‘Those who have been exposed to his story and his playing often regard his style as a direct window into what might have been played in rural Scotland before the emigrations’
affected the province as a whole, the changes would be little felt in more rural areas of Cape Breton. Gibson notes the functionality of the Gaelic language, acting as a socio-cultural anchor to tradition in these areas well into living memory. This seems true even short distances outside urban centres such as Sydney, Antigonish and New Glasgow. More rural areas such as Mabou, the Magarees and Scotsville, of Inverness County, in the western areas of the island, have retained many Gaelic cultural anachronisms including the use of the Gaelic language and traditional dancing to this day. Gibson discusses this area in further detail in Old and New World Highland Bagpiping. Pipers such as Sandy Boyd had little exposure to places such as these and little means to affect any change as they would not have had the Gaelic to communicate effectively with these areas. Within communities that still valued tradi-
tional Gaelic music and dance, three distinct types of pipers emerged, due to the introduc- tion of written music and formally trained players. The first could be classified as those who remained from the original class of com- munity musicians. These were the pipers who had learned completely by ear, used a free form style of fingering and embellishments on the chanter and could not read written music. One such example of this category is Black Angus MacDonald, of Melrose Hill, Inverness County. His history listed in Gibson’s Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping notes that he deliberately remained musically illiterate because he was afraid reading music would alter his traditional style for the worse. He was a highly regarded dance-piper and lived until the end of the 1930s. MacDon- ald was likely one of the last pipers who fitted completely into this category, almost all pipers hereafter would have had some exposure to written music.
The second type of pipers were those who
began receiving formal training, including standardised playing technique and musical lit- eracy, while retaining the fundamental rhythms and repertoire of the community dance-piper.
This category is typified by pipers such as Joseph Hugh MacIntyre (1891-1968). Joe Hughie was a descendant of immigrants from South Uist, one of the most culturally conserva- tive areas of the Gaelic Scotland and was raised in the French Road area in south-eastern Cape Breton. Growing up in a family of pipers, Joe Hughie began piping at a young age and while he never played in a pipe band, his technique could be described as standardised 19th century Scottish. This means that he used a set scale, as outlined in Joseph MacDonald’s Complete Theory (1803), relied on an outdated, but still standardised set of embellishments, and could read music as well as learn by ear. He was in high demand as a dance-piper during his prime and his extremely musical style has been preserved in a few home recordings as well as transcrip- tions of his playing that have been featured in piping collections compiled by Shears. This was by far the largest category of community pipers during most of the 20th century and many of these players were most likely capable of playing in either the traditional or modern style depending on the setting. The third group includes pipers such as Alex
Currie (1910-1997), who began as traditional ear-trained pipers and later received formal training in involuntary contexts, such as Army pipe bands, which they later rejected as inferior. Currie has been widely regarded as the last of his kind by those studying the history of Cape Breton pipers and is held in the highest regard by those who met him. He was perhaps the last living player who learned completely by ear and used no standardised techniques. His scale, embellishments and setting of tunes were all uniquely his own, despite attempts by others to conform his style. Most knowledge of Currie’s playing is found in the form of various personal interviews with musicians interested in his style, such as Hamish Moore and Barry Shears, as well as in a few old home recordings of his playing. Currie first learned tunes from the Gaelic singing of his mother and grandmother before learning to play the
pipes. He then learned how to make a chanter out of a local timber and taught himself how to play from scratch. He grew up playing with the bag under the ‘wrong’ arm and his hands ‘backwards’, right-over-left on the chanter. Like many untrained pipers, he was noted for using a variety of different fingerings to produce slightly different pitches, or flavours, in order to replicate the style of singing he had learned as a boy. In his 30s, Alex served in the P.E.I. Black Watch, where his superiors attempted to retrain his technique. While he eventually switched his bag arm to the conventional side, he retained his hand position, scale, embellish- ments and never truly learned to read music. He deemed his older style of learning and playing tunes “more accurate” than what was written in books. Those who have been exposed to his story and his playing often regard his style as a direct window into what might have been played in rural Scotland before the emigrations. Currie’s death in the late 1990s marked the end of an era, all other living pipers having learned through some amount of conventional training by that point.
THE next issue will feature the final section of Chapter 3, including the preservation of this dance-music tradition within Cape Breton's fiddling, with in-depth discussion of musi- cal sources, as well as a look at the modern revival of ‘Old Style’ piping in Nova Scotia. The forthcoming article will also feature the conclusion of this series, with a discussion of current dance-piping traditions within Scotland and Cape Breton, from Chapter 4 of the thesis, and some reflections from the author. l
This feature has been edited for readability, removing any in-text citations and footnotes. For a complete list of refer- ences please see the full text of this chapter hosted online at:
www.thepipingcentre.co.uk/magazine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cheape, Hugh. Bagpipes: A National Collection of a National Instrument. Edinburgh: NMS Enterprises Limited, 2008. Cranford, Paul. The Cape Breton Fiddler’s Collection. Cape Breton: Cranford Publications, 2007. ---. Winston Fitzgerald: A Collection of Fiddle Tunes. 1997. Cape Breton: Cranford Publications, 2005. Gibson, John. Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping: 1746-1945. 1998. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Gunn, William. The Caledonian Repository of Music, Adapted for the Bagpipes. 1848. Glasgow: The Piping Centre, 2003. Moore, Hamish. Personal Interview. Baddeck, Cape Breton. 13 Oct 2010. Shears, Barry. The Cape Breton Collection of Bagpipe Music. 1995. Halifax: Taigh a’ Chiuil, 2003. --. The Gathering of Clans Collection, Vol. 2. Halifax: Bounty Print Ltd., 2001 ---. The Gathering of the Clans Collection, Vol. 1. 1991 Halifax: Taigh a’ Chiuil, 1994.
PIPING TODAY • 33
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