musical integrity beyond the picturable.
Then we have the Aberdonian John McLeod’s “Another Time, Another Place”, three interludes composed for a film of the 1983 novel of that name by Jessie Kesson (1916-94). Like her equally unique novels The White Bird Passes (1958) and Glitter of Mica (1963) and the stories collected in Where the Apple Ripens (1985), this fictionalises aspects of this wonderful writer’s life, growing up an illegitimate child in north-east Scotland.
She also wrote more than 90 plays for radio and television. Isobel Murray’s biography of Kesson is carefully judged and her selection of Kesson’s early stories, poems, radio work and autobiographical reflections was published as Somewhere Beyond (2000).
Edwin Morgan said of The White Bird Passes: “The heroine, Janie, is brought up in the slum tenements and wynds of a north-eastern Scottish town in the 1920s, and from there goes to an orphanage, triumphantly surviving these environments in her determination to make something of her life.”
Norman MacCaig, poetic master of lucidity and brevity, gave his praise succinctly: “Beg, borrow or steal this book.”
Compton Mackenzie was equally enthusiastic: “She can make the printed page alive.”
Glitter of Mica describes a tough, lonely farming community, exploring its characters, concentrating on the Riddel family, a dairyman, his wife and their college-educated daughter, their humour and animosities, loyalties and jealousies, evolving over 30 years. It’s a story of hardship and struggle but also of the indomitable spirit that was the essential character of its author.
If Center connects Scotland’s music with the visual arts and Eardley especially, McLeod’s piece engages the literary world directly, as if giving evidence of the inter-relatedness of all the arts.
Next comes the Glaswegian Erik Chisholm’s “Straloch Suite”, based on music from the 17th-century Straloch manuscript. Chisholm is the subject of one of the finest books of recent decades, one of the few full-scale biographies of a major Scottish composer, that should be in every library, every school, and in every Scottish politician’s office as compulsory reading.
In This is Erik Chisholm, Scottish Modernist, 1904-1965: Chasing a Restless Muse by John Purser (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009). Purser writes: “His output includes symphonic works, three concerti – the Piobaireachd Concerto is available on CD – and twelve operas, of which three ran for several weeks in New York, one was televised by the BBC, and two were recently revived in Cape Town. His complete piano works is currently being issued in a major CD series.
"His music, rooted in a profound understanding of Hebridean traditions, but sometimes inspired by Hindustani rag, combines great beauty and technical mastery with a provocative modernist certainty. His use of traditional music in a classical context is seminal, and he was ever open to experiment in subject matter and idiom.
“As performer, conductor, teacher and entrepreneur, Chisholm was a vital, even disturbing force. He caused ructions in Bombay, enlisted Earl Mountbatten in founding the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and musically rejuvenated Cape Town. ‘Into this stagnant paradise Erik Chisholm erupted like a ball of fire’ was how one colleague described his arrival. As a successor recorded, ‘This human dynamo was a great force for both consolidation and expansion.’
“At a personal level, Chisholm saw himself as a Scot and an internationalist. He had strong left-wing leanings and a mind open to quality, irrespective of its origins”.
The Chisholm is followed by the suite “Perthshire Echoes” by Moonie (1883-1961) of Edinburgh, six pieces based on traditional songs such as “The Birks of Aberfeldy”.
And then we have John Blackwood McEwen’s impressionistic “On Southern Hills”. Both the Moonie and the McEwen are “landscape” music, a contentious term. When we talk about “landscape” in music or poetry, it’s a different thing, perhaps, from landscape in paintings. Literal description is essential to the representation of reality in the visual arts, or, to use the most appropriate term, “mimesis”. But in poetry and music something extra happens, a quality of the haunted, of “hauntedness”.
Landscape is simply what the Earth gives us, particular locations, places with contour and shape – and music. But poems, and especially concert music, also convey a sense of deliberated “presence” in the air, a history of things and living creatures who have been here before us, and perhaps a sense of those who will come after us. McEwen is one of the most masterful of all composers – Scottish or otherwise – who gives us this sense in his music.
Finally, we have Francis George Scott’s riotous, hilarious and sinister setting of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem “Crowdieknowe” in an arrangement for solo piano by Ronald Stevenson, and then Stevenson’s own settings of “Scottish Folk Music”, returning us from the highest of high art to the melodic and tuneful songs of an oral tradition which “serious” Scottish composers have always been in cahoots with, never neglected.
Just as James Hogg and Walter Scott collected stories from the oral tradition to complement and subtly animate the literary sophistication of their writing, Scottish composers have always been keenly aware of the folk tradition. It has never been foreign to their understanding of music for the chamber, opera house or concert hall. You can hear it in the FG Scott/Ronald Stevenson pieces.
In “Crowdieknowe”, God and his angels arrive at the cemetery on Judgement Day and command the dead to rise. But the dead have minds of their own and won’t brook any authority beyond themselves. Self-determination is their essential character, which is why we, the living, have a responsibility to them. And they will have their revenge.
We will be of their company soon enough. So we need to ensure their honour. In Stevenson’s transcription, Scott does this in his music. Would that our politicians exemplified such force and gleeful energy as this piece of music exercises with such coruscation!
Stevenson’s settings of “Scottish Folk Music” further exemplify this, delightfully and passionately.
But to go further, you need to listen to Christopher Guild’s CDs. Volume One includes the marvellous pieces for children, “A Wheen Tunes Fae Bairns Tae Spiel” as well as the folk music settings, while Volume Two explores some of the Hebridean landscapes and traditional Gaelic tunes in beautifully modulated versions and Volume Three includes encounters with and meditations on Chinese and Ghanaian folk song as well as a brilliant miniature encapsulation of the classical bagpipe “Praise of Ben Dorain” by Duncan Ban MacIntyre.
Volumes Four and Five introduce transcriptions from other composers such as Paderewski, Charpentier, Purcell and Delius. In other words, Stevenson’s mastery of the Scottish tradition is contextualised by his extensive knowledge of the music of other lands and cultures. In that cradle of understanding, the confidence in our own cultural history is earthed and nurtured, and by that openness and engagement, it is exhilarated.
The whole musical tradition of Scotland has its own life, that will rise of its own volition and command the respect of the living, and deliver great enjoyment, if we have ears to hear it with, and a mind to savour and understand its value. I know that this concert will demonstrate that and give unquantified pleasure while doing so.
The National has always given good space to the reclamation and re-assessment of Scotland’s art and literature and a concert like this brings into public provenance a history of Scotland’s music no-one who values and aspires to our independence can afford to ignore.
Tickets are on sale at tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scotland-s-piano-music-another-short-introduction and there are plenty of concession rates if you are a student, over 60, or coming as a family. Christopher Guild’s much-lauded CDs of music by Center, Moonie, Scott and Stevenson will also be on sale. As Jamie Reid-Baxter puts it, “It’s a programme that onie chiel wi a hert and an open lug wid injoy.”
- FG Scott’s setting of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem “Crowdieknowe” is transcribed for solo piano by Ronald Stevenson and the eldritch, wild energy and rebellious temper the poem expresses comes through with stunning vigour. To get a sense of what lies within the music, here’s the poem. Wild men resisting the authority of God. Would that we do the same with Westminster!
Crowdieknowe
OH to be at Crowdieknowe
When the last trumpet blaws,
An’ see the deid come loupin’ owre
The auld grey wa’s.
Muckle men wi’ tousled beards,
I grat at as a bairn
’ll scramble frae the croodit clay
Wi’ feck o’ swearin’.
An’ glower at God an a’ his gang
O’ angels i’ the lift
–Thae trashy bleezin’ French-like folk
Wha gar’d them shift!
Fain the weemun-folk’ll seek
To mak’ them haud their row
– Fegs, God’s no blate gin he stirs up
The men o’ Crowdieknowe!
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