Shock of the new

I‘ve been pondering this week about how we approach new things, how there are some things we take to immediately while others take a while to grow on us. There are also some things we love for ever and others that we later look on with incredulity: how could I possibly have worn that dress/bought that sofa/loved that band?

I suppose some of it comes down to an individual’s ability to cope with change: some of us do seem to be more open than others to change, or cope better with change more in some areas of life than others. I can think of people who loathe anything at all to change at work, but are happy to travel to new and exotic places. I think it’s possible, too, to have a sort of change fatigue. As I get older I note a tiredness with change at work from my coevals. It’s not that we don’t like change, it’s just that this week’s latest thing we’ve seen before, probably more than once, and have suffered the consequences. In some ways it’s not change that we’re quibbling about at all: it’s more of the same old that is irritating us.

Some change in likes is probably that we never really liked the thing in the first place. We got caught up in a fad, a passing phase, the rest of the world all shouting about whatever is the new black, and we’ve got swept up with that tide and later we’ve looked at the photos and wondered what on earth we were thinking.

Some change in likes is a change in us. I discovered the Bronte sisters at university over 20 years ago. I can still cry buckets over Jane Eyre, but I can’t read Wuthering Heights any more. Barely out of my teens I thought it tragically romantic, Cathy and Heathcliff’s passionate, death-defying love. Now I find them self-centred, silly, childish, and very irritating.

Which brings me to the new that takes a while to get used to and the new we embrace at once. I bought  Fhuair Mi Pog  while back. I’d already heard and enjoyed Allan Macdonald’s playing and the CD had smallpipes. Of course I was going to love it. However, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. There are some pipes, but there, as ever, it seems, some whistles, and although there are pipes with song there are also songs without pipes. I was probably expecting a lot more pipes than there are: just six of the 15 tracks.

Then the tunes weren’t quite what I was expecting either. They weren’t really jigs or reels or marches or strathspeys, and I found them odd. And Margaret’s voice I found…interesting. It made me think of the glory days of technicolour musicals and the soprano voices there: a little harsh, a little tight, a little overly-refined, lacking (to my mind) the expansive passion, the warmth, the colour of an operatic soprano. I listened to it dutifully a few times, stuck it in the cupboard that houses rarely played CDs and forgot all about it.

Looking for some musical variety I dug it out recently to play in the car…and I am really enjoying it. Why has it grown on me? I suspect because one way or another it’s no longer new. I’ve been listening to Julie Fowlis quite a bit. Her voice has grown on me, and perhaps made Margaret’s seem more familiar, or at least, less unfamiliar. Julie’s voice has given me has certainly given me a different benchmark to put Margaret’s voice against, and now I know her voice better I am surprised by my original response to it. The style of song is more familiar to me, the particular rhythms of Gaelic. And of course this time I knew what to expect.

Which has probably all paved the way for me to pick up the LBPS excellent new CD Reclaimed and love it at first hearing. In many ways the presentation of the tunes is very new, very different, but in its separate elements it’s all things I know. Pipes and voice, pipes and strings, lowland tunes, the whole chamber music feel – the layers and harmonies of a small number of instruments – these are all familiar to me. And my favourite track with voice, well, my father is always one for reciting chunks of poetry learned by rote at school and Helen of Kirconnell Lea is one of those.