Five things - songs

I used to prefer songs , as I've mentioned before. I suppose it's easier to be exposed to songs than to tunes, the repetition of chorus aids memorability, songs are maybe less challenging than tunes because we're all familiar with words.

I suppose, as well, that as a Literature student I've always been drawn to lyrics, to words. In folk, however, the songs tend to be ballads, my least favourite wodge of the poetry spectrum. They tell often unlikely stories in a simple manner: there's not a whole lot of metaphor, striking imagery, or other literary tricks. 

That said, I am reasonably intrigued by songs that have clearly changed over time, split, or merged, maybe got a little garbled along the way. I like the way that songs - stories - travel, and each place they come to changes them, so that the story suits the locality. I suppose ballads are a form of urban legend, and urban legends never tell tales of long ago in a far off land: the whole point is that this happened to my neighbour's sister's cousin. Somehow we feel that a story must be true when it has happened so near to us. Not only could it be true, but the same thing could happen to us. We want our musical stories to feel local, relevant.

If I listed all the CD tracks I skip on every playing, on repeat playings, or when I have the CD on permanent loop every last one of those tracks would be songs. They aren't all bad. Here are five I don't really tire of.

Road to Drumleman. (Ossian - Seal Song.) There is nothing like a tale of homesickness, the wonders of the old land, to bring out the Celt in me. I love the rather domestic scale of this: it's not mountains and drama he misses, but the people, and the chance of "a dram and a wee cup of tea". 

Rosie Anderson. (Smalltalk - Smalltalk) I love some of the marvellous turns of phrase in this: "I'm all in to surprise he said” and “I only brought her safely home from the dangers on the way”. Like many sad songs, it seems, it closes with a repeat of the opening, just to remind you of the pleasant days that have gone, the days when Hay Marshall loved Rosie as his life. There's also a comic note, as in all the best tragedies, with Rosie on the lookout for an officer, her "broken heart to cheer". It's rather reminiscent of Lydia Bennet.  Note, also, the Jean Redpath version (linked from the song title) has an extra  verse about Rosie's maid, and that the errant Rosie "played the loon" after a month in London, whereas Billy Ross has her languishing long enough in London ("months but barely  nine") to have "gotten a son".

Cruel Lowland Maid. (Caladh Nua - Next Stop). This is a bit of a cheat because it’s the tune I love, all boppy and uplifting, despite the grim tale of murder, with a cheerful "whoop!" at the end to underline the hanging of the cruel lowland maid. 

Bonnie Earl of Moray. (Jock Tamson's Bairns - Rare). Another where the tune is almost the main draw, the lovely Swedish tune that the Bairns use for it, the interesting arrangement with the song surrounded by tune. And again the conceit of coming back at the end to the beginning, although here not reminding us of good times before the tragedy, but just underlining again the woefulness of the situation. This, of course, is the song that gave the world the Mondegreen.

Little Musgrave. (Billy Ross - Shore Street). I've heard Fairport sing Little Matty Groves unplugged. In their hands it's a rock anthem with a twist each time ("How do you like my brand new curtains, that I got in Ikea last week?" was one memorable lyric variation). It's different each time, and it's lots of fun. Little Musgrave is an Appalachian version, a sweet and sorry tale. There seems to be lots of other verions of this, and much discussion about its history. It's an English song, though, no links to Scotland at all, it seems.

Not the hills of home

I've been humming The Glandaruel Highlanders, which is on my latest CD acquisition, Polbain to Oranmore. Actually, that's not quite true. I've been singing the song Campbeltown Loch:

Campbeltown Loch, I wish you were whisky,

Campbeltown Loch, Och aye!

Campbeltown Loch, I wish you were whisky,

I would drink you dry!

Not that I have ever heard the song, but Kevin Macleod mentioned the lyrics on the sleeve notes, and they took my fancy, and I've been singing them (Och aye!) to a very mangled version of The Glendaruel Highlanders. I know that it's mangled because when I tried the tune out on my pipes this evening it didn't sound like any tune I know.

I think this is partly because when I listen to the tune I immediately start singing the song, which means I am not really listening, and I know that I am repeating the chorus only over the whole of the tune. As I've mentioned before It seems that if I have words and a tune my brain seems to prefer the words, no matter how wrong they are.

I suppose the other problem is that voice is, in its way, just another instrument, and just as a pipe tune sounds very different when played on banjo or fiddle or even whistle, it sounds different with voice. It's not just that other instruments can slur or lilt or bounce in a way that pipes can't. Some of it is to do with the different ways in which other instruments treat the gracing. It's something I came across early on when I first heard A Scottish Soldier. It's The Green Hills of Tyrol, Jim, but not as we know it. 

(Incidentally, I found Glendaruel in the Seaforth Highlanders, and I knew it would be there because this handy site told me so).

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.

Not with a bang

My daily piping spree seems to have quietly fizzled out. It's odd, because at one point I was wondering whether January would turn out to have been my last challenge month.

It's partly the sudden drop in temperature, so that my hands have been too cold for me to play well. Throw in a couple of late evenings at work, a sudden urge to get knitting at a jumper that has been ignored since December, and a general lethargy (which I think is also down to the weather) and piping has just slipped quietly out of my evening routine. I'm not even humming pipe tunes at the moment. I've had Caladh Nua's Farewell to You  on permanent loop since the weekend.

Hopefully it will be a matter of a change being as good as a rest, and if nothing else there can be another challenge month in June.

Reclaimed

Reclaimed is a compilation CD, which isn’t always a good thing. Too often compilations are mixed bags, a bit of a curate’s egg. This has is a common thread, apart from the pipes, which is the music of William Dixon. This is certainly one for my (long) tune book wish list. Several of the tracks use voice or strings (violin, viola, or cello). There are no banjos or bodhrans, no snare drums, no MSR sets. In short it’s neither folk nor GHB stuff, it is cauld wind pipes (not just Scottish) finding their own level. 

Reclaimed also gives me some additions to the list of things that go well with pipes. This CD gives us pipes and voice, which I already know from Seudan and Fhuair Mi Pog and hadn’t really thought about when I was compiling that five. This isn’t just singing with the pipes, though. Mairi Campbell on Now Westlin Winds, gives us voice used almost like drones, which works really well. And I’ve already said how good pipes sound with more pipes, mostly thinking SSP or GHB with Uilleann pipes, but I think this is the first time I have heard smallpipes played with more smallpipes, (Jack Latin) which is just perfect, actually. It’s a long time since I’ve played with another smallpiper. There aren’t many of us about.

While I'm mentally updating Five Things this CD gives us an extra place to hear Mr MacInnes. He’s on two tracks here, one unaccompanied set of three tunes (The Night Visitor's Song, Willie Stays Lang at the Fair and Well Bobbit Blanch of Middlebie) and with strings and voice on Helen of Kirconnel Lea. 

Eslewhere Mike Katz plays pipes by the Monkey's maker, there is an intriguing narrative piece on border pipes, a track featuring Martyn Bennett, and a rare chance to hear pastoral pipes. The icing on the cake of this CD is the informative sleeve notes.

Song without words

When I listen to a CD a lot the tracks I am most likely to skip long before I move on to a new CD are the songs, especially the “comic” ones.

Like a lot of people I suppose, I’ve always in the past tended to prefer songs to tunes, or instrumentals.  The world of pop is certainly geared towards songs: it’s what many of us are brought up on. I’m also a fan of classical music, some of which (opera) includes vocals, and much of which does not (Beethoven’s 9^th being a bit of an exception to the rule), which is perhaps why moving to tunes hasn’t been such a hardship.

I think it is this tendency for popular music to be songs rather than tunes that means people prefer songs. I suppose anyone can warble a song, and provided the words are roughly there, even if you’ve little idea of the melody, people will recognise it. The human voice is also compelling to us: we can pick voices out of noise in the same way that we can detect faces in a muddled background.

As an Eng Lit graduate I’ve always taken more interest in words than music, but a lot of songs don’t really have words that are worth taking much notice of. For lots of popular songs the bit that sticks in my mind is often a chorus, or a brief, and oft repeated refrain. I can call to mind Whitney Houston, for example, singing that she will always love you-oo-oooo-oo-ou, but couldn’t hum the rest of it or tell you what any of the other lyrics were.

And yet I would generally think that songs are easier to remember than tunes. Songs normally have some sort of narrative and we can see that, for instance, Lord Barnard can’t kill little Matty until he has found him with his lady, which can only happen after the page has tipped him off, which can only happen after the page has seen little Matty at church.  Some folk songs, through many re-tellings, get a little garbled (like Aye Waukin' O where we are told in quick succession that he dreams when he sleeps, he wakes up feeling bad, and that he never sleeps at all). Words are still easier to string together, to guess the relative order or guess at words we’ve forgotten, because we know the convention of forward momentum in storytelling, and because we know the rudiments, at least, of grammar and word order.

Possibly this is just as easy for those who know enough about musical theory.  As I get to know more tunes I am learning the different possible structures and find it easier to hazard a guess at what might come next in general terms: a repeat or a variation or a change.

One of the songs I don't skip on repeated listenings to Rare is Bonnie Earl O Moray, which is set to a lovely Swedish tune. Like many of Jock Tamson’s songs it is interestingly arranged. They tend to avoid the instrumental intro, verse(s) and chorus, instrumental, last verse (or repeat first or last verse) standard. This has a big chunk of tune, all the singing, another big chunk of tune, then a repeat of the first two lines of the song only.

What is interesting is that I can hum the tune but am struggling to get the words for the song. This maybe because the tune is simple, repetitive, and occupies more of the track than the song itself. What is even odder is that when I hum the tune while thinking of the words I find myself trying to adjust the tune to what I think the words are, even when it’s clear that if the tune doesn’t fit I must be getting the words wrong.

I'm also (and this post I wrote ages ago and have left to fester in drafts) listening a lot to Julie Fowlis' Gach Sgeul, and with those the tunes drop in to my memory but the words, being Gaelic, do not. Yet I still find that I am trying to hear the words, or at least, the sounds that the words make, in order to help me think how the tune goes. There is clearly something in my brain that is still giving preference to words, to the human voice, over music, still preferring the song to the tune.

Finlay and the weavers

I managed to play today, but found myself struggling to recall how Kilbowie Cottage goes. I listened to it and thought I had it, but got confused once I was back with dots and pipes. This random failure to learn tunes is one of the reasons why I normally learn a handful at a time: though some fall by the wayside others will be left. Still, I will persevere, and I need to put The Big Spree or Highland Strands back in the car so I can listen to the tune.

Thanks to a recent birthday I have new listening matter. First is the Tannahill Weavers' Leaving St Kilda. I've only listened to it the once and it's good in parts, as they say. The tune selection is good: The Good Drying, Whistlebinkies Reel, Magersfontein I already know and its good to hear new versions of these; the rest are new to me and are a good selection of classic pipe tunes, well played. My only quibble with the pipe sets is that someone should have politely asked the guitarist to sling his hook: he's too loud, too high up in the mix, and, for my money, adds precisely nothing.

Pipe sets aside there are lots of song sets. In fact 8 out of the 12 tracks are songs. How can I put this tactfully? I cannot abide them. I dislike the singer's voice, I find the arrangements uninspiring. I was amazed when I first read Tannies' sleeve notes to find that they generally sing trad songs, because they manage to make them sound like 1970s hippy folk with a guitar and a tambourine. (There may not actually be a tambourine. It just sounds as though there might be). I was prepared for this, and after all, that's what the skip button on a CD player is for. I'm disappointed that so few sets are pipe sets, and bitterly disappointed that as far as I can tell the one instance of smallpipes (a strong reason for overcoming my dislike of songs and asking for this) is during one of the songs!

The second birthday CD was Finlay Macdonald. I can't remember how or where I came across him, I can't find the CD online anywhere, not even through Coda where it came from. A mix of old and new tunes, some written by Finlay. Chris Stout is credited on fiddle, which has to be a good thing. Currently on track three and so far very good indeed.

A waukin-o

Just reading Elizabeth Gaskells's letters and I've come across this version of words for Aye Waukin-o, which Ossian sing on Sealsong.

"Do you know 'Jess Macfarlane'? You ought to know it, it is so pretty, and some of the words have run in my head all evening

When first she came to town
They ca'ed her Jess Macfarlane
But now she's come and gane
They ca' her the wandering darling

I writ my luve a letter
But alas! she canna read -
And I like her a' the better.

I'm rather afraid I've heard somebody say it is not a proper song; but I don't know why it should not be for all I know of it, and I am sure my two verses are charming & innocent."

Elizabeth Gaskell to John Forster, 17 May 1854.

I imagine that "not a proper song" implies some impropriety in the story the song tells, rather than being a criticism of it as a musical piece. She doesn't mention how she knows it, although her eldest daughter studied singing.  Mrs Gaskell mentions an awful lot of friends and visiting, a little about writing, a lot about travel and domestic arrangments, but this is the only mention I've come across of song lyrics.

Five things - more Mr Macinnes

Five CDs that feature not enough of Iain MacInnes.

I realise I run the risk of sounding a bit obsessive and stalkerish here, but heaven knows there are few enough CDs out there featuring smallpipes, and even fewer featuring Iain, who is my smallpiping hero because I love everything he does. Although he has only given us a miniscule number of CDs of his own he has appeared elsewhere over the years. If you want to hear more of MacInnes, and who wouldn't, these are the CDs you need to get hold of. 

1. Shore Street, Billy Ross. A CD showcasing Billy and a good range of Scottish songs, on which he is joined from the old crowd from Smalltalk and Ossian, among others. Iain is credited on the first track (The Heiland Sodger). He is most certainly also on track 3 (Fiollaigean) but oddly uncredited... The pipes are right at the end of the song: blink and you'll miss them. The CD is well worth listening to. Billy has a soft and clear voice and there are interesting notes on each song and the Appalachian version of Matty Groves is worth the price of the CD alone. You'll never think of Matty Groves in the same way again.

2. Canterach. The band and the CD share a name. Now really and truly this is no less an Iain MacInnes CD than Smalltalk or The Carrying Stream. He appears on 9 of 11 tracks on whistle, GHB and Scottish small pipes. Somehow it's not one of my favourites: it's the keyboards, electric guitar and various bits of percussion and other such embellishments I could live without. It's Iain's playing,but not his usual style in terms of choice of tunes, instruments or arrangements.

3. Grand Concert of Scottish Piping. Two tracks and 10 tunes featuring Iain on small pipes. The rest of the CD isn't bad either. Two more small pipe tracks (Martyn Bennett), one lot of border pipes, and as a bonus, Allan MacDonald.

4. and 5. Tannahill Weavers, Cullen Bay and Land of Light. I've got both these albums and if it wasn't for the pipe sets I'd probably never listen to them. As it is I skip a lot of tracks.  Lots of songs that don't sound trad, but apparently are, lots of strummy guitar. The pipe sets are good and include Ian playing stuff you don't hear him doing anywhere else: a Gordan Duncan tune, for instance. The smallpipes make a few brief contributions, in the main Iain is on GHB. 

I saw the Tannies, years ago, in Colchester. It was before I discovered pipes, although I already loved them. The Tannies were just one of the fan's old favourite folk bands then, and I think he enticed me along with the promise of pipes. I remember I'd not long learned to knit fair isle holding the two colours one in each hand and I spent much of the evening contemplating fair isle patterns I might knit, and remember very little of the concert itself. Thank heaven Iain had left them, otherwise think how I'd be kicking myself now.