INVITATION TO THE DANCE

The influence of fiddle dance music that emerged in 18thcentury Scotland still echoes through the reels and strathspeys of today. Aaron McGregor explores the legacy of the players, composers and publishers who helped create this golden age

Niel and Donald Gow, oil painting c.1780 by David Allan

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND

The 18th century is rightly seen as a golden age in Scottish fiddle music. The latter half of the century saw the first Scottish publications of vernacular dance music, beginning with publisher Robert Bremner’s A Collection of Scots Reels or Country Dances (c.1757–61). A boom in printed music together with the preponderance of literate fiddlers meant that Scotland had one of the best recorded vernacular violin traditions of the period. Here we see the emergence of the most important tune types in Scottish fiddling – notably the reel and strathspey – and the composition of many tunes that remain popular today. This was the period of many of our finest fiddler-composers, including William Marshall (1748–1833), Robert Mackintosh (c.1745–1807) and the Gow family, most famously Niel Gow (1727–1807) and his son Nathaniel (1763–1831). The composition and performance styles of these musicians remain the foundation of Scottish fiddle music, and some fiddlers can still claim a direct teacher– pupil lineage back to Gow and his contemporaries.

Access to 18th-century Scottish collections once relied upon visits to libraries, but material has become more accessible with recent digitisation projects by the National Library of Scotland, the Wighton Collection (Dundee) and Historical Music of Scotland (hms.scot). Collections and tunes have also been catalogued, for example in my own manuscript database at hms.scot (bit.ly/3vWoM9U), by Charles Gore (Scottish Music Index) and as part of numerous wiki-based projects, such as the Traditional Tune Archive (tunearch.org).

THE SCOTTISH FIDDLER’S REPERTOIRE This article focuses on dance music, the core of Scottish fiddle repertoire, so let’s begin by looking at one of the most important collections: Gow and Son’s The Complete Repository of Original Scots Slow Strathspeys and Dances (figure 1). Published in four parts by Nathaniel Gow and William Shepherd in Edinburgh from 1799 to 1813, this was the first encyclopaedic collection of Scottish dance music. These volumes were the culmination of an era of innovation and creativity, but also the first attempt to present this music as a cohesive repertoire in its ‘native simplicity, free from the Corruption of whim or caprice’, and in so doing, unify performance so that all fiddlers ‘played the same notes’.

The Complete Repository presents a neatly packaged version of Scottish fiddle music, predominantly consisting of song tunes and slow airs alongside vernacular dance tunes – strathspeys, reels, hornpipes and jigs. Not coincidentally, this was the same list of dances enjoyed by the demonic group in Robert Burns’s epic narrative poem Tam o’ Shanter (1791), a symbol of rural or national styles in contrast to fussy continental types:

And, vow! Tam saw an unco sight! Warlocks and witches in a dance; Nae cotillion brent new frae France, But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels Put life and mettle in their heels.

It’s not difficult to find examples of such tunes in 18thcentury collections – Bremner’s Scots reel volume consists entirely of them. However, this simplistic idea of repertoire doesn’t match the on-the-ground reality of what fiddlers played. For a start, they played music beyond dance tunes – laments, slow airs, variation sets, marches, fiddle pibrochs and a multitude of Scots–Italian hybrids (discussed in Kevin MacDonald’s article ‘When Worlds Collide’, The Strad, November 2021).

SOME FIDDLERS CAN STILL CLAIM A DIRECT TE ACHER-PUPIL LINEAGE BACK TO NIEL GOW AND HIS CONTEMPOR ARIES

FIGURE 1 Title page of Gow and Sons’ The Complete Repository, part 1 (Edinburgh, 1799)

Fiddlers needed a variety of dance repertoire, including local vernacular types as well as English country dance tunes and continental dances, notably the minuet throughout the 18th century, and later the waltz, cotillion and quadrille. Some fiddlers published different types of dance music in the same collections, as did Mackintosh in his Airs, Minuets, Gavotts and Reels (1783), which also contains a virtuosic Italianate violin sonata. Others published repertoires separately. Alexander ‘King’ McGlashan (c.1740–1797) – leader of the Edinburgh Assembly and Nathaniel Gow’s teacher – published two collections of reels (1778 and 1786), plus a third compilation that presumably contained the rest of his dance repertoire: A Collection of Scots Measures, Hornpipes, Jigs, Allemands, Cotillons. And the most fashionable Country Dances (1781).

The many surviving handwritten manuscripts of Scottish fiddlers perhaps give a truer picture of their complete repertoire, which often included this full range of tune types. The Gairdyn manuscript was likely compiled by an occupational fiddler in Edinburgh in the early 1700s. The majority of its 413 pieces are incipits of only a few notes, likely aides-memoires. Among more than 150 dance tunes, we find a mixture of minuets, court dances, country dance tunes, reels and other vernacular types (figure 2, page 40).

FIGURE 2 Example page from the Gairdyn manuscript, showing how its 413 pieces often comprise only a few notes as an aide-memoire for the player. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

THE PORTFOLIO CAREERS OF 18TH-CENTURY FIDDLERS

This diverse repertoire is hardly surprising given the portfolio careers of 18th-century Scottish musicians. Fiddlers often played for audiences across the social spectrum. Even a humble fiddler such as Patie (Patrick) Birnie (c.1635–c.1721) – famed for busking at the Kinghorn ferry crossing and playing at ale houses – was employed by the gentry, including Sir John Foulis of Ravelston. Musicians combined a range of activities: playing for concerts, at theatres, at church, for burgh functions and for dancing. Isaac Cooper (c.1755–1820), from Banff in Aberdeenshire, played for and taught dancing, performed and composed concert music, published collections of reels, and taught twelve different instruments including the violin, harpsichord and Irish bagpipes. Violinists played continental and Scottish dance music on the same nights. In 1746, the balls of the Edinburgh Assembly included minuets and country dances, and a 1752 manuscript of dances taught at the dancing school of Duns in the Scottish Borders (held at the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society archive) includes lists of minuets and reels, instructions for country dances, and two virtuosic solo dances (a jig and a hornpipe).

Patie Birnie, oil painting by William Aikman (1682–1731)

BIRNIE PORTRAIT NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND

EVEN A HUMBLE FIDDLER SUCH AS PATIE BIRNIE – FAMED FOR BUSK ING AND PLAYING AT ALE HOUSES – WAS EMPLOYED BY THE GENTRY

STRATHSPEYS AND REELS IN THE 18TH CENTURY

Reels and strathspeys are presented as already long-established in later 18th-century collections, such as Angus Cumming’s A Collection of Strathspey or Old Highland Reels (1780), but the standard forms seem to have been products of the 18th century. In Scots, the basic meaning of ‘reel’ is ‘a whirling motion’, and by the 18th century it was being used in Scottish country dance instructions synonymously with the English term ‘hey’, which involved dancers weaving around each other in a figure of eight motion. As a full dance, the reel involved groups of three (and later four or more) dancers, with the figure of eight figure followed by sections of improvised setting (or ‘footing’).

The standard modern reel tune is in fast duple time, most commonly in two sections, each eight bars in length. It predominantly consists of flowing lines of quavers, with strong beats ornamented by ‘birls’ (rhythmic ornaments of two semiquavers and a quaver; figure 3, page 42). Tunes of this type first appeared in the late 17th century, such as in the Bowie manuscript of c.1695 (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh) compiled by Edinburgh fiddler John McLachlan (d.1702), but the first source to label this type of tune as a reel is the manuscript of George Skene (1695–1756) from Aberdeenshire, compiled 1715–17 (National Library of Scotland).

FIGURE 3 ‘Lady Doll Sinclair’s Reel’ and ‘Ratha Fair’ from Robert Bremner’s A Collection of Scots Reels or Country Dances (Edinburgh, c.1757–61)

The strathspey is a slower form of reel, most often with more dotted rhythms, especially the Scotch snap figure (semiquaver followed by a dotted quaver). In c.1749, James Oswald printed two tunes with these basic features which are both titled ‘A New Strathspey Reel’ (figure 4), but otherwise reels in pre-1750 (and many later) collections freely mix dotted and undotted rhythms: clearly the two types were not yet standardised.

The standard model for the strathspey’s development as a tune type is outlined by the fiddle-playing minister and writer William Thomson, who wrote in 1791 that the strathspey reel was invented in the Speyside region (Moray) by fiddling families the Browns of Kincardine and the Cummings of Grantown. An exploration of the strathspey as a dance gives a different picture. Many of the earliest references use the terms ‘strathspey reel’ and ‘strathspey minuet’ synonymously. From the 1740s to the end of the century, both seem to have referred to a couples dance combining the figures from the minuet with the reel’s music and stepping style. In 1774–5, Englishman Edward Topham described this dance during his time visiting Edinburgh:

Another of the national Dances is a kind of quick minuet, or what the Scotch call a Straspae. We in England are said to walk a minuet: this is galloping a minuet […] nothing of the minuet is preserved, except the figure; the step and the time most resemble an hornpipe.

FIGURE 4 Two strathspeys from James Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion, vol.3 (London, c.1749)

The strathspey has a long association with the fiddle. In c.1760, Joseph Macdonald’s Highland piping treatise gives separate examples of pipe and violin reels, the latter featuring strathspey-like dotted figures. (The connection was later pointed out by the writer and luthier Alexander Murdoch in the 19th century and musicologist Francis Collinson in the 20th century.) The strathspey’s rhythmically incisive style clearly suits violin playing, but the instrument’s importance might also have been due to its ability to cross musical and social divides.

THE CELLO IN SCOTTISH DANCE MUSIC

One of the most surprising features of 18th-century fiddle collections is that bass-line accompaniments are given for most tunes. Most of these bass-lines look similar to one another: they move in crotchets, alternating between notes a tone apart, with a cadence closing each section.

It is only recently that scholars and performers have taken much notice of these basses. In the 20th century, presumably they didn’t fit with notions of ‘traditional’ music (chord symbols are often used instead) or else they were dismissed as being too uninteresting to reprint. Nevertheless, this bass style represents the core of the most important accompanying instrument in 18th-century Scottish fiddle music: the cello or ‘bass fiddle’, most famously depicted in David Allan’s paintings of Niel Gow and his cellist brother Donald (see page 38).

Apprentice fiddlers sometimes started on the cello, and the simplicity of cello bass-lines would have allowed apprentices to learn ‘on the job’, immediately being able to accompany master fiddlers in dances. Niel Gow’s son Nathaniel and later James Scott Skinner (1843–1927) both learnt the cello in their youth, and in the 1790s, traveller and writer John MacDonald from Inverness-shire wrote of his apprenticeship to a blind fiddler in the 1740s, recalling carrying the cello on his back and sleeping in barns after accompanying his master at weddings and dances.

The popularity of this bass style went beyond pedagogy. In the mid-20th century, Collinson wrote of an elderly relative who remembered the cello bass-line as a sort of ‘accented drone’. At the end of the 19th century, Skinner recalled the cello’s characteristic accompaniment style, in which the player ‘vamped’, using ‘one drone note’ at a time (figure 5).

SETS OF TUNES VERSUS MANY REPEATS

In modern Scottish country dancing and ceilidhs, dances are accompanied with sets of several tunes, each tune normally repeated two to three times. When performing without dancers, fiddlers often play sets of different tune types, with one of the most common groupings the march–strathspey–reel, a format also popular in competition piping. Sets of tunes were sometimes performed by 18th-century and earlier fiddlers – one example is found in the Bowie manuscript, where the song tune Katherine Oggie is followed by three thematically related reels. Gow’s Complete Repository deliberately groups together medleys of strathspeys and reels by key, noting in the preface that ‘the change of Key, more or less has been found to offend the Ear’. This view is very different from the modern-day desire for harmonic contrasts.

FIGURE 5 From James Scott Skinner’s A Guide to Bowing (Glasgow, c.1900)

On the other hand, 18th-century country dancing maintained a stronger link between a particular tune and its dance, and fiddlers and their audiences don’t seem to have minded a single tune being repeated countless times. A newspaper account of a ball accompanied by Mackintosh in 1805 describes a single country dance to the tune Miss Drummond of Perth’s Reel lasting an hour and a half, which was followed by Lady Charlotte Campbell’s Strathspey and Reel, lasting a full two hours.

PERFORMANCE STYLES

One will search in vain for detailed discussion of fiddle performance practice in 18th-century Scotland. The earliest treatises are those by Skinner and by William C. Honeyman in the late 19th century. However, both look back to a longestablished tradition, and their detailed explorations of bowing and articulation in reels, strathspeys and hornpipes are worthy of more detailed study.

HOW CLOSELY MIGHT THE INTONATION, CONTINUOUS SOUND AND ORNAMENT STYLES OF HIGHLAND BAGPIPES HAVE INFLUENCED FIDDLERS?

We can only speculate as to the huge range of performance styles among 18th-century musicians, but they must have differed more than our current ideal of the Baroque violinist. Some ‘fiddlers’ such as Mackintosh and Nathaniel Gow were highly trained in performing (and composing) Italianate concert music, and to some extent they situated their national music within the standards of European art music. However, it is a disservice to lesser-known exponents of Scottish fiddle music to assume that they simply performed lesser versions of this style. How might the many itinerant or more rural fiddlers have sounded, such as the 18 violinists listened to by the traveller Martin Martin on the Isle of Lewis in 1703 who played ‘pretty well without being taught’? How closely might the intonation, continuous sound and ornament styles of Highland bagpipes have influenced fiddlers, particularly given that many musicians played both instruments, and others certainly exchanged repertoires and performance styles?

The richness of golden age Scottish fiddle music allows for more than one interpretation, be that by 18th-century performers or their modern counterparts. As this music becomes more accessible, it is clear that it demands a variety of perspectives – from those who study historical collections as records of repertoire and performance practices to those who situate this music within living traditions.