CONSIDERABLE thought went into Breton piper and piobaireachd aficionado Patrick Molard’s latest

piobaireachd album, The Waking of the Bridegroom… and hardly any engineering.

He recorded its seven tracks at his home on a DAT recorder — “with no pressure, no producer, no sound engineer, no post-produc-tion,” he said. “It was just for myself, my own pleasure.” And it was these recordings that the Skye-based recording company Macmeanmna used to produce the album. That side of things all happened remarkably quickly and relatively effortlessly.

It was the music that took years of work and reflection to draw together.

The time he spent as a student with Bob (Robert U.) Brown and Bob (Robert B.) Nicol at Balmoral Castle in the early 1970s gave Patrick Molard a passion for piobaireachd, and sparked a fascination with the music that has taken him far beyond the set tune lists and the familiar core repertoire.

A particularly interesting track on his The Waking of the Bridegroom album, for example, is a short but attractive tune called Fhailt na misk that is to be found only in the second volume of the manuscript source known as the “Campbell canntaireachd” or “Nether Lorn manuscript”. The two hand-written books that survive (MSS.3714-3715 and MSS.2259-2260 in the National Library of Scotland) — there may have been a third, since lost — date back to the late 18th century. The first volume is identified as “Colin Campbell’s Instrumental Book, 1797” and the second is undated but the paper on which it was written dates from 1814.

They are Highland piping’s earliest known written sources of music. Together, they contain 169 tunes written out in canntaireachd, the unique, syllabic representation of piobaireachd: a chant form in use before staff notation was applied to piping.

The compiler, Colin Mór Campbell, was piper to John Campbell, Earl of Breadalbane, at Ardmaddy in Argyllshire.

Fhailt na misk — or, Fáilte na misge: Salute

Exploring piobaireachd’s pleasuresPATRICK MOLARD

PATRICK MOLARD … “Few pipers really want to understand piobaireachd, and those who play it typically play it only to win

prizes in competitions. They tend not to study, out of interest, the range of different settings, the books, the stories of tunes and so on. People from other circles, however, see it as a very romantic music, almost as kind of like mental yoga, a very good stress reliever. They listen to piobaireachd because it makes them feel good. And many

people are seduced by the beauty of the melodies.”

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to Drunkenness — had never been published and may well have remained unplayed for close to 200 years.

“I was given a copy of the manuscript 15 years ago,” said Patrick Molard: “photocopies of the whole manuscript from a friend, Eric Freyssinet, from the north of Brittany near the town of Lan-nion. He has studied piobaireachd with Andrew Wright and is especially a master of interpreting the Campbell canntaireachd.

“He is deeply into the music. He has man-aged to decipher most of the manuscript, and he taught me. I had not really been interested when I was younger. I knew about it but I’d never tried to understand the meaning of it.

“It is thanks to Eric Freysinnet and discus-sions with Glasgow-based scholar Barnaby Brown that I also fell in love with the manu-script,” he said. “And, for the past 10 years, I have been working with the Campbell canntai-reachd more seriously.

“I began to decipher the unknown pieces, making comparisons with pieces I already knew and my experience of piobaireachd playing, and managed to teach myself Failte Na Misc.

“I feel sure that this Salute to Drunkenness has not been played before, not in the last century or so, because it’s not available in any staff notated score. It exists just in the canntaireachd,” said Patrick Molard.

“I made my own decisions about how it should be phrased and timed. So I have no proof that what I played on my album is correct; it is from my own experience that I found the rhythm of the phrases. I did ask Andrew Wright’s advice before I recorded it, however, and he said he thought I was right. What I play fits the can-ntaireachd and sounds ‘right’.”

“And I am happy with the piece that is on my album. But there are other pieces in the Campbell Canntaireachd that I don’t know how to play,” he said. “Some pieces are perplexing. Sometimes you have five beats and it should be four and sometimes you have five or seven beats.

“I don’t know whether there are mistakes that were made by Colin Campbell or maybe we don’t know everything, and there may be things that have disappeared in the bar signature. I remember seeing an article from Barnaby Brown on this in Piping Today where he said we had lost something in the variety of time signatures and that may be the solution.” (Barnaby Brown, 2006: ‘Refreshingly different’ in Piping Today No. 22, p 22-23.)

“When I am having difficulty with such pieces, when I am not really happy, I take my telephone and I phone Eric Freyssinet and ask him what he thinks. And we have spent whole weekends at his home playing all of the obscure pieces in the two volumes of the Campbell can-ntaireachd, trying to find solutions… and we haven’t found solutions for every piece. I also ask Andrew Wright’s advice. But I don’t find too many people in Scotland who are really interested in issues like this,” he said.

“I think that, when people play for competi-tions, the focus is different. The curiosity seems to come more often from non-Scottish pipers. For me, when I talk about Alexander Glen pipes, McDougall pipes and so on, it is very important. I tell my students that the context is as important as the tune. Tunes are just notes; the context is where you find the people who have made this music and this instrument. It is important to keep our awareness of them alive. And that is what I am trying to do.”

Piobaireachd, Patrick Molard is convinced, has the capacity to spark audience interest among non-players as well as players. His first piobaireachd album — featuring Beloved Scot-land, The Sister’s Lament, Sir James MacDonald of the Isles’ Lament, The Earl of Seaforth’s Salute, MacLeod’s Short Tune and the Lament for Ronald MacDonald of Morar — was released in 1992 on a Breton label.

“It was not advertised anywhere else. It was produced in Brittany and 10 years later I could say that it had sold 2,500 copies,” he said. “Most of those sales have been in France. It took a long time to get that many sales and it’s not great by some standards but it is enormous when you consider that in France, when you play jazz music, if you sell 1,000 copies it’s quite nice.

“There was no promotion and publicity around that album, but it continues to sell and it has been bought by piobaireachd lovers around France and maybe in Belgium; no-one in the English-speaking countries. So most of the people who bought it were not pipers and few if any of the pipers who did buy it were competitive pipers.

“A non-player can just listen to the music and enjoy it without worrying about technique or competition requirements. And here, in France, there are many people who really love piobaireachd, and the vast majority of them are not pipers.

“Few pipers really want to understand piobaireachd, and, of those who play it, they

typically play it only to win prizes in competi-tions. And they tend not to study, out of interest, the range of different settings, the books, the stories of tunes and so on. People from other circles, however, see it as a very romantic music, almost as kind of like mental yoga, a very good stress reliever. They listen to piobaireachd be-cause it makes them feel good. And many people are seduced by the beauty of the melodies,” said Patrick Molard.

“When I play the Lament for Patrick Og MacCrimmon, for example, people may find the ground not so obvious but, when you come to the variation, it is very beautiful. And I have had great success in Brittany with The Unjust Incarceration. I don’t know why; it’s a very difficult tune. I tell people the first line is imprisonment. The second line is protest. The third line is revenge. I tell the story and take the pipes and play it, and people feel it and love it.

People in Brittany were asking him to release another piobaireachd CD, he said. “Piobaireachd was still in my mind but I was not ready to do another recording.

“Over the past 15 years, I’ve been involved in various different projects with different people, not only on Scottish pipes but also on Irish pipes and Breton pipes,” he said.

“The first set of Highland pipes I had and played for 35 years, I’d always thought was a set of James Center pipes. I was 20 years old when Bert Barron from St Andrews came to me and said, ‘well, son, this is a very old set made by James Center’. So I bought the pipes and told everyone that I was playing Center pipes.

“Recently, I had firm evidence that they were not Center pipes but were made by David Glen. So I had a set of David Glen pipes.

“Then I got a set of Gavin MacDougall pipes from Andrew Frater, a well-known reed maker from Uphall near Edinburgh. It is a beautiful set.”

A descendant of the hereditary pipers to MacDougall chiefs in Lorn, Allan MacDougall began a pipe-making business in Perth in the last decade of the 18th century. The business stayed in the family and survived moves to Edinburgh and then to Aberfeldy into the early years of the 20th century.

“My MacDougall pipes were made at a time when the pitch was markedly lower,” said Patrick Molard. “And I feel we are losing something now; we are losing the spectrum of mid-harmon-ics. Our modern instruments can be very precise but there’s a lack of depth in the tone.

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“Most recently, an old friend, Pierre Blanchet, whose passion is pipe-making, made for me a replica of an 1847 set of Alexander Glen pipes in ebony and ivory… and the tone of the pipes is fabulous. Alexander was the father of the famous David Glen.

“Pierre is a genius at making replicas of old vintage instruments,” he said.

”So I now have three sets of pipes: my original David Glen set, the copy of an Alexander Glen instrument and a set of MacDougall pipes.

“I also have three different chanters, a chanter made specifically for me by Bob Hardie in 1985, a Strathmore chanter made by Murray Hender-son last year, and one by a Breton pipe maker, Georges Botuha, that’s now about five years old: a very nice chanter. There are differences; it’s a question of harmonics.

“And last winter, I felt I should do something with these instruments, and so I started I began recording myself and these instruments at home with a DAT recorder.

“After a some weeks, I listened to what I had done and thought it was quite good. I burned a CD on my own computer and shared in with a few friends who then told me I should release it; they said the sound was good, the playing was good, the tone of the pipes was good… and I sent a few samples to Paula Glendinning, a good friend from Maryland.”

Paula Glendinning, a successful senior solo piper who plays with the City of Washington pipe band, has a keen interest in piobaireachd, and referred Patrick Molard to Macmeanmna in Portree. “So I sent a CD to them, not really expecting any answer, but got an immediate reply from Cailean MacLean saying they were very im-pressed by the sound and would ask their piping producer, Iain MacInnes, for his opinion.

“I have known Iain MacInnes for years and have done a lot of interviews for BBC Radio Scotland. Iain said he really liked it and Mac-meanmna produced it: a home-made album. I did the recording, the sleeve notes — in English and French — I sent the photographs. Andrew Wright wrote a very nice introduction and the text was translated into Gaelic and Breton… so there are four languages on the sleeve notes.

“An aspect of the CD was that I didn’t want to record only the standard repertoire of piobaireachd.

“As well as the research I’d done, and that Eric had done, on the Campbell canntaireachd, I also went to David Glen’s Ancient Piobaireachd collec-tion. It was there that I found a fresh tune called

The Waking of the Bridegroom, which became the title of my album.

“I also did some research on the Donald MacDonald manuscript which I got recently online thanks to Ross’s Music Page (www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/music/index.html). I printed the whole manuscript — I’d been looking for a source for many years.”

The site is maintained by Dr Ross Ander-son, Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge, who is a keen piping researcher with a particular interest in the de-velopment of folk music in the 19th and early 19th centuries.

Said Patrick Molard: “I fell in love with the setting of Lament for the Only Son which I put onto the album as the last track.

“For another tune, I went to a book that Paula and her husband, Charlie Glendinning, produced in 2001 — The Glendinning Collec-tion. The last tune there is an interesting tune, ‘The Prelude by John MacDonald of Inverness’, so from the book, I put it on the CD.

“Paula transcribed the tune from a record-ing of, I believe, John MacFadyen playing it on a BBC Radio programme during which he attributed it to John MacDonald.” It is a short piece, a ground with a single variation, with some non-standard embellishments.

The other pieces on the album — Clanran-nald’s Salute, Euan Cameron of Lochiel’s Salute and the Munro’s Salute — are drawn from the Piobaireachd Society books.

All are played in full.“Each starts with the drones, there is no fade

in and they stop with a little fade-out,” said Patrick Molard. “I wanted to keep the start of the drones so people can hear the difference between the three sets of pipes.”

Patrick Molard and Pierre Blanchet are now working on the reproduction of a set of Donald MacDonald pipes in the National Museum of Scotland collection.

“In July, I went to Edinburgh and, thanks to Andrew Frater, we were permitted to go to the National Museum of Scotland and meas-ure up a set of pipes made in 1806 by Donald MacDonald. According to the contemporaries of Donald MacDonald, the sound of his pipes was very loud and rich, and we noticed that the top of the bass drone was huge. Pierre Blanchet has measured many sets of pipes and said he had never seen something like it before.

“We have a project to make a replica of the Donald MacDonald pipes over the coming

PATRICK MOLARD plays his replica set of 1847 Alexander Glen pipes, made by Pierre

Blanchet … “I have seen and played the original and I have the copy, and the copy is even better than the original, it is

just beautiful, and has a sound we don’t hear now: sweet and powerful at the same time… rich, resonant. There also is a magical phenomenon with the pipes that you don’t seem

to find on modern pipes. I can play for 10 minutes and eve-rything is normal. But, after

15 minutes, something strange happens and I have a feeling

that I have only one drone go-ing, only the bass one. I have to check that the tenor drones have not shut off but, no, they are going. It’s very strange.”

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months,” said Patrick Molard. “Last April I went to Donald MacDonald’s birthplace in Skye. And I have visited in Edinburgh the area where he worked, I have studied his manuscript and his published book, I have read about him and I feel I know something of the man.

“We also went to the museum at the Col-lege of Piping. We were welcomed by Jeannie Campbell and Dugald MacNeill and allowed to measure up the set of pipes made by John Ban Mackenzie, and another set that’s supposed to have been made by Donald MacDonald, so Pierre Blanchet is comparing the various meas-urements he has from three different Donald MacDonald. He wants to take some time over the project.

“But, when I see what he did with the Alex-ander Glen replica, I am very confident,” said Patrick Molard: “I have seen and played the original and I have the copy, and the copy is even better than the original, it is just beautiful, and has a sound we don’t hear now: sweet and

powerful at the same time… rich, resonant.“There also is a magical phenomenon with

the pipes that you don’t seem to find on modern pipes. I can play for 10 minutes and everything is normal. But, after 15 minutes, something strange happens and I have a feeling that I have only one drone going, only the bass one.

“I have to check that the tenor drones have not shut off but, no, they are going. It’s very strange. And I think it is interesting that Al-exander Glen learned his trade from Donald MacDonald.”

The tone quality, if not the unusual ‘lock-ing’, is something Patrick Molard attributes to the drones’ bores and the type of wood that was used. “An interesting feature is that the two tenor drones are different,” he said. “The drones have different bores, and we have seen the same feature on other pipes made by the Glen family.

“The tone of the each drone is different but they are complementary, so you have the

same pitch but a different quality of sound. Perhaps no point was seen in having two tenor drones both the same, so they made the bores different.

“Also,” he said, “we discovered that the wood was important. Most bagpipes nowadays are made from African blackwood but the Glens and MacDougalls used ebony and cocus wood. Duncan MacDougall did not like African blackwood which he considered ‘unsuitable for bagpipe making’. One way I think ebony is superior to African blackwood is as far as absorption of humidity is concerned. African blackwood is full of resin and does not absorb much, neither water nor oil, and is not very different from plastic of the same density. Both keep the air humid, whereas ebony and cocus wood are drier. I can check this every time I play on my cocus wood David Glen, or my Indian ebony Gavin MacDougall pipes.

“In the Edinburgh pipe making style, there was something different.” l

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