The Highland bagpipe

by W. L. Manson

“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘that’s ludag, the little finger.’

“‘Well,’ said the artist, ‘that’s hirrin,’ and he played the passage several times to show how it was done with the little finger.

“‘Is hirrin the name of the little finger of the right hand, or the name of the hole in the chanter, or the name of the note; or what else is it?’

“‘No,’ said the master, ‘that’s hirrin,’ and he played that word over again cleverly with the same little finger. Then he continued—

“‘Old John Mackenzie taught me that in Ross long ago; and he learned it over the fire in the Isle of Skye. We used to sit and listen to him, and learn what he said and sang, and learn to finger in this way.’ Then the piper played silently with his fingers, and every now and then he blew the chanter and sounded a passage a breath long from the book, which he read easily, but could not explain—and that’s hirrin—and if any of the party ever hear that particular combination of three notes again the name of it will be remembered. It means three notes combined.

“Compared to a book of poetry, it thus appears that each tune is like a song, and hirrin is like a word in a line which keeps its place and its time in the tune. That much we learned from our interpreter. He had learned by rote certain articulate syllables combined as words which for him meant passages in a particular pipe tune. For the ignorant residue of mankind they meant nothing.”

There Mr. Campbell had to stop, for further light on the subject he could not obtain. “The pipers’ language,” he says, “is not founded upon a systematic combination of vowels and consonants to make words, like C E D, D E C, D E D. It is not a set of names for notes, like Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do. Each tune has a different set of words made of different syllables. Only nine notes can be sounded on the instrument, and more than sixty syllables occur in a book of twenty tunes.” Mr. Campbell must have been unaware of the assertion of some enthusiasts that 3,000,000 combinations can be practised on the pipes, or he would not have written that last sentence. Proceeding, he says, “it seems that something natural to human songsters has been spelt with the Roman alphabet, so that words of one, two, three, four, six, and eight syllables, do in fact suggest accent rhythm and tune, high and low notes and whole tunes, which can be learned by rote, written and read, as if the tunes were songs in an unknown tongue. This is in fact a language and its music.”

Persevering in his researches Mr. Campbell got Ross, the Argyll piper, his brother, and a skilled pianist to help him. He opened the Gesto book at the tune called “The End of the Little Bridge;” Ross read the tune and sounded the signs on a chanter, while his brother chanted at intervals sounds which both brothers had learned from oral chanting and could play on a pipe. The musician with his eyes on the book played his notes with his left hand on the piano, as he heard them from the pipers, and wrote them with his right on music paper, according to his own system. By this means one combination of sounds was translated from the pipers’ written language into another system of musical notation, and the result was music, showing that the hereditary pipers, whatever is the secret of their system, had a system. Were there only as many different syllables as there are possible notes on the chanter, the matter would have been easily understood. As it is, the Gesto book is the only book of its kind in existence. In all countries of the world, the natives chant tunes to certain strings of syllables, and to this day we have the “Fal de ral” choruses to a certain class of songs. In the Highlands alone these apparently nonsensical sentences stood for actual living music, were written as such, and, in the Gesto book, printed. But the system which in a continuance of the congenial atmosphere of clanship and hereditary pipers and schools of piping, and ignorance of what is now called popular education, might have developed into an exact science, has been smothered by nineteenth century progress, and is now known only to piping enthusiasts and students of the antique in our national life. Various attempts have been made to construct a theory which would explain the system, but none is thoroughly satisfactory.

Leaving the mystery of Canntaireachd, we come to the time when pipe music was first written in ordinary notation. The piece known as “The Battle of Harlaw” was played at that encounter in 1411; but it is significant that the oldest copy of the music extant, supposed to date from 1620, is not adapted for the bagpipe. The earliest known attempt to write pipe music in ordinary notation was made in 1784 when Rev. Patrick Mac Donald, Kilmore, Argyllshire, included in a collection of Highland Vocal Airs four pipe tunes. In 1803 the same author published a “Treatise” on the bagpipe, written by his brother, Mr. Joseph Mac Donald. This contained one tune, suited for beginners. Some time after the ’45—it must have been a considerable time—Mr. Donald Mac Donald, bagpipe maker, Edinburgh, was employed by the Highland Societies then existing to collect and note down as many pibrochs as he could find. In these days the mysteries of correct time were known to few and those of metre to fewer; but Mac Donald started with a brave heart, and to him as much as to the hereditary pipers the Highlands is indebted for the preservation of much of its pipe music. He collected mostly in the west country, and it is noticeable that the great majority of tunes now existing are west country tunes. The east Highlands, doubtless, had its own pipe music, but for want of a collector most of the airs have been lost. “Craigellachie,” the gathering of Clan Grant, is the only notable exception. Mac Donald’s first volume contained twenty-three pibrochs, but the exact date of its publication is unknown. In 1806, we are told in Angus Mac Kay’s book, Donald Mac Donald was voted the thanks of the judges at the annual competition in Edinburgh for having “produced” the greatest number of pipe tunes set to music by himself. His book, however, does not seem to have been published then, for from internal evidence (there is no date) it is obvious that it did not see the light before 1816. In the volume he promised to give histories of the tunes when he published a second instalment. A long time after he sent the manuscript of his second volume to Mr. J. W. Grant of Elchies, then in India, with a plaintive letter asking him to accept it as no one had shown so much interest in it as he had, and the publication of the first volume had nearly ruined him. The manuscript is now in the possession of Major-General C. S. Thomason, R.E., a grandson of Mr. Grant, and, it is hoped, will yet be published.

Of a later date, we have the book published in 1838 by Angus Mac Kay, piper to the Queen. It was a pretentious volume, containing sixty pibrochs, with histories of the tunes, the lives of the hereditary pipers, and other interesting matter. It will always be a puzzle to students of pipe music why Mac Donald and Mac Kay included in their books so many poor pieces and left out some of the best. Ross’s collection, which appeared long after, contained some which one would have thought Mac Kay or Mac Donald might have had. Messrs. Glen, Edinburgh, published a collection dated 1854, and there are besides the publications of Mac Phee, Mac Lachlan, Gunn, Henderson, Mac Kinnon, Bett, and others, all issued later. Most of these, however, appear to have been based largely on Mac Donald’s and Mac Kay’s books. Mr. David Glen of Edinburgh has, it may be added, published recently the old pipe music of the Clan Mac Lean, compiled under the supervision of the Clan Mac Lean Society of Glasgow.