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ovelist Pat Barker, talking about responses to sculp- ture, puts my analysis in context; “You bring every- thing you are, everything you’ve ever experienced to that encounter…” [with the sculpture], and I realise that part of what’s happening is that I’m in danger of projecting my own values and feelings on to some- one’s work. I check this out against the responses of a member of the festival staff whom I’m aware has been in tears during the performance. She has lived her life in England and has no Scottish connections, but is even more visibly moved than me, so there is obviously something other than common geographical and historical bonds at work. Talking with her, I pin down her reaction to what we agree is a “universal humanity” in his music, and my initial uncertainty about the source of my emo- tion vanishes. What we are both responding to is that universal thing Mike Scott touches upon: “This man is living each note, putting his soul into every moment.”
It’s impossible to talk about Duncan without talking about landscape, and the more I listen to the music as I write, the more I realise it’s about his inner landscape as much as the sense of place in the three glens. Duncan says as much. “The music has been very much inspired by where I come from, and the history of my people. It’s a true representation of who I am and where I come from”. That statement is revealing as it signifies that the six years of work during Duncan’s self-described “time of intro- spection” has developed that self-knowledge intertwined with his musical development.
The “where I come from” also is key. The three glens lie in the
Western Highlands, and you understand Duncan’s sense of belong- ing when he reveals that he and his brother were the first Chisholms in his paternal family to be born outside those glens for 700 years (albeit only 15 miles outside). During the Highland Clear- ances, the personal time for the family that Duncan refers to as the Chisholm Clearances, took place in the
1850s.This was a time well expressed by the poet who said that a person thereafter might travel many miles in the hills and glens and “… no find a reekin’ hoose nor hear a crawin’ cock.”
A small number of his family stayed on to become game- keepers, and later to service the Victorian passion for ‘huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’’, but many others went to Canada. Just how big the diaspora was is revealed in a low-key way by Duncan when, talking about visiting Nova Scotia, he recalls discovering thousands of Chisholms in the phone book. By comparison, in his ancestral backyard only one page is taken up by Chisholms. (One of those ‘stranger than fiction’ connections raises its head shortly after the interview, as I recall Glen Affric being substituted for Canada in a 1971 BBC production of The Last Of The Mohicans, long before Daniel Day Lewis ever donned the buckskins, and, checking this out, discover that it also stood in for Canada in the 1953 movie The Kidnappers.)
Talking about Farrar, the first in the Trilogy, Duncan recalls that “Up until now, the music’s been very much based on visuals, ie creating the soundtrack to the visuals that were in my head, and it seems to have worked. Farrar itself won the album of the year at the Scots Trad Music Awards in 2008, and Cannaich, which fol- lowed the same creative approach, was nominated in the same category in 2010.” (Duncan was also nominated Musician Of The Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2013.) The Cannaich album is an imagined journey from the village of Cannich, up past the town of Craskie, on to the wild and unpredictable waters of Loch
Mullardoch.In keeping with the journey, the music gets wilder and darker. He concludes “I think people get it.”
He moves on: “I’ve spent most of my life trying to find my own particular sound. I started playing when I was eight, and I’m now 43, so it’s now about 35 years of learning what I sound like. I think the fiddle itself, when played, can be very relevant to the type of person you are. It’s the instrument closest to the human voice in terms of creating and expressing emotion – making the note involves as much care as taking breaths in a vocal.” He goes on to talk about the importance of the spaces between the notes, and expressing what’s inside of him through his fingers, and indeed it is this featherlight handling of dynamics allied to his pure-distilled tone that gives the magic to his music. This is a spine-tingling
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