I live in Moray, an area in Scotland which is the birthplace of strathspeys. I find strathspeys intriguing, uplifting and also difficult to play with good expression. On a flute workshop Chris Norman said that strathspeys are the tango of the North, or of Scotland, and deserve to be expressed with similar passion. I can feel something like that in the nature of the tunes, but how does one bring it alive?
I am working on two tunes in particularly:
Cape Spears composed by Muriel A. Johnstone
John Stephen of Chance Inn composed by Angus Fitchet
Please share your own approach to strathspey playing, what are your favourite strathspeys on whistle, and can you give any examples?
[edit: removed links to my “work in progress” samples]
Strathspeys are one of the big reasons I regret I never took up fiddle.
Neither flute nor whistle ever seem to do strathspeys the right justice, no matter how well played, that they get on fiddle or GHB. Still, that’s only to my ear, so ultimately there’s no reason to avoid them on whistle. When you hear a strathspey played so well on a whistle that you don’t find yourself wishing it were instead a fiddle, now that’s some good whistling. I think they’re at least great practice, if nothing else. I still tackle one now and then, myself. Then I put down my flute, wish I were a fiddler, and cry.
Here are some pointers I have learned.
First of all, the brass tacks: Rather than doing it any old which way, start by playing as if for dancers (always, right? ), which means stately, yet sprightly and uplifting, on point, but above all, CLEAN. In your case, Hans, I think you should for a time eliminate ornamentation altogether and concentrate on the necessary elements: essential notes hitting the right spots in time, and nailing the snaps cleanly. Once you can play a strathspey in simple fashion well enough for dancers to follow, then add your ornamentations where they will make sense - but only so long as everything still stays clean, of course - and later tackle other “arty” styles.
Instead of emulating the usual reel-like “ONE-two-three-four” feel, think instead of a “ONE-two, ONE-two” sense to give the right momentum and swing. It’s a fine point, but it makes a difference for the better.
Now the snaps: Remember that the FIRST note of the snap strikes the beginning of the beat, and the second note only fills the space, to put it one way. In the following example diddly, caps mean emphasis, and doubled letters mean greater comparative time length: “BA-dumm Daa de DE-dumm DA-dumm”; or like that. Don’t make the second note of the snap the strike of the beat. You’ll discombobulate yourself, and the tune.
I’m sure there’s more but this is a good start, and I hope it helps.
1 - Alastair Fraser, and I think Jonny Hardie - 2 great strathspey players - used to say that strathspeys were music you shake your fist to. Might not translate too well on to the written page, but try it.
2 - There are more than 1 type of strathspey, they’re not all the same in style or rhythm or tempo. Hamish Moore did a talk several years ago at a music school I was teaching at in Aberdeen. He’d recently returned from a trip to Cape Breton, and reckoned he’d identified 8 different types of strathspey, which he demonstrated using recordings. Hamish would have to explain it to you - I admit it went a bit over my head, but there you go.
I a big fan of strathspeys, particularly bagpipe ones, which logically sit better on the whistle or even flute than most of the fiddle ones.
One great tune IMO is ‘Tha Mi Sgith’ by Silly Wizard, ease to learn as they play it first as a slow air and then as a Strathspey
(‘Hame hame hame’ and ‘Eck Stewart’s march’ are great as well so enjoy!
I make these comments as someone more familiar with (and more partial to) the Cape Breton approach to strathspeys, but I think they’re applicable to the form in general:
I absolutely agree with Nano that hitting the rhythm/snaps are paramount, and ornamentation should be kept to a minimum. When played on the fiddle, a strathspey gets it unique sound and rhythm from the bowing hand, not from the fingering. The equivalent effect on the whistle would come from your blowing technique. I’ve long thought that a really effective strathspey style on the whistle could emerge from an unorthodox approach to supplying the air, something akin to beatboxing (well okay, maybe not that extreme, but it gives you the idea).
On the other hand, consider the other main instrument for playing strathspeys; the bagpipe has no mechanism for varying airflow, and so the the rhythm is produced entirely through a complex and highly refined fingering technique. So completely contra point 1. above, you could go whole hog on the grace notes and come out with something very bagpipey.
I’m not sure how closely you’d want to follow either approach - it’s up your own taste of course. Approach 1 would probably sound a bit bizarre at first, and the 2nd way might just end up sounding like a cheap imitation of a bagpipe. There might be a happy compromise of blowing and fingering techniques that would end up making the whistle seem just as natural a vessel for the strathspey as the fiddle and pipes are – and maybe working on each extreme approach could get you there eventually.
Oops: Davy, I just now checked out the Marissa Vachon vid and found the same tune as the one I referred to in Morrison’s vid! Morrison’s a bit more “angry” about it, though, with the pace and backup to drive the point home. A Scots boxplayer in my locale really turns on the warpaint with that one; you can just see him sprouting a punk haircut when he plays it. Does anyone have the name for it? I’m pretty sure I’ve been told, but apparently it didn’t stick.
Hey, I have a question: Is where you put the snaps ever open to a certain amount of variation? A friend of mine said recently to someone else that once composed, thereafter where the snaps go is absolute. As someone who started out with Irish playing where variation is an expected part of that territory, I find myself reflexively resisting such pronouncements, but I held my tongue because I don’t really know the right or wrong of it, yet I do wonder if he wasn’t actually coming from his earlier GHB training where band unity is the goal.
I can’t speak to the full range of opinion on this matter, but you may be aware that one of the issues that gets debated quite a bit around Scottish fiddle and pipe tunes is the extent to which they are influenced and constrained by Gaelic. The strathspey in particular is closely associated with the language - a number of researchers have argued that the snap is a direct mapping of Gaelic linguistic rhythm onto the music. A lot of the older tunes have Gaelic words and before formal instruction and musical literacy became commonplace, musicians would learn the tunes by singing them - often not attempting to play them before vocally mastering them. Certainly the Gaelic-speaking folks in Nova Scotia will evaluate a player based in part on his or her fealty to the words that play in their heads as they listen. It’s that close language-music association that folks like Hamish Moore are preaching in Scotland, where the influence of Gaelic on music is more, shall we say, complicated (though a number of pipers like Fred Morrison and the MacDonald brothers of Glenuig are good examples of “playing it as you would sing it”).
So at least for these older tunes that have words associated with them, there is an (albeit shrinking) audience that would expect the snaps to match the flow of those words. Here’s an example I pulled together a few years ago of several Cape Breton fiddlers playing the tune “Christy Campbell” - I chose it because I happened to find 5 different versions among my cd collection - 3 by Gaelic-speaking (or at least passive bilingual) players, and 2 by younger non-Gaelic speakers. Here’s the first phrase:
I’ve seen two versions of the Gaelic words. Focusing just on the last 6 notes of that phrase, or three dotted pairs, the lyrics are either:
'Chairistiona Chaimbeil
or
'Se mo ghaol gun taing thu
In either case, the middle dotted pair requires the first note to be long and the second short. Cairistiona [Christina] is pronounced Kar-ish-CHEE-na, and just like the English version of the name, you need to accentuate the “ee” sound. If you flip the dotted pair there, you end up with the equivalent of calling someone Chris-t’n-AA.
Similarly, with the other line, the middle dotted pair is “ghaol gun”, and ghaol has to be long (ao always is), and gun sounds very odd if it’s drawn out.
So listen to the 5 versions of these 6 notes, paying special attention to the middle dotted pair. The first 3 are the Gaelic speakers. Here’s regular speed:
You can clearly hear the first 3 playing it long-short, as the song would indicate, while the last 2 go the opposite way. But note also how much variation there is among those 3 Gaelic versions. Even within the structure dictated by the words, there’s tons of room to play around.
David, that is the first tune in the Fred Morrison clip, but the second tune (from 0:32) is the same as the strathspey played by Marissa Vachon on low F whistle. I wonder if it comes from Brian Finnigan, as some others of Marissa’s YouTube clips seem to be.
Hamish once gave a similar talk at a piping week I was attending here in the US. He finally summed it up with the statement, “The strathspey, it’s a Scottish thing you wouldn’t understand.” That made it onto a T-shirt…
Thanks, Seonachan - and this raises a point that I hadn’t thought of until well after I’d posted my question: if the strathspey is the tune to a song, then in the same spirit as a song air, I’d have to reference the words in the playing of it. I couldn’t do it any other way. BUT: in the case of a strathspey that is purely a melodic piece having no words associated with it - The Aird Ranters, for example (thanks for the clarification below, Davy ) - then is there room for any such variation? Mind you, I’m asking more about the dictates of longterm tradition, not necessarily about what’s new and shiny these days - although from your full answer I gather that where you put the snaps in such tunes is definitely open to at least a certain amount of variation.
To be honest, I don’t like it, at least as-is. If she had used that interpretation as an intro before launching into the actual proper strathspey itself, then that would have worked much better for my own personal tastes. YMMV. Kickin’ reel at the end, though.
