Also at last November's Collogue, Simon McKerrell took a look at the underlying structure of traditional Highland pipe tunes, the way certain recurring motifs give them their distinctive character, and suggested how such analysis can enhance our understanding and teaching of piping and other music traditions.

SOUNDING very much like the sixty-four thousand dollar question, What Makes Our Music Sound Scottish? was the title of Simon McKerrell's talk at the LBPS Collogue last November. And as a piper with a broad span of activity, encompassing folk bands such as Back of the Moon and Deaf Shepherd, winning the Dunvegan Medal and Skye Clasp

in the Highland competition stakes and his current “day job” as Head

of   Piping  Studies  for   the   BA

(Scottish Music - Piping) degree at

Simon McKerrell

the National Piping Centre, he seems as well placed as anyone to try and answer it.

What he did, illustrating his lecture with snatches of piping (on Border pipes) and canntaireachd, and issuing photocopies of notation, was to deconstruct some well established Highland tunes, mainly marches, and pick out certain musical motifs or phrasings which recurred over and over again, the musical “thumbprints”, as he called them, which gave tunes such as these their distinctive character. In doing so, he illustrated not only the way in which these thumbprints recurred throughout the Highland pipe repertoire, but also the genius of the composers, known and unknown, who absorbed these characteristics and preserved them while using them anew to create such enduring music.

He made the point that while the motifs he was examining here were very much the quavers, semi-quavers and demi-semi-quavers of Highland piping, “in the bellows piping tradition and in the 19th-century Highland piping tradition, those would be quavers and not so polarised in terms of the rhythm”. Furthermore, he added, those other traditions would have unique motifs characteristic of their particular style.

Certain individual motifs occur throughout all pipe music, said McKerrell, and these are common building blocks. Other motifs were specific to certain modes and composers tended to favour particular modes, although none have their own motifs exclusive to them alone - which, he claimed, supported the idea of a communal tradition. “For example, John MacColl favoured the A/G mode, which is a double tonic arrangement that has very specific

motifs that charatcerise the sound of his tunes. His example of the common motif A-E-C-E can be seen in many tunes such as the march Donald Cameron, in this case to emphasise a certain note that is important to the development of the tune.”

Other such key phrases included A-B-C-A , E-D-C-A and, the most common motif in pipe music, the C-B-A motif. All these motifs, he explained can be realised around different tonics, “and they become even more pervasive in the pipe repertoire when you remove the specific pitch. So, for example, the A-B-C-A motif is often seen as the G-A-B-G motif. This retains the essential elements of the motif, which are the rhythm and contour.

“The ornamentation used on each of these different motifs is identical now in the High- land piping repertoire, although we know that in the 19th century those motifs, now crystal- ised in our own performance, were played in quite a different maimer.” And he alluded briefly to the Lowland Scottish ballad tradition, in which there were many similar motifs - phrases such as “‘Blood red wine and lily-white hands, down by the greenwood side ...' Many of these literary motifs are much easier, in a way, for us to latch on to because they involve particular images, whereas in music, you only have the function of that particular motif to go by in the story of the tune.”

Among the examples of pipe marches, he played - “just to get the point home” - were The Stornoway Highland Gathering, Millbank Cottage and The Conundrum, letting us hear these “thumbprints” recurring over and over again, in different positions.

It was important to labour that point, he said, “because, to me, this is the genius of traditional musicians who compose in the oral tradition, and part of that genius is that they absorb the music, and they recreate new music using all of those structures and systems that they've learned. And in all the traditional music of Scotland there are fantastic geniuses of composers, right from the early dynastic composers, such as the MacCrimmons and the MacGregors, through to other geniuses of Scottish music like the Gow family, to any tradi- tion you care to mention”.

One of these, in his opinion, was Pipe Major Willie Lawrie, the first part of whose well- known pipe march The Braes of Brecklet he played, with the A-B-C-A motif coming in yet again.

In tunes such as this he demonstrated that these composers were using the motifs at various levels of the tune in a sophisticated but previously unacknowledged way. Here, be- low, is his musical example of the first part of The Braes of Brecklet, where you can see the A-B-C-A motif in the first crotchet of bar seven …

Other such key phrases included A-B-C-A , E-D-C-A and, the most common motif in pipe music, the C-B-A motif. All these motifs, he explained can be realised around different tonics, “and they become even more pervasive in the pipe repertoire when you remove the specific pitch. So, for example, the A-B-C-A motif is often seen as the G-A-B-G motif. This retains the essential elements of the motif, which are the rhythm and contour.

He had also written out the “underlying skeleton” of the tune, showing the same notes, A-B-C-A used as an underlying structure supporting the final two bars of each part.

“The point I'm trying to make is that, in traditional music, the genius of composers, and of the tradition itself, can be made apparent through quite complex structures if we take that same motif that we've been looking at in The Braes of Brecklet. He played the tune: “The observant will have spotted that the motif we've been talking about has been used in the structure of the tune to underly the last two bars, because the most important notes in the last two bars of that tune are A, B,C and A - which is, in fact, the motif that starts off that last few bars.

“Willie Lawrie has taken the basic tune, and whether or not he thought about the underly- ing structure I don't know, but, unconsciously perhaps, he has laid under the tune the traditional motif that he used on the surface. It's fairly easy to see if you play the tune, but these motifs occur on different levels right throughout pipe music - particularly, as we're

beginning to notice, in pibroch repertoire, the use of these motifs to underly the structure of the tune but also to be emphasised in the surface structure as well.

“That is the genius of the oral tradition - and also the genius of Willie Lawrie.”

McKerrell identified two particularly useful applications for this knowledge: “One is to understand what we mean by the word ‘tradition' in musical terms. What I'm interested in here is the idea of different traditions - what do they mean within the notes themselves? I think that, through the analysis of performance, we could come to understand quite specifi- cally the notion of a tradition, and for the Lowland and Border Pipers' Society, I think that scholarship around modes could begin to answer some of the questions about what makes Border music sound like Border music.

“The second aspect, which I'm particularly interested in, is a pedagogical one: how can we use this knowledge to best effect in terms of teaching? I would like to experiment with the teaching of Highland pipes through an aural method where students absorb these motifs, rather than learning through the very systematic route that is current today. I think the quicker and more effective way is to absorb these things is as a whole, as units in them- selves, as other traditional musicians have been doing for generations.”