Image: cover art from Window to the West
This book, jointly authored by Meg Bateman and John Purser, is an extraordinarily rich, free-to-download, cornucopia of insights and exemplar, wonderfully illustrated, about Gaelic culture, available in both English for non-Gaelic speakers, and in Gaelic for those whose world it is.
Gaelic worldviews necessarily link Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man, so this is not just a book about Scotland. And it is not, exclusively, a book about music – although there is a lot of music in it. As much poetry as history, philosophy, and spiritual ethnography, this is a wide-ranging encyclopaedia of Gaelic culture.
How do we know about the world? Through language, yes – and this book explores the affordances of Gaelic in some detail – but also through our other senses as we move through our environment. The ‘Window to the West’ helps us to recover, through text, what these verbal and pre-verbal forms of experience might afford. Language helps to prime cognition, and patterns of encounter consolidate this in thought and memory. When the richer context of live encounter may have been disrupted, the text of a book can help us to reconstruct in the imagination what it felt / feels like to live in the lands of the Gaels.
The idea of a ‘window to the west’ draws on a poem by Sorley MacLean (‘Hallaig’) about a half remembered, half imagined, world of shared experience that lies just beyond a boarded-up window. The poem, and the title, speaks to the need to recover cultural knowledge from a society (the Gaels) whose lines of transmission have been disrupted by a variety of challenging historical factors. The structure of the book is similar to the poem – non-linear, a gathering-in of associations tracked by name and place and theme. Within the text, hypertext links help the reader to wander (like the deer in Maclean’s poem) from point to point across themes. You can read the text as it comes to you – or you can make your own tracks. Although I do recommend you start by reading the foundational initial chapters, as these are the window frame to what follows.
The authors establish patterns in thinking that span across many different knowledge areas. Keywords (to use Raymond Williams’s term) might include “aesthetic trends towards abstraction, circularity, number symbolism, dynamism and interweaving” (Bateman and Purser, abstract). All these may impact on music, as examples throughout the book demonstrate. There is a strong emphasis on visual art – ways of “seeing” the world – but really, this is a synaesthetic exploration of different areas of experience, thematically rather than chronologically organised into what could be described as an interwoven fabric rather than a linear narrative: in such a rich multi-sensory tapestry, “hearing” the world is also relevant.
So you have two metaphors for reading this e-book: a deer wandering in the woods, or a weaver making a complex fabric that can be folded into different configurations for different readers.
The project is at least a decade in the making, with each section carefully initialled to one of the two authors. Knitting it together must have required a lot of patience and close dialogue. Bateman brings to this project her experience as a poet and teacher of literature and cultural history. Purser is also interested in literature but is also encyclopaedic on Scottish music. Both writers are associated with the University of the Highlands and Islands Sabhal Mòr Ostaig in Skye. They have taken time to consult with experts in many areas of specialist knowledge – see p.13-16 for an extraordinary list of academics and practitioners on everything from ancient archaeological soundscapes to musical instruments to religion to dance. For those interested in the music of the Gaels, this book is the Gaelic ‘answer’ to the more Scoto-centric work that is Purser’s (also wonderful) Scotland’s Music (BBC with Mainstream Publishing, 1992 and 2007).
“The Environment and Sight”
Gaelic art is deeply embedded in its environments – land, water, sky, animals, birds, and plants. But paradoxically for a culture so invested in visual design, the idea of blindness is an important cultural trope for both poets and musicians working in the Gaelic world, inner light linking to creative and spiritual insight (pp.36-45).
The foundational first chapter of the book looks at how the Gaels engage/d with their natural world, linking this with what can only be described as a kind of spiritual imagination: this is a culture that traditionally valued the seer’s capacity to see underneath the surface of reality. Making music, poetry or prognostication are suggested to be potentially connected activities. The bards of the Ossianic epics are blind, like Homer but also, true to an indigenous tradition that associates covering your eyes with gaining access to spiritual truths (pp.40-2). Blind harpers, pipers, fiddlers and even lute players can be found at the intersection of legend and the historical record and have often been visually represented in images of Gaelic musicians as bards: the book is generously and beautifully illustrated. In legends, musicians often go underground to gain instruments or musical skills (p.54). The darkness in the Gaelic world is the source of inspiration, not an impediment to knowledge.
This prioritising of darkness also impacts on the Gaelic experience of time, with days and lifespans starting in the dark and not in the light. Dark places – caves, cairns, burial mounds – are sites of ancient sonic experimentation (p.62). Prehistoric, pre-Christian places bear witness to the Celtic interest in the lunar cycles: diurnal and annual transitions from darkness to light are important temporal markers (pp.67-8). The Gaelic north is a geographical zone in which darkness is a tangible reality, commemorated in monument and deep in the creative language of the people. When Christianity appeared, the new religion bent itself into the preexisting cyclical calendric imagination, with chants sung to mark recurrent festivals. This is not unique to the Gaels, but perhaps their traditions marked it more than in some more southern cultures.
The landscape itself also generates unique sounds (pp.125ff). The sounds of the sea and the wind, interacting in often turbulent weather, bleed into the vocabulary of Gaelic. Even non-Gaelic ears can respond to this, as Mendelssohn found when he visited Staffa (p.129).
Music and soundscapes more generally are threaded through much of this initial discussion.
Gaelic Language and Representing the World
In the second key chapter, the authors give us insights into the distinct nature of the Gaelic language and suggest ways in which this unique language might shape aesthetic cognition. The brain particularly notices what it is linguistically primed to notice.
Gaelic verbs handle time, it is suggested, in ways which give the Gaelic speaker a rather more mobile, in European terms, sense of their position in time (p.137). Gaelic sentence formulae also favour negatives and indirect approaches – things emerge from what they are not (from darkness, perhaps) (p.142) or by implication rather than direct comment. Names and proper nouns for things help to locate the subject in relationships with people and places. A summary suggestion is that in Gaelic, each person is ‘less the agent and more the receptor’ of experience (p.150), compared with the more individualistic Anglo-Saxon world. Gaelic vocabulary about colour and pattern (manifested in tartan, but also connected – surprisingly – with points of the compass, black for north and white for south; east for bright yellow, reds, pink and purple dawns, and west for browns, blues and greens of dusk) suggests an interest in dappled, many-coloured objects. Gaelic is also interested in the quality of the colour, its light absorption or reflectivity: extending this metaphor, the authors suggest that Gaelic poetry is a kind of weaving together of differently ‘coloured’ strands, with variation of hue and texture: not so much a single individual voice, as inter-relational: Bateman suggests that “auditory correspondences are made within and between lines” (p.227).
While some of this may be true to poetry in many other cultures, this discussion suggests a bleed-through rather than a separation of categories that organises the world into continuities and connectedness in ways that are different from English. As an example, this section discusses the lettering system known as ogam and suggests that this was unusually interested in preserving the sounds and even pitch of language. Although, to be fair, English and Scots can also be understood phonetically, it may be that there are closer and maybe more “musical” connections between signs and sounds in Gaelic (p.273-4). The extended discussion of the metaphor connecting the strings of the harp with the shapes of ogam letters suggests that the sounds of music and poetry might be more intimately connected than in the English-speaking world.
Bateman’s witness as a bi-lingual speaker of both Gaelic and English is that the structures of Gaelic syntax and vocabulary make the world a more fluid and dynamic experience that the category-structured and cause-effect sequenced epistemology of English native speakers.
How is this translated into music?
The way that this book is woven together means that references to music are laced throughout all sections, but particular attention is given to this area of Gaelic culture in the following sections.
- Water in traditional song (p.305-8).
- Birds and musicians (p.373ff).
- Musical instruments (pp.599-634). Discussion encompassing rock gongs (ringing stones), bronze trumpets and the Celtic war horn called the Carnyx, quadrangular hand bells, pipes, clarsach, and highland bagpipes (and their warrior associations p,630-5). The appearance of musical instruments is important as well as the sound. Instruments are often works of art in themselves, and are further represented in visual art.
- Dance (p.709-727). The authors suggest that the athletic dances of the Highlands, particularly the reel, are well-matched for a people needing to be fit to travel in a challenging landscape. The connection with ballet is a matter of threading this forward into this European art form. Many Scottish dance choreographies make elaborate shapes, and while I would argue that this also has affinities with European courtly masques and wider baroque dance patterns that the authors don’t explore, their reflections on interlaced figures on carvings and rubrication as being essentially imagined as dancers is intriguing (p.720). I’m not entirely convinced that French ballet is Celtic dance in new clothing, but I can accept that Scottish dancing might make an interesting contribution to modern Scottish ballet choreography.
- Opera (p.727-729) The authors acknowledge that theatre is not an indigenous Gaelic mode, but again, look at the way that Gaelic imagination might bring new influences into this artform. There is discussion of the representation of Gaelic society in pastoral ballad opera (18th century) and in romantic grand opera (19th century), while wondering how these might contrast with more contemporary operas drawing on Gaelic topics by the likes of William Sweeny and Aonghas MacNeacail who are themselves Gaelic speakers.
- ‘Musical structures’ (pp.729-739) Discussion has already suggested affinities between the patterning of language, and with tartan and weaving. Here is where we find a discussion of memorised canntaireachd, the vocalised notation of the ceòl mòr of ‘great music’ of the Highland bagpipes (pìobaireachd). This is a section that pulls together some earlier strands: if the best musicians are blind in legend, then an aural, not a visual, notation is going to make the best medium for teaching and transmission of repertoire. For those who still rely on a more visual imagination, there is food for thought in the idea that the repeating structures of such music is metaphorically derived from the crossing over and back of weaving. Binary patterns such as the pervasive presence of the double tonic in Gaelic melodies (p.739) are also, possibly, a kind of interweave.
- Numerology (pp.740-760). A note on ancient carved geometrical and later Christianised, and classicised, number symbolism is useful background to anyone who wonders why some Scottish music might at times be shaped by these ideas.
There is much more to read in the fine detail, and I would encourage you to dip in. This is a book that does for the Gaelic aural imaginary what Simon Schama, for example, did for the landscapes dear to his own personal history (Poland, Germany, Great Britain and the USA) in his (also wonderful) Landscape and Memory (1995). Schama’s book, which drew particular on the visual rather than the aural, was a labour of love that went on to become an international bestseller. It sits on my shelf and I see it an I dip in still.
This is a free book – hurrah! – and deserves a similarly wide reception. Isn’t physically on your shelf, as it’s an ebook. Bookmark it, and remember to read and reread it.
Further reading
Meg Bateman and John Purser, Window to the West: Culture and Environment in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd (University of the Highlands and Islands, 2020)