Harp Ceol Mor Chadwick

Transcription

1 Harp Ceol Mor Chadwick Simon Chair Robert Wallace I am very pleased to introduce Simon Chadwick. He is a bell ringer and a fiddler. He is going to be playing for us on this lovely replica of the Queen Marys Harp. From his website he has the following notes. Simon Chadwick lives in the medieval town of St Andrews, on the east coast of Scotland, where he researches, teaches and performs the ancient native music traditions of Scotland, Ireland and neighbouring countries. Simon trained as an archaeologist, and has long been fascinated with ancient things. One hesitates to say that is maybe why he is here today. When he first discovered the medieval harps in the museums in Ireland and Scotland, he took it as a challenge, to figure out how they worked, how they were played, and what the old music traditions were that they belonged to. I think that there is a great connection between harp music and piobaireachd music. I think that a lot of the melodies came from the clan harpists and clarsach players. Maybe Simon is going to disprove that. But that is enough from me. So I am going to hand over now to Simon Chadwick. Simon Chadwick Thank you very much. It is a great honour for me to be here addressing you all because people associated with this scene are some of the most important people who influenced me. Keith Sanger is here, and Barnaby Brown, and Allan MacDonald has also been a great influence on me. And I am very pleased to meet David Hester, and to have heard his talk this morning. I am going to tell you about my work with the historical Scottish and Irish Harp tradition. That is my main thing. Then we will see how I work with what I hear. The first thing, because some of you have asked already, is about this harp. It is not a normal type of clarsach. I always forget, because I live in this world of 1

2 ancient Scottish Gaelic and Irish harps, that there is a modern type of clarsach as well. If you look at the picture of the three oldest historical harps from Ireland and Scotland you will see that they are a little different to the modern clarsach. Basically this tradition came to an end in the 18 th century in Scotland and the 19 th century in Ireland. It was an oral tradition, unlike the bagpipe. It died, and so people now have to make it up, and this is another of my research interests how the way it is made up has changed over the generations. And the type of harp that is normal in Scotland, and Ireland today is a 19 th and 20 th century invention. It has no connection with the old tradition. It is completely different. It is as if the bagpipe had died out, and then one hundred years ago people started to look at piobaireachd manuscripts and play them on oboes. It is that different. I trained as an archaeologist, so I am looking at it from an archaeological point of view. I go to museums, I look at the ancient harps in the museums. I say that s it, that s what I want to understand. I want to know how these instruments work, how they were tuned, how they were played, and what was played on them 500 or more years ago. So this is my archaeological experiment shows replica Queen Mary harp. I went to my sculptor, he isn t a musical instrument maker really, and I said, see that harp (the one in the middle in the picture above), I want one like that, as near as possible. And you see that the harp on the screen has no strings. That s fine, I ll deal with that. So his mission was to make this archaeological copy, as an exact crafted facsimile, and my job is to put the strings on and get it up and running. 2

3 This is not the only such replica I ve worked on. There are a few projects and different kinds of reproduction instruments from those lavishly decorated full specification archaeological copies to through to some quite student types. Each one is an experiment, and gives me a chance to try out new ideas with stringing, with tuning, and each one teaches me new things. Just last week I had a major redesign of stringing and tuning one of these harps. I am deliberately not trying to impose any modern preconception, so that is why I have ignored the modern harp traditions. I don t want to be influenced by things other people have made up. I want to discover everything from the roots up. So you have the instrument. You can start putting the strings on, you can start exploring the tuning. We have evidence from the Irish side of the tradition. Edward Bunting wrote down a lot of the tradition from the old harpers including tuning schedules. One of the most interesting things about tuning schedules which immediately struck me and which has struck others before, is that there is a connection to the bagpipe scale. In the middle of the harp you have two strings tuned the same. And these are the same pitch as the two tenor drones on the pipes. The harp is all down one note, so these are called G. So you have two tenor Gs. You have a bass G at the bottom of the harp. And then you have the scale with a flat 7 th. So that is really interesting. You think, that is really cool, but I don t know what to do with it. So you file it away in the back of your mind. So you have the harp, you have it set up provisionally, maybe you will change it later on. I started out my work on repertory looking at Keith Sanger and Alison Kinnaird s book where they have this wonderful appendix where they attempt to go through all the historical sources of all the harp tunes. 3

4 So I have a great problem. With bagpipes, you have written music. But with the harp there is not a single manuscript. So what this list represents is tunes in other types of books in lute books, in fiddle books, in viol books, piano books, harpsichord books, where there is some reason to think that this is actually a harp tune. So it has come from the harp tradition to another tradition. Sometimes it is obvious, for example it says this tune is composed by Rory Dall. And you know that Rory Dall is a famous harp man. Sometimes it is less clear, so there is a whole genre which seems to be connected to the 17 th century harp tradition, but you can t prove it. And there are other tunes where you think this has a stylistic similarity, this feels like a harp tune to me. So there is this fuzzy group of tunes which you can connect more or less securely to harp music. So I thought that a good project for me would be to work through this list and try and get these tunes, see how they work on the harp, see what implications for style and idiom you get. Even better Keith and Alison published in their book some of the facsimile pages. This is one which struck me quite early on. This is the Lament for the Bishop of Argyle, out of David Young and Walter MacFarlane s fiddle manuscript. It was discussed here at the Piobaireachd Society Conference many years ago and it is published in book 15. It is a fiddle 4

5 tune and a fiddle manuscript. But just as the conference claimed here that maybe it was a pipe tune before it was on the fiddle, so you can make the same argument maybe it was a harp tune before it was on the fiddle. So I worked out this tune on the harp, and I was fascinated by it. I thought wow this really is a harp tune, this really feels to me what ancient harp music should be like. It has this grand lamenting melody and a series of variations with repeated figures on the notes. You can see I hope those repeated figures. 5

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7 And so I went looking for other music in this style and I tried to find out more about it. And I guess that it was some time after that that I first came across piobaireachd as a genre as well. And this is all kind of similar. So I left it there. One of the other things that I do in Keith and Alison s book, because it is the history of the harp in Scotland, they give you all the Scottish sources for Scottish harp repertory. But I was always interested in the whole Gaelic world, shared with the Highlands of Scotland. So I spent time looking at the harp music of Ireland. In Ireland, because the traditional stayed until later, the music collectors went out and met the old harpists. So these are from the manuscripts of Edward Bunting in the 1790 s and 1800 and he visited some of the last of the old Irish Harpers. He transcribed live, at speed, what they were playing and that is what these pages are. You can see on the left hand page at the top that this must be a live transmission, taken down when he was actually playing the harp. There is bunting with his pen, dotting along at full speed and then saying right, can you 7

8 do it again, a bit slower. Then can you see how he has crossed through the whole score. Then he copies it into his neat desk book and he gradually work it up into a form which he can publish. And then at the bottom you have the same thing with a different tune. And this tune (Burn s March), Ann Maitland who is one of my main teachers has always highlighted that this is one of the most important tunes in the harp repertory. It is one of the three tunes we have which is said to be a beginner s tune. It is different in style to other forms of music. Hopefully you can see how it is structured. So you have this little fragmentary tune. And then a section which has alternating figures. Then da capo, then another little section with a different figure and main notes, then da capo, then a different sequence which has a slightly different melodic shape. Then da capo, then a fourth section with repeated main notes and a different figure and so on and a da capo at the end. I ll play this on the harp so you can get a sense of how it works. Sound Clip 1 Burn s March Simon Chadwick One of the interesting things about this is that it took me years to try and understand what is going on with this tune. When I first looked at the staff notation I thought I don t understand this. It doesn t make sense to me, it s not a tune. How does it work? And a lot of people say the same thing to me. And I gradually came to realise that there is a structure inside it, and it is the structure which makes it work. You have to understand the structure to be able to play it. You can t learn it without understanding the structure. Patrick Quinn s is the second score. I ll play you Patrick Quin s variation which is different. Sound Clip 2 Burn s March Patrick Quin s Variation Simon Chadwick. Patrick Quinn was a fiddler. I wonder if that is why he has the more lyrical variations. I don t know. Also from the Irish Tradition Edward Bunting collected a whole load of technical terms. And so I thought that I have to work through those technical 8

9 terms. I need to play them all on the harp. They have interesting names. There is the name in Gaelic, then detailed instructions on how to play it. It all fascinates me. There is one here called Leath Ieaguidh, which is one of Joseph 9

10 MacDonald s names for a bagpipe movement. There is Sruith-mor and Sruithbeg, ascending or descending squishes which may or may not be connected to some of the bagpipe movements. 10

11 There is a whole set called Barludh, a kind of trill movement, all using different fingers to stop and play them. When you are playing them you have to stop the strings all the time. This is a very characteristic feature of the old harp tradition. The stopping of strings can keep incredibly precise control of the bass notes. So any note can speak full and resonate, or it can be cut short, or it can be just a little pip. And you have fosgailte where you have the same note but a different kind of stopping. There is one for the left and one for the right hand called Glas which seems to be a harmonious interval. And there is and there is a series of chords, which seem to big and over the top. 11

12 So I was fascinated by these, and whether they are connecting to a much older theoretical world which I am interested to find out more about. And then here is a related but separate tradition, Welsh Harp Music. 12

13 This is a book, about 1620, of Welsh Harp Music and tablature. It is ferociously difficult. There is no proper edition of it so you have to work from manuscripts and it is not very easy. One of the sections explains structures, and this makes sense to me in that I can imagine that this is how harp music would work. At the second line at the bottom there is a structure which is set out called Alban Eaifaidd. I m not sure what it means but Alban has a Scottish connection. And there is theoretical stuff in this Welsh Music that says a lot of this ancient Welsh music comes from Highland or Gaelic music. On the surface it is not but they believed it was, so there is some mileage in trying to understand where did this music come from, what was it doing? How can it illuminate our traditions? And you can see this Alban sequence. It is an interlocking pattern, home and away sonorities, so you can work out something. It is very slow. So you can see at the top he has written EEFD EEE EEFD EEFD FDFD EEFD FD EEFD EEEE. So there is a kind of geometrical cycling two sonorities interplaying each other, all 13

14 the same length, sometimes with repetitions you don t quite expect. I thought that is very interesting as well. File it away. Would you like to hear some of this. It is really difficult to interpret on the harp. Almost every symbol on the tablature is open to argument. So it starts C, and the next stack is DC with CD underneath, and then B, CB with D underneath. It should be simple. But then you think, how do you tune the harp, do you transpose it? There is a chart which explains the fingering for each one, but this is a system which is not clear, so you can argue which finger is meant. What about the rhythm, what about the pacing? So here are instructions and he says bis dequa means again the beginning but does he mean again from the beginning of the first section, or does he mean again from the beginning? And nobody knows, so you have to make it up. So I ll play you a section of this and you will get a sense of it, but bear in mind this is very speculative and that there are probably ten alternative versions which are all possible. If you had a room of scholars, everyone would have their idea of it and they would think everyone else was doing it all wrong. So this tune is called Canny an Saints Cecillin so it is a song to St Cecillin. Sound Clip 3 Song to St Cecillin So you see how it works. Each section is just slightly different from the one before using a slightly different set of ornaments or grace notes, so there is a gradual unfolding and a gradual increase in complexity over the course of 12 cycles. I thought this is fascinating, this is wonderful. It takes about 10 minutes to play all of it through with the repeats and the choruses. So I guess the reason I am here is that for over 100 years people have been saying yes, so surely this is where piobaireachd comes from isn t it? This is the earliest most explicit statement Is it not likely that pibroch is just the pipe imitation of Harp exhibition tunes? (CMP The Bagpipe and the Gael Guth na Blaidna vol 5 no 4 autumn 1908 p.366). So I thought, I can look at this. Because most of this comes from the piping scholars. You ask the piping scholars where piobaireachd comes from and they say oh the ancient harp music. I thought, well I know more about the ancient 14

15 harp traditions than anybody else so maybe I should have a go at this, and see what I can bring to the table from my archaeological work. So this is the work I have been doing. This is Francis Collinson s book, and he had a big influence on this because he picked up on what people were saying and he tried to get hard evidence He used Angus Fraser s Manuscript which I think was a big mistake. He puts Angus Fraser s piano/fiddle setting of the tune next to the Piobaireachd Society version of the same tune and says look, it is the same tune, surely this is a connection between piobaireachd and harp music. 15

16 People took up on this, and here are some of the earliest recordings of piobaireachd played on the harp. 16

17 I think that Charles Gaur was the very first with one of the tunes which Collinson mentioned, then Alison Kinnaird with the Harp Tree, then Ann Heymann picked up on it. I think that the first person to take straight up pipe tunes and play them on the harp was Alan Stivel, but I didn t know that until very recently. So since the late 1970 s there has been this picking what looked like piobaireachd and playing it on the harp. But I have to say that a lot of it is Angus Fraser s stuff, which is a whole problem area which I haven t really dug in to yet. But people have been thinking about it. So I thought, that s all very well, Alan Stivel just took random piobaireachd that he liked and played them on the harp. I thought that there has to be a more structured way of doing this because a lot of the piobaireachd repertory is more modern than when the harp died out, about So this is where I decided to go. I came across references to Raonull Mac Ailein Oig And this 19 th century recording of the tradition. Obviously he played the pipes. He was one of the most famous pipers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and is credited with amazing tunes. But he also played the fiddle and he also played the clarsach. I thought here we have a person who is said to be a harp player, in the seventeenth century, who was a great composer of piobaireachd. Let s try and get his compositions up and running on the harp, just to see what happens. I made a CD with his four primitive piobaireachd 17

18 and a song which is connected to him which I made my own variations up for, and I think that this is the first ever CD of Ceol Mor entirely on the harp. I don t think that has ever been done before. It was great fun. I thought that I would play you one all the way through so you can hear what it sounds like and you can hear how it works. I had great difficulty choosing what I should play you. Because I didn t realise that these five tunes, the four piobaireachd and the song, is completely different and has completely different challenges. You could do what Alan Stivel did, you could make the harp imitate the pipes, with all the ornaments, a big drone at the bottom, and it is fine, but is not really idiomatic harp music, and my main aim is to understand the music of this instrument. So I made an effort not to try and imitate the pipes with these, but to try and understand the tunes so that I could create a convincing harp version of them, idiomatic for the harp. So each one had a completely different challenges and completely different issues that I had to deal with. Issues in terms of where to 18

19 put the drone, what key do you play them in on the harp, which is not always obvious. The one I ll play you is the last one A Bhoilich, The Vaunting. Some of them are clear pipe versions, some are the other way, but this one sits in the middle. I tweaked it and made it more harp style, but I think that it is following Donald MacDonald, and I like Donald MacDonald s arrangements. They are interesting, not least because in his printed version he says they are arranged for violin and piano. He is not actually intending it to be played on the pipes, but on the violin, so what does this tell us from a musical point of view. So I worked from his manuscript, and I took it pretty much at face value, and then I pushed it. I quite happily strayed away from what he has written. I don t play urlar repeats in this one which makes me feel very bad. I normally find that urlar repeats feel perfectly natural, but in this tune there are twelve separate sections. I m sure that you know the story of this tune. The young man fell ill and was on his deathbed so he asked for a lament because he was sure he was dying. The 19

20 you man said, would you play the lament for me before I die, so the lament was played, and the you man got better. So they decided to make A Bhoilich of it a boasting title. Sound Clip 4 A Bhoilich (The Vaunting) Questions. RW I think that was tremendous playing there. I think quite a few of us would die for that crunluath, and the drones don t go out of tune at all. Any questions on that fascinating talk. Rae Bell. The script that you have shown. Was that contemporary, or was it a historical document of how harp music was written? SC The Welsh tablature? That was invented around 1600, and the tradition was dead within a generation, so it was very short-lived. So it very specific to early 17 th century Welsh Harp music. RB So is your current music written? SC It is not written, it is an oral tradition. RB That is fundamental. SC Lots of people who play the harp nowadays write it down, or they play it on the piano, or the fiddle. I m not interested in that, because I m trying to understand the ancient tradition. I m trying to understand the music of this harp and the harpists who played this kind of harp, so I don t see why I should. 20

21 RB The last variation you played there was much like our taorluath in my opinion. SC That is what it was. I was following it on Donald MacDonald s Manuscript. Keith Sanger The tune which Collinson puts great weight on and calls Lament for the Harp Tree was actually a song air called The Fairy Lover, and for whatever reason Fraser decided to transfer on to it. He make this quite clear. Collinson for some reason chose not to see Fraser s comments, and seized on it as a tune called it Lament for the Harp Tree. SC I didn t want to go into Angus Fraser. I showed you it because it reflects 17 th century attitudes to harp and fiddle piobaireachd. His manuscript is not all it seems, and all the variations made to sound like piobaireachd are made by himself. I just don t want to go there. JT Simon, a fascinating talk. I m interested that you are trying to revive the oral tradition by keeping it oral. Have you been doing it long enough to see what is happening. In other words, how constant is it, or how changing is it, because it is oral? SC It is quite fixed, certainly in the short term. But it is known to drift long term. The main thing is that because you haven t got scores to work from you have to learn ways of remembering, and so there is this emphasis on structure. The details can be quite fluid and can change a lot. So I was talking to Barnaby two weeks ago about some of the introductory runs, and I think he changed some of how I do them. But it is important that it does not affect the underlying structure of the tune. RW Any more points 21

22 ?? It is just an observation really that I liken to the last lecturer (David Hester) who gave us the other talk on oral tradition. Just a small aspect of it which hit me quite forcibly. When you were going through the music on the screen there and you were pointing out triples and things they were down, then in the next couple of bars they were being reversed up again. It reminded me of what had been said previously about the oral tradition of the bagpipes and how that had been lost. SC I think that an important idea for me is that music is primarily a performance art. Quite a lot of people get the idea that music what you look at on paper. And I think that what is on the paper is a kind of reaction to what you hear. So what you hear is the most important thing. And that means that it only exists once and it will never be heard again. That is something which is important to me. Carrying on from there, what you have to remember is that notation of oral sound came at a much later stage in history. SC Like you say it is like a picture of a landscape. It is a picture. It is much better to actually go to the place. RW Anyone else? I think it was interesting to hear how the harp tradition died out, and how close piping might have come to that. I bet that you wish that the harp people had an Archibald Campbell. SC They almost did. There is an overlap between the last of the revivalists and the last of the harpists. The harpists never talked to the revivalists. They lived at the same time but they never talked. This is one of the things that is fascinating for me with the harp, you have the archaelological approach. You get the copy of the instrument, you get the manuscript pages. I ve always thought that there is something missing, and that is the inherited tradition. 22

23 I ve always thought that with this instrument, the living tradition closest to it is Gaelic song and Piobaireachd. RB Do they march? SC I don t know. RW I think that the Egyptian Harpists used to march. SC I ve no idea. RW Well that was a tremendous talk Simon. Simon has a CD for sale and I would recommend it. It is very well recorded, beautiful playing, and if you really want to get an idea of what Piobaireachd might sound like, we don t know, it is all supposition as Simon says, but it is very good. SC I m making no claims, I am just trying to get this thing up and running as a musical instrument, and respecting the old tradition, and this is a step on that path. RW It certainly works on the CD. If there are no more points can I thank Simon once again for his excellent presentation. 23

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