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| Reclaiming 5/4 | ||||
FOR composers and pipe majors, the Highland bagpipe’s range of tone colour compares poorly with that of orchestras and rock bands. Something extra is required to stimulate the average modern listener over and above the pure pipe or traditional pipe-band sound. In recent years, no end of borrowings from alien musical traditions have helped to entertain performers and public alike. Bongos, three-part harmony, modulating numbers of players, C naturals, slides and techno backing tracks all spring to mind. The most appropriate borrowings, however, may be the exotic rhythms. It’s not necessary to change the sound quality or instrumental line-up we’ve inherited to provide additional interest.
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The musical metres left to us by the competition era are fewer in number and more rigid in usage than those of the MacCrimmon period. In particular, the technique of alternating different metres within an Ùrlar or variation has fallen by the wayside. Between the 1830s and 1980s, such works perplexed pipers reared on urban-Western music theory and ceòl beag. Any composition not in simple metre—i.e. built in units of four, dividing into twos or threes—was liable to be considered ‘inadequate and confused’ (Piobaireachd Society, Book 14, p.452), even when perfectly acceptable by earlier Gaelic standards. |
The competition era filtered out
works and variations that weren’t entirely in 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8 or 9/8.
These were permitted; fives, sevens and elevens weren’t, nor mixed
metres, even in regular interlaced patterns. Several odd bars survive, but
they have been disguised—squeezed or stretched into uniformity on
paper—or disowned by enlightened editors. The pipers’ superiors did
not recognise the complex rhythms employed in the Balkans, Middle East and
Solomon Islands (in fact, most corners of the planet). Now that ethnic
music has entered the urban drawing room, there is no reason for Highland
pipers to continue upholding notions of metre proper to the music of
Western cities, 1650-1900.
Judging by The Twenty-four Measures recorded by Robert ap Huw, Welsh harpers of the sixteenth century employed 5/2, 5/4, 7/2, 7/4 and 11/4. All but the last of these survive in the pibroch manuscripts of Scotland. This is the first of three articles showing how deference to our colonisers and the collapse of interest and training in the Gaelic arts exterminated a musical practice that may have been unique to the Highlands and Islands.
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