HE slow airs, Flight of the Eaglets and Loch Monar, both composed byWillie Ross, are
• Click here to hear the tunes or go to PT Extra on the CoP website.
two of my favourites.They are in his Book 4 on page 48. I reckon that Loch Monar is perhaps his best tune. How did he get such a fine, majestic melody? It is very difficult to invent a new tune which has character. How did he find it in his very musical brain? With or without knowing it, and I suspect the latter, he has chosen the same note sequence as the strathspey Struan Robertson. Once arriving at this possible source I then gave some thought to the Flight of the Eaglets and soon realised that it has the same note sequence as a tune I have known since birth as it was my father’s favourite song, The Brown Maiden. He would sing it each morning in Gaelic, with great vigour and volume as a ‘wake up’ or reveille. It is of course the second tune in the College Tutor 1 and on reflection is probably overlooked and pigeon- holed in many minds as a beginner’s tune. However when it is well played it is one of the best. I don’t recall having heard it played by a pipe band in recent years. With the altered timing Willie gave it, it is a lament with a deep sense of loss and a most fitting tribute to the three Mac- Robert brothers, RAF pilots, who were killed in the 2ndWorldWar.
many discussions about music in general and pipe music
I in
particular. I was always impressed with both his knowledge and his ability to analyse
the
structure of a melody. His ‘Collection of Mainly Traditional Music for the Bagpipe’, which he had prepared before his death, is now published and is therefore a very valuable legacy which we should treasure.Too many of today’s pipers (it has possibly always been thus) have quite a limited repertoire and know few of the more traditional tunes. Much care has been taken by Joe to score his tunes with just the gracenotes required and with the use of double dots and cuts to help timing.This is especially helpful in the G.S. MacLennan tunes which had been written by GS himself as even-noted – although he did not play them that way. GS left it to the player to work by instinct and experience as to how the tune should be played.The 2/4 march P/M John Stewart is shown as it has appeared in more than a few books, and on the opposite page as Joe was taught to play it by P/M James Robertson
23
had the good fortune to know Joe Wilson over the years he taught at the College and we had