Sunday 11 March 2012

Scotland's Flower


Apologies if yesterday's musical post was a bit complicated. To summarise:

The end of Flower of Scotland sounds naff if it's a bagpipe band playing. Hasn't anyone else noticed?

Saturday 10 March 2012

Flower of Scotland


The Scottish rugby crowd singing "Flower of Scotland" sound much better away from home. The reason is simple – they're not being accompanied by a bagpipe band.

Percy Scholes, in his wonderful Oxford Companion to Music, writes: "a very extraordinary scale in common use today requires a word, extraordinary in that it exists side by side with very different scales–the Scottish Highland Bagpipe Scale… The notes are roughly those to which we are accustomed in the white notes of the...piano, except that the C and the F are about a quarter-tone sharp. […] It is a somewhat romantic circumstance that one nation should have been able to preserve in actual use scales so different as the pentatonic, the diatonic major and minor scales, and the strange scale above mentioned. It is to be noted, however, that this last scale is in use only instrumentally, and it would be interesting to know whether any Scot but a bagpiper could, if called upon, sing it or its tunes correctly." (10th ed, p918)

I remember the Corries, who wrote this song, singing it in Edinburgh in the 1970s, to the accompaniment of a number of instruments, some of which they had invented. But not the Highland bagpipes. Again, the reason is simple – their songs used various scales that are completely beyond the great pipes. You hear the problem on the third last note of "Flower of Scotland". It's a minor 7th. The pipes can only manage something a semitone higher. Consquence – at Murrayfield the pipe band play one note, all the instincts of the crowd make them want one a semitone lower, and the result is horrible.

Relief is swift. The band plays only one verse. The crowd has taken to adding the second (actually the third), unaccompanied. They sing the right note, and natural order is restored. But at Lansdowne Road this afternoon, they were led by a brass band, the note was what the song requires, and everything was fine (if a bit um-pah-pah), though we only got one verse.

I haven't yet understood why no one has resolved this. Perhaps it's the feeling that both the song and the pipes are such symbols of Scottish identity that they must work together or, at least, that neither can be jettisoned. Am I really the only person who shudders when I hear it coming?

The Highland pipes are fine. But the Northumbrian and the Uilleann pipes are magic.

Saturday 3 March 2012

Bloggers on the move


It's been bright and sunny in Oslo the last couple of days while we've been visiting Elissa, Sam and Theo (and their parents, of course). Unfortunately, the big melt has been on for the last week, so there's oodles of dirty slush underfoot, lots of really slippy bits and, when you're off that, tons of winter grit to play havoc with plastic suitcase wheels. But it's been great boating weather.

In fact, many of the boating bloggers I keep tabs on seem to have decided it's time to make a move. They post sunny photos to match the mood and write with great enthusiasm of washed and polished paintwork, of mechanical niggles resolved, of the disposal of winter clutter. They radiate infectious joy about each passing landmark, even though you know they've been that way many times before.

Quite envious, really. We'd always thought of the end of March as the time to make our move, what with the the other stuff we've committed ourselves to. We'd thought we wouldn't be ready for life on board until then. Now that seems to have been too pessimistic a prognostication. Perhaps March will blow a wintry hoolie and make us glad we're still snug in the South.

Wonder what Erin Mae's thinking. Perhaps we should pay her a visit and find out.