John Dally casts a player’s eye over Matt Seattle’s most recent tune book, Over the Hills and Far Away

ALL OF us who share Matt Seattle's passion for Border and Lowland pipe music welcome the publication of his latest book, Over the Hills and Far Away (Dragonfly, 2006). While we may debate the relative importance of styles, techniques and ornamentation, and even argue over the definition of what

Border pipe music is, we cannot escape the influence of Matt Seattle's zeal and intellectual ardor, and not only because he discovered William Dixon's manuscript.

This new collection of traditional melodies includes revised settings of more than a few tunes published in The Border Bagpipe Book. These revisions, as well as the new tunes, have benefited from Matt's total immersion in the Dixon manuscript. Matt continues his practice of creating settings that are theoretically accurate, and correcting some previously written settings. But some of the changes are not ones this reader will follow, as when he switches out the C sharps for Bs in Holey Ha'penny.

Matt encourages pipers to examine all the possibilities themselves by giving a wealth of background material and freely expressing his own likes and dislikes. The background notes are very valuable and entertaining. As with his previous books

Matt delivers a great deal of historical and scholarly material about the tunes, their structure and history.

Matt's arrangements take syncopation in Border pipe music to the next level and show the influences of blues and rock music. Some of his settings call for technique that might be more difficult than rewarding, as when he jumps to high B and C sharp, but he deserves credit for putting it out there. It is also very much appreciated when Matt supplies backup chords. This reader does not follow his settings note for note, part for part, but enjoys them as potential ways to take the basic melody of a tune, and as suggestions for improving his own style of variation.

One of the more difficult things to get across in any written setting is the underlying rhythm of a tune, especially when we are working with traditions that died out years ago. We come to these tunes largely as readers, so we need all the help our eyes can get. To that end we depend upon the conventions of musical notation to guide our instincts and hard won experience playing the music. Matt's use of time signatures would be more helpful if it were more consistent with convention and if the tying together of the tails of notes followed the time signature.

Suggestions for tempi would also be welcome. Deciphering the fundamental rhythm, through a process of justifying the time signature with the written bars of music, is at times frustrating. When Matt goes a step further by tying the notes' tails together under bar lines to help convey his syncopation, the result, for this reader, is more confusing than helpful.

All musical revivalists cannot escape the influence of their own history and experience, which by definition cannot be that of the music they are attempting to revive. We are always in danger of falling into the trap of historical reenactment on the one hand and arid musicology on the other. The challenge is always to move the music from the page to fingers. It is refreshing to find a piping authority that encourages original thinking and discourages slavish devotion to style or text. Close study of this book will spark many “new ways” with old tunes in the Border pipe sense of the phrase.